When Marco Pinotti (HTC-Highroad) finished 9th overall in last year’s Giro d’Italia, a discerning minority regarded the performance, and not Ivan Basso’s victory, as the most significant of the Corsa Rosa for Italian cycling. For years an unheralded journeyman, Pinotti had slowly risen to prominence in the latter part of the noughties as contemporaries like Ivan Basso and Danilo Di Luca’s stock fell, their reputations and palmarès sullied by doping scandals.

Few, though, would have batted an eyelid at Pinotti’s five Italian national time trial titles, his four days in the pink jersey in 2007 or indeed his 2010 Giro campaign were it not for the anti-doping convictions he wore so forthrightly on his sleeve. A graduate engineer, he also spoke eloquently about the environment, the challenge of attracting kids to cycling and just about any topic on which his views were solicited. He was, in short, a worthy spokesperson for a cycling nation that for years had placed its trust in men of straw.

Last December, on the eve of the 2011 season, we sat down with Pinotti to retrace his career path up to this point. With just ten days to go to the start of the Giro in Turin, we’re about to discover whether cycling’s voice of reason – and Pinotti’s palmarès – will continue on the same heartening upward curve.

A shorter, adapted version of this interview appeared in the April issue of Procycling magazine.

Cyclingnews: Marco, let’s go right back to the start. How and why did you start cycling?

Marco Pinotti: I started riding when I was 16. I was Matteo Algeri’s teammate. One summer I went round to his house to do homework and we went for a bike ride together. He said I was quite good, that I should give it a go and so on. Then I went to watch an Under 23 race that October. I liked it so I started looking for a team. I found out there was one in my village. So I joined and the next season I started racing.

Did cycling run in the family?

No one rode bikes in my family but my granddad always liked cycling and wanted me to race. He died in January 1992 and that was the year I started racing. He never saw me on a bike but I know he’d have been my biggest fan. I was lucky to be from an area where there’s a lot of passion for cycling, which really developed after the war with Gimondi. He was winning in the sixties, then the oil industry was in crisis in the 1970s and people started using bikes as a mode of transport. So it really grew, then in the 1980s and 1990s you got the ripple effect of Gimondi and that generation. There were lots of clubs in the area then. In the second half of the 1990s, there were something like 27 professionals living in Bergamo, some born there, some from other regions or countries. They were all guys who had started riding in the late 1980s. Now it’s very different; now there are only a handful of pros in Bergamo. I think there are two reasons why it’s changed so much. One is that people just don’t ride bikes as much any more. The other is that the foreigners aren’t coming to Bergamo any more. There’s still Kanstantin Siutsou, Alexander Kuchinski, one of the Efimkin brothers, but that’s about it. That’s because it’s no longer a good place to train. If a young rider, someone like Tejay Van Garderen, asks me to recommend a place to stay and train in Italy, I’d like to say Bergamo but I tell them to go somewhere else.

Kids of your generation in Italy grew up very aware of cycling and the top riders, didn’t they? Do you think that’s changed now?

Italian kids are maybe as aware of cycling as they once were but it’s changed. There are a lot fewer races. There are a lot fewer kids too, when you think of it. Now families have one, two kids on average. There’s more traffic, so parents don’t want their kids on the road. And there’s a lot of competition from other sports. I don’t know…On one hand, the Federation will tell you that the numbers are going up but those statistics are “doped” slightly by the numbers doing mountain biking, which is safer. Granfondos have really taken off too – but those are generally over 30s who are doing it for health reasons. And again, Bergamo’s not at the forefront of that trend.

Did you follow the Giro, the Tour?

Even before I started racing, I followed cycling. I followed all sport. I loved the Tour – with LeMond, Bugno, the back end of Hinault’s career. But I didn’t have any idols as such. I can remember the Fignon and LeMond Tour really well. But I wasn’t a “fan” of any one rider.

You were more focused on your academic work? You went on to get a degree in engineering….

I was certainly more focused on my school work than cycling at that time. I started racing but I didn’t intend to turn pro. That idea only really entered my head the year before I turned pro. I always had to juggle academic work with cycling, so I was always a bit pressed for time. I thought I’d turn pro for two or three years and see how things went, whether my body could take the strain. But I would never have expected a career like I’ve had, so long and successful.

How successful were you as an amateur?

I won races but I was never up there with Basso and Di Luca, those guys. I was always in a small amateur team. Now, and even more so then, there was a massive difference between the big, very organized teams who went on training camps and were basically run like pro teams, with riders who were effectively pros because they’d left school and cycling was all they did. I never went to training camps. I just used to race on a Saturday then go back to my parents’. So, I won races but small ones. I was never really in the set-up for the national team. Time trials were the only way for me to get noticed on a national level. Without those, I would never have gone beyond a few good results in regional races. There was a bit of a dearth of good time triallists so that’s where I slotted in. That’s what got my name out there on a national level

They were rough, unpleasant times in Italian amateur cycling….

Yep. Absolutely. I don’t know what it’s like now but it certainly wasn’t easy then. History has taught us that a lot of victories in that era were the fruit of illegal short-cuts and not talent.

Pinotti in his element

You came into contact with professional cycling for the first time immediately after the Festina affair, when you joined Polti as a stagiaire in August 1998…

I guess I was conscious of what was happening…but the Festina affair was a good thing because it opened up the possibility for change. It gave cycling a big jolt. When I turned pro, I heard mentalities were already changing. Or at least there was that hope. So that was the first jolt, which made people finally take the war on doping seriously.

But did you know what you were getting into?

No, I had no idea.

And you hadn’t seen team-mates or opponents doping with your own eyes?

No.

So it wasn’t as though you were going to races and your team-mates were filling the minibar with EPO…

No. I think if that was ever the case, it probably changed in 1998. After Festina there probably wasn’t much organized doping. It was individual riders making their own choices then. Perhaps the teams were closing their eyes to it but there was no organized doping. I don’t know what it was like before Festina. But something definitely changed there.

Had you already asked yourself the question of whether you would dope or not?

I was lucky that I was turning pro just because I could. I also had an education behind me. I turned pro in 1999 and graduated in 2000. My main aim was to get my engineering degree, then I was going to evaluate whether I could still race my bike. If I could survive with my values and not do too badly…I like racing my bike, so why not continue? Then when I got my degree I felt even more secure because I had something to fall back on. I even went for interviews after I graduated just to see how attractive the offers were. But they weren’t so attractive that I wouldn’t rather carry on racing.

And in fact, in those first two years, you…

Did nothing [laughs].

Well, yeah, you didn’t get amazing results but you did OK.

Yes, yeah. I mean, I turned pro and rode and finished the Tour in my first year. It was one of my biggest achievements in the first part of my career. It was the first Tour that Armstrong won. I finished and the directeur sportifs were all happy with me. 

But it must have been tough.

Well, I didn’t do anything exceptional but, honestly, I finished without ever having been on my knees. I was OK. It was actually a really good thing to do the Tour in my first year because I said to myself that was as hard as it could get. The level was high but the others also had two legs, just like me, and there I was with them. It was a good first experience of the Tour.

Your friend Matteo Algeri had bit more trouble than you adapting to the pro scene.

He did two and a half years. He was passionate but he had lots of physical problems which maybe came from overextending himself to get up to scratch. He’d eventually had enough.

What were your sporting highlights in those first couple of years?

Finishing the Tour in 1999, coming second in a stage in 2001… I was in a break with Rik Verbrugghe. That was the first time I really became aware of Jonathan Vaughters because that was the day he had to quit the race because his eye was swollen from a bee sting and he couldn’t take cortisone. I saw the photos in the paper the next day. I was second in that stage and I was fifth or sixth in the young riders’ classification. I was 30 or 40 minutes behind on general classification but still one of the best Under 25s. That was good for me because I was coming off a few physical problems. Even then I realized that I recovered pretty well. I might have been 50th overall in that Tour but I was in the top five young riders and that was having lost a bit of time in the flat stages. In the mountains I was in the top 40 or 50. I can remember the Alpe d’Huez stage that Armstrong won, when he bluffed Ullrich. I was in the first group of around 40 at the bottom of Alpe d’Huez. I can remember Armstrong bluffing, the penultimate climb…

The Glandon.

That’s it. There were a few hard sections and I could see Armstrong dropping back behind me. He didn’t look too bad but it seemed strange that he was there at the back of the group. There was Livingston on the front, then Ullrich…I can remember Telekom working the whole day. Then we descended, got to the foot of Alpe d’Huez and I got dropped. I can remember being puzzled when I saw him on the Glandon.

With hindsight and everything that’s happening now, what are your impressions of Armstrong?

When I rode the Tour in 1999 he was a source of inspiration. I was like a lot of other people. Looking back now….when he gave up the first time and L’Equipe published the article about his 1999 urine samples, it was a bit of a kick in the stomach.

You believed in him before that?

Here’s the thing [long hesitation]. As long as you don’t have proof, you always hope. I hoped. But there I thought, blimey, everything people said, the rumours…it was all confirmed, albeit not from a legal point of view. Now all I know, I read in the newspapers, and when I read about this investigation in the United States, I just think there’s no point now – the time to act was years ago.

Would context be any excuse? If one were to say, if he’s proven guilty, that plenty of other people were doping?

No, it’s not.

There’s an argument that he also dictated, created the context. He was the standard bearer for the sport. If he had sent out strong signals, would the context have changed?

OK, but it’s not the riders’ responsibility to send out signals. His job is to race his bike and win. Armstrong never tested positive. OK, there are those tests from 1999 but he was never convicted. What annoys me is the role the authorities played or didn’t play. A few months ago I read Paul Kimmage’s book, Rough Ride. As I read it, I was thinking, blimey, this was 1990! And if my memory serves me, Kimmage said that one of the reasons he was writing it was so that the UCI would finally see what was happening. He talked about how the riders all knew there would be no dope tests in the last stage of a major tour, so they took amphetamines. And this gave him a dilemma: he didn’t want to take amphetamines but he did want to help his team leader. So what could he do? In the book, he was effectively asking why the UCI let this kind of thing happen. He wrote it as an invitation to the authorities to open their eyes. They didn’t and so they’re maybe the guiltiest ones.

OK, but there wasn’t always the technology to detect certain substances. The riders also had to take responsibility, let their own ethics govern the sport.

Agreed, but for years these people underestimated the problem. In 1997 it was the riders who applied pressure to introduce a haematocrit limit. Maybe it did more harm than good – I don’t know – but it was the people at the base of the pyramid, the riders, who demanded action before the authorities. I wasn’t there at the time but…I’m more angry with the people who facilitated all this or who didn’t do enough. But then yeah, you’re also right about riders and their ethics. Now there are people trying to undermine the credibility of the biological passport, which is a positive thing that the UCI have introduced. A lot has changed but when Landis says there are riders who the UCI has protected, if that’s true, it’s very serious.

Allegations don’t come much more serious that that.

Yeah, because there is this conflict of interests between promotion and organization. If I was in the UCI’s shoes, it’s clear that I would want to create heroes, drama. The two roles, promotion and legislation, should be separated. There ought to be collaboration with the UCI but they shouldn’t be in control of both areas.

Doping is a completely selfish act, isn’t it? Would you agree that these riders have no concern for the wellbeing of the sport?  

I agree.

For example, Danilo Di Luca gave an interview this winter explaining why he collaborated with the Italian Olympic Committee’s (CONI) anti-doping commission. He said he’d done it “because he couldn’t stand being away from races”. There was no notion of him doing it to serve the sport.

This is hypocrisy at its worst. Don’t get me started on Di Luca because if you do we’ll still be here tomorrow morning. I don’t want to talk about him.

But it’s obvious that you’d like to…

[long sigh] You can’t say what he said. I don’t know what he told the investigators – he must have said something if they reduced his ban – but compare Di Luca and Tom Zirbel. Zirbel was banned for two years by USADA having tested positive for DHEA. He didn’t know how it got into his body and he definitely didn’t take it intentionally. Nonetheless, he admitted that what enters an athlete’s body was his responsibility and he wasn’t able to prove that it was contamination, perhaps because he didn’t have the money and the lawyers. Anyway, he couldn’t prove it and he got banned for two years. There was another case - Zirbel heard about it - of an athlete who did manage to prove that he’d taken a contaminated supplement and the company got sued – but the athlete still only got a three-month reduction to his ban. Then along comes Di Luca, who’s already been charged twice -  once for consulting a doctor who’s banned from cycling for life and now for this. Di Luca tests positive, admits he did it and then he provides the investigators with information, which he can do because he’s an expert in the field, and they give him a nine-month reduction. Then what? He throws his hands up in the air and says, “I didn’t name any names. I didn’t spit in the soup. I just explained my doping methods.” So as an expert in the field, he’s told the investigators how you go about doping. At this point Zirbel says, “Ah, it’s a shame that I’m not an expert in doping. I should have pretended to be one then I’d be able to start racing again next year. Because I’m an idiot, though, and I let this substance get into my system without knowing how, I’ve got two years and I’m stuck with it.” You see these are the inconsistencies of the system. I read what Zirbel wrote and I thought, yeah, he’s right.  I respect him. I mean, they are two different bodies making the decisions, USADA and CONI, but the lack of uniformity is still unacceptable. It’s things like this that undermine cycling’s credibility.

And yet it’s a lot better than it was.

I say that if things remain as they are, it’s at least a big improvement on fifteen years ago. There’s been some progress. Everyone whinges about McQuaid but ever since he took over at the UCI – I don’t know, maybe under another president there would have been even greater strides – but things have improved. Maybe it’s because he’s come under pressure from WADA, the riders, the media, but efforts have been made. Cycling must be one of the cleanest sports now. I mean, I don’t know anything about other sports, but I know what happens in cycling. Sure, if you read WADA’s report on the Tour de France, you think to yourself that they’re still not doing enough, that the holes in the net are still too wide, but what do you do?

Is one of the reasons you still “hope” Armstrong was clean his charisma, his presence?

He definitely has that. I rode the 2009 Giro alongside him and you could see his charisma. Cycling has benefited from that. Do I hate him? No, because I’m more upset with the authorities. I never said a word to Armstrong all those years when he was winning the Tour. He was a lot more accessible at the Giro in 2009. Someone from the hospital in Bergamo called me during that race to ask whether Armstrong might agree to have his photo taken with the oncology department, since there was a stage finishing in Bergamo. I thought to myself there was no way, he’d have people asking him for stuff every two minutes…but I’d told this person that I’d try anyway. So at the first opportunity, in the middle of a stage one day, I found him in the bunch and asked him whether he might be able to help. He was really gracious, actually. He said they should look in the roadbook, find out where his team were staying at the end of the stage to Bergamo and meet him there in the evening. He even asked for their name, so he knew who it was. Sure enough, the day after the Bergamo stage, he found me in the bunch and told that the people had come and got the photos they wanted. Apparently the people from the hospital had invited him to some kind of conference in October but he couldn’t go because his girlfriend was due to give birth then. He was very approachable, really, which is not what you’d expect of someone that famous and in demand.

Another charismatic rider whose career overlapped with yours was Gilberto Simoni, your team-mate at Lampre and then again at Saunier Duval.

His was a different kind of charisma. He came to Lampre in 2000 and rode with us until the end of 2001, when he went to Saeco. Then in 2006 I rode with him again at Saunier Duval. I have good memories of him. He’s not someone who brings a team together, not that kind of leader…

Really?

Not in my experience. He was always a bit in his own world. He was very methodical [pauses] but in his own way. In winter, he hardly rode his bike. I can remember the first year that I was at Lampre, he started his training in January. Then he went and finished third in the Giro. Let’s say that he did things his way. Then, by the time we rode for Saunier Duval, he had become much more of a leader, which he needed to be because we had a lot of young riders. The directeur sportif would often give his briefing in the morning and Gibo would interject with his own ideas. He started to have a big influence on the directeurs sportifs, probably as a result of having won the Giro twice and grown in confidence. He didn’t shout but he didn’t have to; when he talked, you listened.

With the media, he was very enigmatic. Sometimes it could be quite comical.

He was like that with us too. You thought he wasn’t paying attention but he noticed everything, then he’d deliver these killer one-liners. If you messed up in a race he wasn’t one to bang his fists the table and if you did something right he’d always remember it. You’d finish stages happy with the work you’d done for the team but thinking Gibo probably hadn’t even noticed certain things, yet he always did. He was always brutally frank as well – a typical mountain man. He didn’t care about public relations.

Which other riders have particularly influenced you in your career?

I learned a lot from Chris Horner.

Tell us more.

Yeah. I raced with him at Saunier Duval. He had real race craft, really good tactical sense, but all of his own, very American. I can remember in the 2005 Tour of Switzerland, he, Leonardo Piepoli and Fabian Jeker were our strongest riders on the climbs and in the transitional stages rest of us had to cover the breaks. I can remember this puzzling him. He said that all team leaders seemed to do in Europe was sit on for the whole race and see how far they could get on the summit finishes. He couldn’t understand why the leaders didn’t also pull on the flat stages, or why they weren’t covering the breaks too. So he had pretty different perspective from the rest of us. He’d been in Europe in the late 1990s, it hadn’t really worked, then he’d come over for the second time in 2005. He was 34 at the time yet, to listen to him, you’d have thought that he still had six, seven years as a pro ahead of him. I couldn’t work it out: he’d been at La Française des Jeux, broken his scaphoid or something, then won everything in America and come back over here. And here he was now sounding like a kid at the start of his career. I said to myself, blimey, never mind six or seven, the way he’s talking he’s going to ride for another ten years. He was 34 then and now I’ve just had my best season at 34 years of age… and he’s just had his best year at 39.

So it was the power of positive thinking, youth as a self-fulfilling prophesy?

That’s it. I was 29 at the time and I was thinking I didn’t have that long left. I looked at him and thought he’d have one, two years at best. But then you heard him, and five years on you can see now that it wasn’t just wishful thinking on his part. There he is at 39 winning at the Tour of the Basque Country.

In your own career, moving to T-Mobile, which soon became Highroad, was a massive turning point.

Yeah. I’d always wanted to ride in a foreign team and the culture of an American team suited me perfectly. The constant striving to improve, the innovation…it lit a fire under the passion I already had.  It’s the main reason why I’ve improved so much. The old way that still prevailed in Italian teams had its advantages but you only have to look at what this team’s for done me to see that this is the way forward. Liquigas is still a big team but Italy’s still a very traditionalist country because its cycling culture has such deep roots. For example, in this team we spend hours if not days getting our bikes properly fitted. In Italian teams, if they do it, it’s just for show, for the press. I’m not even sure they’re convinced that these things have an effect on performance. For example, at Lampre, Compex supplied us with electro-stimulators, like they do here. But there the directeurs gave us the Compex and that was it, whereas here, last year, we had a two-hour seminar on how to use it. See what I mean? There I seem to remember half of the team got a Compex at the start of the season, they took some photos, then the rest of us got ours later in the year, but no one ever told us how to use it. The same thing with nutritional supplements and equipment. You might already know the stuff that they tell you but you might not. Maybe in Italy the amateurs are more advanced in terms of what they know but then they stop learning.

Somehow it’s hard to imagine you becoming a directeur sportif when you retire, whether it’s in Italy or anywhere else.

You never know. I can’t really see myself driving a team car but you never know. At the moment I’m thinking about racing and nothing else. I’m better off being like Chris Horner and living for the moment. That’s where my focus is now.

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After more than six months, hundreds of witnesses and millions of words in evidence, the coroner is today delivering verdicts on the victims of the deadly 2005 terrorist attacks on London. What have we learned from the inquests?

1. The line between life and death is very thin, and very arbitrary

Patrick Barnes and Philip Beer travelled together from Borehamwood every morning, but on 7 July 2005, the service was slow and they got to the Piccadilly line 15 minutes later than usual. They were standing face to face, holding on to a bar, when Barnes felt as if he had been hit on the head with a brick. It was a moment or two until he came round to hear the screams. Barnes shouted through the smoke for his friend, whom he couldn't see: "Are we going to die?" "No," said Beer, "everything's going to be fine."

In the smoke and confusion, Barnes was able to stagger from the scene, but he couldn't find his friend. Beer, wedged tightly against him when the bomb exploded, died in the carriage.

Again and again, the shattering testimonies of the witnesses to 7 July have underlined how very thin the line was between life and death, and the apparent arbitrariness of who survived and who did not.

Catherine al-Wafai, sitting five feet from the suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan on the Edgware Road train, walked off the tube in a daze and made it all the way home, wearing only one shoe. Philip Duckworth, standing next to Shehzad Tanweer near Aldgate, was blown from the carriage and staggered from the scene, with just a small piece of the bomber's shin bone in his eye. Others who were further away from the bomb sites, however, did not make it.

In some cases survival depended on the chance intervention of others. Martine Wright and Andrew Brown both lost legs in the Aldgate bomb but their lives were saved because they were sitting near the carriage door, and because Elizabeth Kenworthy, an off-duty police officer who climbed into the carriage, was able to reach them, tie tourniquets around their limbs and keep them calm. The young man rolling on the floor a little further into the carriage appeared much less badly injured, so she was "very, very upset" to learn that Richard Ellery had died.

Others made it thanks to reserves of will that they probably had no idea they had. Philip Patsalos, a university professor, recalled feeling his leg after the King's Cross blast and finding it "rather mushy". "I started thinking to myself, I've got to stay alive, I'm going to die here." He concentrated on counting his breaths in and out, keeping himself calm. When the emergency services arrived, he was so still they walked past him, thinking that he too was dead.

"I said, 'Sir, help me, I'm dying,'" he told the inquests. "Did he respond?" asked the lawyer. "Yes."

2. 7 July was a global atrocity

For much of the past five months, a number of news organisations have reported the 7 July inquest largely in their London news bulletins, as if only the capital had been attacked. But it is not merely the fact that this was the biggest terrorist assault in British history, barring Lockerbie, that makes 7/7 an atrocity against the entire country – and much further afield. The timing and location of the bombs, attacking commuters at rush hour on London's socially levelling transport network, meant that they killed both bankers and students, cleaners and consultants, many from far beyond the capital.

Ellery, a shop assistant at Jessops in Ipswich, was visiting for a one-day course. Michael "Stan" Brewster worked for Derbyshire county council and was in the capital for a conference. Jennifer Nicholson commuted from Reading, James Adams from Peterborough, Adrian Johnson from Nottinghamshire. Marie Hartley died on a day trip from Lancashire.

The attacks also acutely illustrated London's status as a global microcosm in which, with brutal irony, different cultures habitually live, work and travel together in peace, side by side. The dead of 7 July had origins in at least 23 countries: Montserrat and Mauritius, Kenya and Poland, Sri Lanka and New Zealand and Ghana.

Sam Ly's family had had fled Vietnam for Australia as refugees in the 1970s; he had travelled to London on a working holiday. Atique Sharifi's parents were killed by the Taliban when he was a child; he came to Britain in 2002, unable to speak any English, to earn money to support his younger sister in Afghanistan. Gladys Wundowa had worked in a salt mine as a child in her native Ghana to raise money for her siblings; she became a maid for a Lebanese family,  moved to London, found work as a cleaner and had embarked on a course in housing management when she died. Two thousand people attended her funeral in her home village in Ghana.

It wasn't only London that mourned.

3. Crises turn some people into heroes

How would you react if the railway carriage or bus in which you were travelling was destroyed by a suicide bomb? Would you flee, mindful of your family and your own survival? Would you dare walk down a tube tunnel towards a loud bang, not knowing whether the line's electric current was off? Would you climb into a smoke-filled carriage filled with scenes of unspeakable carnage? For those following the inquests, those questions have been unspoken but ever present.

It is not easy to predict what makes a hero. Certainly many of those who risked their lives to help on 7 July had experience, or some professional training, in trauma situations. Adrian Heili, whose intervention almost certainly helped to save the life of Danny Biddle, who lost both legs, an eye and his spleen in the Edgware Road blast, had served with the Austrian army in Kosovo. Group Captain Craig Staniforth, an RAF wing commander, smashed a window in his undamaged train, which had pulled up alongside the bombed Edgware Road carriage, and swung from the handrails to climb into the wreckage to help desperately injured survivors. He talked to John Tulloch, who had serious head injuries, telling him about his daughter's university applications in a desperate bid to stop him going to sleep.

Others, however, were not professionals. Events organiser Steven Desborough was being evacuated from the Aldgate train, when he turned – "I don't know why" – and climbed into the wrecked carriage. He cradled 24-year-old Carrie Taylor in the moments before she died.

"There were people that walked on and I don't blame them," Desborough was careful to say, and of course many of those who left may have calculated, rightly, that they were unable to help and would only be in the way. Others were in profound shock. It is difficult to explain the impulse that prompted a number of passengers at Aldgate to pause to take photographs of the scene even as Dr Gerardine Quaghebeur was fighting to save lives; they may not now be able to explain it themselves. But given the scale of the atrocity, and the challenges facing the emergency services in arriving at the bomb sites, there is no question that some, perhaps many, passengers' lives were saved directly because of the actions of their fellow commuters.

"I don't think you can sum up my debt of gratitude," Wright has said of Kenworthy. "People like that don't come around that often, and if it wasn't for her I would be dead."

4. The bombers were ordinary, silly young men, as well as evil murderers

Shortly before 1am on 6 July, Jermaine Lindsay, who the following day would murder 26 people on the Piccadilly line train, received a text message from Khan, the plot's ringleader. The message, though menacing in retrospect, is almost comical in its content. The pair, their texts showed, had taken to referring to each other as characters from the 1980s television programme The A Team, and riffing on tough guy BA Baracus's fear of flying.

"Yo BA big nackers," texted Khan, "you on dat plane or wat. fool."

Lindsay replied: "I ain't getting on no plane fool."

Khan may not have known at the time that Lindsay, who was married with a young child, had invited his 17-year-old girlfriend to spend the evening of 6 July in a hotel with him in London, where he promised her they would "spend some quality time together and . . . have some bad boy room service".

The pair had met at a boxing club in their home town of Aylesbury after he winked at her. They had been on a handful of dates, going for a drive to a nearby lake in his Fiat Brava, or to Milton Keynes to wander round a shopping centre. On that occasion he asked her if she knew how to get hold of a gun, since he was going to London with some mates "to teach some people a lesson".

Throughout the inquest a vivid and unsettling picture has emerged of the four bombers, who – as well as being murderous plotters directed by phonecalls from an as-yet unidentified terrorist mastermind in Pakistan – were also banal, sometimes silly, often very ordinary young men.

Tanweer also had a secret girlfriend whom he had met as a teenager, and courted by taking for late-night drives in his car. She knew of his obsession with cricket and jiu-jitsu, but thought he wasn't particularly religious. They had moved apart but stayed in contact, and got together again in early 2005. She felt he loved her, she said, and they made plans for the future, though she was puzzled by the blond tones in the hair on his head and arms – in fact, they had been bleached by the hydrogen peroxide he had been preparing in the bomb factory. The night before the bombings he played cricket with friends in a nearby park.

Khan, too, was a complicated character, greatly respected in the primary school where he was a learning mentor, though teachers had expressed concerns about his hardline views. The man regarded as a father figure was at the same time using his position to try to convert children as young as 11 to his brand of radical Islam.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the inquests heard, when he was still a young teenager, Hasib Hussain had passed a note to his fellow school pupils which read: "You're next."

Hussain, 18 when he died, had told his teachers that he wanted to go to university, but dropped out of school a week before it was due to finish at the end of June 2005. A week after that he murdered 13 people on the number 30 bus.

5. Though many individuals were heroic, the emergency response fell short

PC Dave Hill, normally employed as a diplomatic protection officer for the Metropolitan police, was driving with colleagues along the Thames when they heard reports of unexplained explosions at Edgware Road. They raced to the scene where Hill entered the tunnel and climbed into the mangled carriage – "because I was there". The officer, who wept while recalling the scenes he had witnessed, may have directly saved a number of lives through his actions; he was far from alone among emergency-service professionals in acting without a second thought to save others.

But, however inspiring the individual acts of heroism preformed by police officers, firefighters and paramedics, the uncomfortable truth is that the emergency services' response to 7 July was hampered by delays, communication failures, tactical confusion and a jobsworth adherence to protocol that at times defied common sense.

Again and again, survivors spoke of the appalling wait for rescuers, even as they felt themselves slipping ever closer to death. Fire crews did not arrive at Edgware Road until an hour after the attacks. The first paramedic on the scene called urgently for ambulances; he learned later that ambulances from two stations nearby had not been dispatched. Paramedics intended for Russell Square were sent to the wrong location, meaning they also arrived almost an hour after the attack.

Firefighters arrived at King's Cross station at 9.13am but did not go to the scene of the blast until 9.42am because of communication protocols. Police and firefighters were forced to use runners between tunnels and station concourses because their radio system at the time did not work underground.

Most worrying, perhaps, was what emerged at the inquest about the "Gold" command centre at London Ambulance Service headquarters. This was a scene of barely contained chaos, in which staff could not log on to computers, messages were scribbled on pieces of paper and subsequently lost, and a single operator was handling every 999 call and radio message relating to the four bomb sites. Three hours after the first attacks, the inquest heard, those in charge of the ambulance response were still unclear about how many bombs had exploded and where. Ambulances were not even dispatched to Tavistock Square, scene of the bus bomb, until 52 minutes after the blast.

The ambulance service was also forced to admit that it "did not provide a complete picture" to a London Assembly inquiry in 2006 into the emergency response, giving an account which suggested a speedier and more efficient response than had actually taken place. "There was no intent to deceive," insisted an ambulance spokesman.

6. We may never know how much MI5 knew before July 7

One of the most dramatic images to emerge from the inquests was not an image of a bomb scene, but a grainy, black-and-white surveillance photograph of Aldgate bomber Tanweer, which MI5 sent to US secret services in the months before the attacks to be shown to a key al-Qaida informant. The informant, Mohammed Junaid Babar, had not identified the image as being significant, it emerged in evidence – perhaps unsurprisingly since the original, which very clearly showed the bomber with Mohammed Sidique Khan, had been cropped so badly as to render Tanweer unrecognisable and cut out Khan altogether. Babar had been involved in training Khan in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.

MI5 had no explanation for the poor quality of the image. "One of my children," tartly noted inquest counsel Hugo Keith, "could have done a better job."

Witness G, the security service spokesman giving evidence anonymously, acknowledged in court that MI5 had allowed a committee of MPs to be misled over its classification of suspects, and had not told the MPs about the original, good-quality picture.

But if the spokesman, under cross-examination, did shed some light on MI5's involvement, to many of the bereaved families his evidence was distinguished more by what it did not reveal. It was known before the inquest, for example, that Khan came onto MI5's radar on at least eight occasions before the bombings, dating back as early as 2001. The witness cited limited resources, unsophisticated computer systems, even Khan's common name, as explanations of why the dots had not been joined. Repeatedly, he said the service had improved its systems since the attacks and would be unlikely to miss such connections again. But he did not elaborate how and why.

At one point, almost as an aside, Witness G told the court that he was confident Khan could have been identified as a trained jihadist in March 2005, four months before the bombings, had agents chosen to investigate a major lead. They did not, he said, for a "proportionate and reasonable" reason. However, he was unable to disclose what that was, he said, "for national security reasons".

7. Inquests have their limits

After a process of more than six months, during which more than 300 people have given evidence in person and a futher 200 by statement, 1,173 pieces of evidence have been disclosed and at least 16 separate legal teams have had their say, all involved will hope that the coroner will have made significant strides towards uncovering the full story of 7 July.

But however admirable, in the minds of many bereaved families, Lady Justice Hallett's management of the inquest process has been, questions are certain to remain even after she delivers her verdicts. Legal rules tightly circumscribe the powers of coroners, whose principal role, of course, is to rule on cause of death. It is not yet absolutely certain how much scope she will consider she has under "rule 43" to make recommendations to prevent further deaths.

Some of the bereaved families believe that the end of the inquest should represent the close of the period of inquiry. But others have pressing questions that they insist still have to be answered. A number of family members feel that the security services were allowed to sidestep important questions during the inquest process, and that the witness who gave evidence on MI5's behalf was not pushed by the coroner or her barrister to give full answers.

Some relatives question Witness G's assertion that the failure to follow up intelligence about the 7 July bombers was due to limited resources, or question why Babar, who remains the only person to be convicted in relation to the bombings, served only four years in a US prison before being released.

Some years ago lawyers representing survivors and the bereaved families launched legal action to force the government to hold an independent inquiry into the attacks. Those proceedings were stayed while the inquest process was ongoing; they could be reactivated, dependent on the coroner's findings and potential recommendations. It may not be over yet.

• Location: West Sacramento
• Compensation: Depending on experience
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05 May 2011

President Obama campaigned on a platform of Government transparency.  To his credit, he has taken steps in that direction, such as lifting the ban on photographing flagged draped coffins returning from the wars.  Again, to his credit, he made it clear that Americans should not be shielded from the horrors of war.  Paradoxically, yesterday, he banned the release of photos of the body of Osama bin Laden. 

The White House has today issued these new INFOSEC guidelines, effective Monday, 09 May 2001.

UNCLASSIFIED
New INFOSEC Guidelines from GoTUNSA
(Government of The United States of America)

GoTUNSA has issued a new classification schedule.  All documents used by GoTUNSA (see appendix and definitions) are to use this classification system beginning 09 May 2011.

The new classifications are as follows.  Please see appendix and definitions for more details on each level of classification.

UNCLASSIFIED                                    

INCONVENIENT    
EMBARRASSING     
TOP EMBARRASSING    

SCARY
VERY SCARY
TOP VERY SCARY

TOP EMBARRASSING SCARY
TOP EMBARRASSING SCARY, COMPARTMENTALIZED,
TOP EMBARRASSING SCARY, COMPARTMENTALIZED, CODE WORD

UNPC
UNPC EMBARRASSING
UNPC EMBARRASSING SCARY

SPECIAL ACCESS
YOU ARE VERY SPECIAL
YOU ARE VERY VERY SPECIAL
YOU ARE VERY VERY VERY SPECIAL
YOU ARE VERY EXTREMELY SPECIAL
YOU ARE EXTREMELY EXTREMLY SPECIAL
YOU ARE MORE SPECIAL THAN ANYONE WITH LOWER CLEARANCE

WEB ADMINISTRATOR
TOP WEB ADMINISTRATOR 

YOU ARE GOD
YOU ARE BHO
YOU ARE JULIAN ASSANGE

Shhh…you are Chinese Government Hacker
Top shhhh…Chinese Government Hacker Web Administrator

All documents created or used by GoTUNSA shall be stamped top and bottom in RED INK, underscored, and using the FONT shown.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
UNCLASSIFIED

http://www.facebook.com/MichaelYonFanPage

Michael Yon

Thanks to Australia's namby-pamby rating system, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings will be released with a minor edit for those residing in the country that gave us Prisoner: Cell Block H. 

"The modification was a small change we requested the developer to make to one scene during one the games side quests," said a Namco Bandai rep. "In the original version your character Geralt was given the choice of accepting sex 'as a reward' for successfully completing this particular side quest. The Australian Classification Board originally refused classification as they deemed the inclusion of 'sex as a reward' as not suitable for an MA15+ classification."

"The change is only minor, in that the character choice is now made automatically for him. The character and the side quest are still in the game but presented in a slightly different context."

Everything else in the game should remain intact, including all the other juicy sex scenes. Apparently random sex is okay, but not sex you've earned. Gotta love completely arbitrary regulations. 

The Witcher 2: Edited For Australian Gamers [GamePron]

Tous les ans en Mars Microsoft présente lors d’un salon interne les principaux projets de recherche. Voici une liste de quelques projets publics afin de vous donner une idée sur les innovations à venir. Absolument passionnant!

3-D, Photo-Real Talking Head

Our research showcases a new, 3-D, photo-real talking head with freely controlled head motions and facial expressions. It extends our prior, high-quality, 2-D, photo-real talking head to 3-D. First, we apply a 2-D-to-3-D reconstruction algorithm frame by frame on a 2-D video to construct a 3-D training database. In training, super-feature vectors consisting of 3-D geometry, texture, and speech are formed to train a statistical, multistreamed, Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The HMM then is used to synthesize both the trajectories of geometric animation and dynamic texture. The 3-D talking head can be animated by the geometric trajectory, while the facial expressions and articulator movements are rendered with dynamic texture sequences. Head motions and facial expression also can be separately controlled by manipulating corresponding parameters. The new 3-D talking head has many useful applications, such as voice agents, telepresence, gaming, and speech-to-speech translation. Learn more...

3-D Scanning with a Regular Camera

3-D television is creating a huge buzz in the consumer space, but the generation of 3-D content remains a largely professional endeavor. Our research demonstrates an easy-to-use system for creating photorealistic, 3-D-image-based models simply by walking around an object of interest with your phone, still camera, or video camera. The objects might be your custom car or motorcycle, a wedding cake or dress, a rare musical instrument, or a handcrafted artwork. Our system uses 3-D stereo matching techniques combined with image-based modeling and rendering to create a photorealistic model you can navigate simply by spinning it around on your screen, tablet, or mobile device.

Applied Sciences Group: Smart Interactive Displays

Our research shows:

Steerable AutoStereo 3-D Display: We use a special, flat optical lens (Wedge) behind an LCD monitor to direct a narrow beam of light into each of a viewer’s eyes. By using a Kinect head tracker, the user’s relation to the display is tracked, and thereby, the prototype is able to steer that narrow beam to the user. The combination creates a 3-D image that is steered to the viewer without the need for glasses or holding your head in place.

Steerable Multiview Display: The same optical system used in the 3-D system, Wedge behind an LCD, is used to steer two separate images to two separate people rather than two separate eyes, as in the 3-D case. Using a Kinect head tracker, we find and track multiple viewers and send each viewer his or her own unique image. Therefore, two people can be looking at the same display but see two completely different images. If the two users switch positions, the same image continuously is steered toward them.

Retro-Reflective Air-Gesture Display: Sometimes, it’s better to control with gestures than buttons. Using a retro-reflective screen and a camera close to the projector makes all objects cast a shadow, regardless of their color. This makes it easy to apply computer-vision algorithms to sense above-screen gestures that can be used for control, navigation, and many other applications.

A display that can see: Using the flat Wedge optic in camera mode behind a special, transparent organic-light-emitting-diode display, we can capture images that are both on and above the display. This enables touch and above-screen gesture interfaces, as well as telepresence applications.

Kinect based Virtual Window: Using Kinect, we track a user’s position relative to a 3-D display to create the illusion of looking through a window. This view-dependent-rendered technique is used in both the Wedge 3-D and multiview demos, but the effect is much more apparent in this demo. The user quickly should realize the need for a multiview display, because this illusion is valid for only one user with a conventional display. This technique, along with the Wedge 3-D output and 3-D input techniques we are developing, are the basic building blocks for the ultimate telepresence display. This Magic Window is a bidirectional, light-field, interactive display that gives multiple users in a telepresence session the illusion that they are interacting with and talking to each other through a simple glass window. Learn more...

Cloud Data Analytics from Excel

Excel is an established data-collection and data-analysis tool in business, technical computing, and academic research. Excel offers an attractive user interface, easy-to-use data entry, and substantial interactivity for what-if analysis. But data in Excel is not readily discoverable and, hence, does not promote data sharing. Moreover, Excel does not offer scalable computation for large-scale analytics. Increasingly, researchers encounter a deluge of data, and when working in Excel, it is not easy to invoke analytics to explore data, find related data sets, or invoke external models. Our project shows how we seamlessly integrate cloud storage and scalable analytics into Excel through a research ribbon. Any analyst can use our tool to discover and import data from the cloud, invoke cloud-scale data analytics to extract information from large data sets, invoke models, and then store data in the cloud—all through a spreadsheet with which they are already familiar. Learn more...

Controlling Home Heating with Occupancy Prediction

Home heating uses more energy than any other residential energy expenditure, making increasing the efficiency of home heating an important goal for saving money and protecting the environment. We have built a home-heating system, PreHeat, that automatically programs your thermostat based on when you are home. PreHeat’s goal is to reduce the amount of time a household’s thermostat needs to be on without compromising the comfort of household members. PreHeat builds a predictive model of when the house is occupied and uses the model to optimize when the house is heated, to save energy without sacrificing comfort. Our system consists of Wi-Fi and passive, IR-based occupancy sensors; temperature sensors; heating-system controllers for U.S. forced-air systems and for U.K. water-filled radiators and under-floor heating; and PC-based control software using machine learning to predict schedules based on current and past occupancy. Learn more...

Face Recognition in Video

Face recognition in video is an emerging technology that will have great impact on user experience in fields such as television, gaming, and communication. In the near future, a television or an Xbox will be able to recognize people in the living room, home video will be annotated automatically and become searchable, and TV watchers will be able to get information about an unfamiliar actor, athlete, or singer just by pointing to the person on the screen. Our research showcases the face-recognition technology developed by iLabs. Our technology includes novel algorithms in face detection, recognition, and tracking. The research demonstrates semi-automatic labeling of videos, a novel TV-watching experience using faces in a video as hyperlinks to get more information, and automatic recognition of the person in front of the television, Xbox, or computer. Learn more...

Fuzzy Contact Search for Windows Phone 7

Mobile-phone users typically search for contacts in their contact list by keying in names or email IDs. Users frequently make various types of mistakes, including phonetic, transposition, deletion, and substitution errors, and, in the specific case of mobile phones, the nature of the input mechanism makes mistakes more probable. We propose a fuzzy-contact-search feature to help users find the right contacts despite making mistakes while keying in a query. The feature is based on the novel, hashing-based spelling-correction technology developed by Microsoft Research India. We support many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Hindi. We have built a Windows Phone 7 app to demonstrate our fuzzy contact search. The solution is lightweight and can be used in any client-side contact-search scenario. Learn more...

High-Performance Cancer Screening

Our research demonstrates high-performance, GPU-based 3-D rendering for colon-cancer screening. The VCViewer provides a gesture-based user interface for the navigation and analysis of 3-D images generated by computed-tomography (CT) scans for colon-cancer screening. This viewer is supported by a server-side volume-rendering engine implemented by Microsoft Research. Our work shows a real-world, life-saving medical application for this engine. In addition, we show high-performance, CPU-based image processing needed to prepare CT colonoscopy images for diagnostic viewing. This processing was developed at the 3-D Imaging Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and has been adapted for task and data parallelism in joint collaboration with Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Research, and Intel.

InnerEye: Visual Recognition in the Hospital

Our research shows how a single, underlying image-recognition algorithm can enable a multitude of clinical applications, such as semantic image navigation, multimodal image registration, quality control, content-based image search, and natural user interfaces for surgery being enabled within the Microsoft Amalga unified intelligence system. Learn more...

Interactive Information Visualizations

Our research presents novel, interactive visualizations to help people understand large amounts of data:

o iSketchVis applies the familiar, collaborative features of a whiteboard interface to the accurate data-exploration capabilities of computer-aided data visualization. It enables people to sketch charts and explore their data visually, on a pen-based tablet—or collaboratively, on whiteboards.

o NetCharts enables people to analyze large data sets consisting of multiple entity types with multiple attributes. It uses simple charts to show aggregated data. People can explore these aggregates by dragging them out to create new charts.

o Sets traditionally are represented by Euler diagrams with bubble-like shapes. This research presents two techniques to simplify Euler diagrams. In addition, we demonstrate LineSets, which uses a single, continuous curve to represent sets. It simplifies set intersections and offers multiple interactions.

MirageBlocks

Our research demonstrates the use of 3-D projection, combined with a Kinect depth camera to capture and display 3-D objects. Any physical object brought into the demo can be digitized instantaneously and viewed in 3-D. For example, we show a simple modeling application in which complex 3-D models can be constructed with just a few wooden blocks by digitizing and adding one block at a time. This setup also can be used in telepresence scenarios, in which what is real on your collaborator’s table is virtual—3-D projected—on yours, and vice versa. Our work shows how simulating real-world physics behaviors can be used to manipulate virtual 3-D objects. Our research uses a 3-D projector with active shutter glasses.

Mobile Photography: Capture, Process, and View

The mobile phone is becoming the most popular consumer camera. While the benefits are quite clear, the mobile scenario presents several challenges. It is not always easy to capture good photos. Image-processing tools can improve photos after capture, but there are few tools tailored to on-phone image manipulation. We present phone-based image-enhancement tools that are tightly integrated with cloud services. Heavy computation is off-loaded to the cloud, which enables faster results without impacting the phone’s performance. Learn more...

Project Emporia: Personalized News

Project Emporia is a personalized news reader offering 250,000 articles daily as discovered through social news feeds. It combines state-of-the-art recommendation systems (Matchbox) with automatic content classification (ClickPredict) to enable users to fine-tune their news channels by category or a custom-keyword channel, combined with "more-like-this"/"less-like-this" votes. It is available as a mobile client as well as on the web. Learn more...

Recognizing Pen Grips for Natural UI

By enabling multitouch sensing on a digital pen, we can recognize how the user is holding it. In the real world, people hold tools such as pens, paintbrushes, sketching pencils, knives, and compasses differently, and we enable a user to alter the grip on a digital pen to switch between functionalities. This enables a natural UI on the pen—mode switches are no longer necessary. Learn more...

Rich Interactive Narratives

Recent advances in visualization technologies have spawned a potent brew of visually rich applications that enable exploration over potentially large, complex data sets. Examples include GigaPan.org, Photosynth.net, PivotViewer, and WorldWide Telescope. At the same time, the narrative remains a dominant form for generating emotionally captivating content—movies or novels—or imparting complex knowledge, as in textbooks or journals. The Rich Interactive Narratives project aims to combine the compelling, time-tested narrative elements of multimedia storytelling with the information-rich, exploratory nature of the latest generation of information-visualization and -exploration technologies. We approach the problem not as a one-off application, Internet site, or proprietary framework, but rather as a data model that transcends a particular platform or technology. This has the potential of enabling entirely new ways for creating, transforming, augmenting, and presenting rich interactive content. Learn more...

ShadowDraw: Interactive Sketching Helper

Do you want to be able to sketch or draw better? ShadowDraw is an interactive assistant for freehand drawing. It automatically recognizes what you’re trying to draw and suggests new pen strokes for you to trace. As you draw new strokes, ShadowDraw refines its models in real time and provides new suggestions. ShadowDraw contains a large database of images with objects that a user might want to draw. The edges from any images that match the user’s current drawing are merged and shown as suggested "shadow strokes." The user then can trace these strokes to improve the drawing. Learn more...

Social News Search for Companies

Social News Search for Companies uses social public data to build a great news portal for companies. The curation of this page can be crowdsourced to improve the quality of results. We tackle two questions: How can we use social media to provide a rich, topical, searchable, living news dashboard for any given company, and can we build an environment where the curation of the sources of content for a company page is done by the users of the page rather than by an editor? Learn more...

Today, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety awarded the 2011 Nissan LEAF a "Top Safety Pick" rating. The rating is given to vehicles that achieve the Institute's highest rating of "Good" in front, rear and side impact protection as well as being equipped with electronic stability control and earn a good rating in roof strength. The Nissan LEAF joins the Nissan Cube and Infiniti M37/M56 on the list of 2011 Top Safety Picks.

"Nissan has a long standing commitment to safety and innovation," said Brian Carolin, senior vice president, sales and marketing, Nissan North America, Inc. "The award confirms that the commitment to passenger safety continues with the 100% electric Nissan LEAF."

The Nissan LEAF is the first 100% electric vehicle to be tested by the Institute. Standard Nissan LEAF safety systems include Nissan Advanced Air Bag System (AABS) with dual-stage supplemental front air bags with seat belt and occupant classification sensors, front seat-mounted side impact supplemental air bags, roof-mounted curtain side impact supplemental air bags for front and rear-seat outboard occupant head protection, 3-point ALR/ELR seat belts (driver's seat ELR only) with pretensioners and load limiters, child seat upper tether anchor, LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren) system and child safety rear door locks. Vehicle Dynamic Control (VDC) and Traction Control System (TCS) are also standard on all LEAF models.

Source: Nissan

Marianna Ruggieri and Antonino Valenti Group classification of a mathematical model describing one-dimensional motion in nonlinear dissipative medium is performed. Reduced equations through the optimal system of subalgebras are obtained and some exact solutions are shown. ... [J. Math. Phys. 52, 043520 (2011)] published Tue Apr 26, 2011.

As April, which has been designated Sexual Assault Awareness month, winds down, numerous women’s rights advocates are calling attention to the FBI’s restrictive definition of rape -- a definition that they say inadequately encompasses all forms of the crime.

When Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) incited outrage by proposing to confine the definition of rape to instances of "forcible rape" in H.R. 3, the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" Act, it was a little-known fact FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) had been using this classification since 1929 -- making the definition, as Ms. Magazine points out, almost as old as sliced bread.

The UCR's summary reporting system, which functions as the rubric for measuring national crime data, defines rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.”

India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has signed the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TDKL) Access Agreement with the Japan Patent Office (JPO).

An official press release said the agreement, signed here yesterday, would help prevent misappropriation of India’s traditional knowledge at JPO.

It also successfully concludes the arrangement of protection of India’s traditional knowledge with "trilateral offices" like United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO) and JPO.

This is considered significant as most of the international patent applications get filed at least in one of these trilateral offices. Rejection of a patent application at any one of these offices would facilitate its rejection at any other International Patent Office.

The release said the TKDL Access Agreement had in-built safeguards on non-disclosure to protect India’s interest against any possible misuse. Under the agreement, the patent examiners at International Patent Offices can utilize TKDL for patent search and examination purpose only and cannot reveal the content to any third party unless it is necessary for citation purpose.

It said significant impact had already been realized at EPO, beginning July 2009, wherein TKDL team identified 224 patent applications at EPO which concern Indian systems of medicine and third party TKDL evidences filed at EPO.

In two such cases, EPO has already set aside its earlier intention to grant patents after it received TKDL evidence. In the other 33 cases, applicants themselves decided to withdraw their four-to-five year old applications on being confronted with TKDL evidence.

It is expected that in the remaining cases also, either EPO would reject these applications or applicants themselves would withdraw their wrong claims/patent applications unless they are able to establish the novelty of their claims/applications.

A recent study carried out by TKDL expert team has revealed a sharp decline (44%) on filing of patent applications concerning Indian systems of medicine at EPO in particular on generic group concerning medicinal plant preparation. Normally, on an average, 80 such patent applications are being filed every year at EPO. About 25 get filed during October-December and 15-40 patents get granted yearly during this period. In contrast, during October-December 2009 only 14 applications got filed and no wrong patent was granted

Misappropriation and bio-piracy are issues of great concern for 130 developing countries and this agenda is being pursued at multilateral fora such as Convention on Biological Diversity, TRIPs Council at World Trade Organization and at World Intellectual Property Organization.

However, so far there has been no consensus on ensuring protection of traditional knowledge.

It is for this reason, Mexico, only after more than 10 years of legal battle, was able to get the patent on Enola bean at USPTO cancelled in July 2009. Similarly, cancellation on Monsonto Soybean patent happened in July 2007 at EPO but after 13 years of legal battle.

India is the only country in the world which has set up an institutional mechanism (TKDL) and is able to prevent grant of wrong patents in only a few weeks through an e-mail and at zero cost, whereas other countries need to fight for 10-12 years and have to spend millions of dollars to meet legal and other expenses even for opposing a single patent.

TKDL, a collaborative project between CSIR and Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH), is a maiden Indian effort to help prevent misappropriation of traditional knowledge belonging to India at International Patent Offices.

It has scientifically converted and structured the India’s traditional knowledge, available in 148 ancient books on Indian Systems of Medicine, into five international languages - English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish (30 million A4 size pages) - with the help of IT tools and a novel classification system - Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC).

Today, India through TKDL is capable of protecting about 2 lakh (0.226 million) medical formulations similar to those of neem and turmeric. On an average, it takes five to seven years for opposing a granted patent at international level which may cost Rs 1-3 crore ($ 0.2-0.6 million).

The TKDL technology has created a unique mechanism for a Sanskrit sloka to be read in German/ Japanese/English/French/Spanish, by an examiner at EPO or any other International Patent Offices on a computer screen, the release said.

These unique international TKDL Access Agreements would have long-term implications on the protection of traditional knowledge and global intellectual property systems in view of the fact that, in the past, patents have been granted at EPO and USPTO on the use of over 200 medicinal plants due to the lack of access to the documented knowledge in public domain.

Also, at any point in time, 40-50 patent applications based on Indian traditional knowledge are awaiting grant of patent. s

Apart from USPTO and EPO, India has signed such agreements with several International Patent Offices like the German Patent Office, Patent Office of Australia, Canada Patent Office (CIPO) and United Kingdom Trademark & Patent Office (UKPTO) during the last two years.

NNN

PEGI pioneer leaves trade body.

Michael Rawlinson has announced his resignation as director general of UK games trade body UKIE, and will step down at the end of the month.

No reason was given for his decision to move on, with a statement from chairman Andy Payne stating only that he wanted to pursue "fresh challenges".

A vocal advocate for the UK games industry, Rawlinson was one of the key figures behind the creation of PEGI, the first pan-European age rating classification system, back in 2003.

Read more...

“Because the novel direct-acting antivirals have vastly improved efficacy in hard-to-treat patients over the current standard of care, surveyed clinicians expect drug-treated rates to grow as a result of an increase in the volume of patients seeking treatment”

Revised classification system of renal dysfunction in patients with cirrhosis

May's issue of Gut reports on a working party proposal for a revised classification system of renal dysfunction in patients with cirrhosis.

Dr Florence Wong and colleagues from Canada proposed an improvement on the current classification of renal dysfunction in cirrhosis. Clinicians caring for patients with cirrhosis recognize that the development of renal dysfunction is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. While most cases of renal dysfunction in cirrhosis are functional in nature, developed as a result of changes in hemodynamics, cardiac function, and renal auto-regulation, there is an increasing number of patients with cirrhosis and structural changes in their kidney as a cause of renal dysfunction. There is a need for a newer classification to include both functional and structural renal diseases. Acute kidney injury is defined as a rise in serum creatinine of 26.4µmol/L in less than 48hours Gut A working party consisting of specialists from multiple disciplines conducted a literature search and developed summary statements, incorporating the renal dysfunction classification used in nephrology. The research team discussed and revised these to produce this proposal. Literature search using keywords of cirrhosis, renal dysfunction, acute kidney injury, chronic kidney injury, and hepatorenal syndrome. Acute kidney injury will include all causes of acute deterioration of renal function as indicated by an increase in serum creatinine of more than 50% from baseline, or a rise in serum creatinine of 26.4µmol/L or more than in less than 48hours. The team defined chronic renal disease as an estimated glomerular filtration rate of less than 60ml/min calculated using the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease 6 (MDRD6) formula, recognizing that the MDRD6 formula is not perfect for the cirrhotic patients and this may change as improved means of estimating glomerular filtration rate becomes available. The team reported that acute on chronic kidney disease will be defined as acute kidney injury superimposed on existing chronic renal disease using the above definitions for AKI and chronic kidney injury. Dr Wong's team concludes, "Accepting this new classification will allow studies into the epidemiology, incidence, prevalence, natural history and the development of new treatments for these subtypes of renal dysfunction in cirrhosis." Gut 2011: 60: 702-709 19 April 2011

• Naples Daily News
• Posted April 18, 2011 at 8:28 p.m.

The Delcath Isolation-Aspiration catheter is inserted through the femoral vein and guided into the inferior vena cava and positioned so that when the balloons on the catheter are inflated they isolate the normal hepatic outflow of blood from the patient’s general circulatory system.

Interested in shooting like an Olympian? Then check out the latest version of the NRA International Style Shooting Competition brochure. Thanks to John Parker for filling us in:

International Shooting is the only style of shooting used in the Olympic games, and NRA Competitive Shooting is proud to present the NRA International Style Shooting Competition brochure. In this informative new brochure, general information is provided to assist you with NRA International style competition. Pistol, Rifle, & Shotgun events are covered, as well as the Olympic Finals and the NRA Classification System.

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Don't forget about ordering your rule books from the Program Materials Center, or checking out other NRA Competitive Shooting publications available for free online at http://issuu.com/compshoot.

A student's class of degree has a major effect on their life chances, yet the difference in academic achievement between a 2:1 and a 2:2 can be almost nothing, says Professor Nigel Seaton

Degree classification has a long history in our universities. It is widely accepted by students, parents and employers as the measure of academic achievement. However, this system has fundamental and damaging weaknesses.

First, degree classification is unfair to some students. The life chances available to a student with a 2:1 and a student with a 2:2 are very different indeed. Many blue-chip companies will only interview graduates with a first or a 2:1. A top-class degree also makes it much easier to get a scholarship for postgraduate research.

Yet the difference in academic achievement, and, therefore, their potential as an employee, between a student with a 2:1 and one with a 2:2 might be almost nothing – 60.1% compared with 59.9%. In such a case, the difference in life chances reflects no difference at all in academic achievement.

Universities recognise the effect of fine academic judgments on the degree class a student receives, and the moral responsibility that goes with it. This feeling of responsibility gives rise to schemes to give some students a degree class that is higher than it otherwise would be.

Some universities, for example, identify a "border region" of marks just below a class boundary in which a board of examiners is permitted to move a student up to the next degree class. A student with 58% might be awarded a 2:1, despite getting less than 60% (the usual boundary between a 2:1 and a 2:2).

This might be done because the student has scored very high marks in parts of their degree – indicating exceptional ability – even if they have slipped down in a couple of modules.

Almost the opposite line of thinking is sometimes used to increase the class of a student with a very "even" performance; in this case consistency rather than occasional brilliance might be rewarded.

That this tactic is morally, rather than academically, motivated is made very clear by the fact that there is no corresponding border region just above the class boundary; students are never demoted to a lower class after the board of examiners has reflected on their performance.

Other tactics exist to "do the right thing" for individual students by moving them from one class to another, but none does anything to address the fundamental unfairness of the process.

Another critical weakness of the current degree classification system is that the richness of the student's experience – subjects taken and marks achieved – is submerged, leaving only the class of the degree.

A potential employer might not get to find out that the engineering student scored top marks in an optional course in Spanish or excelled in a particular aspect of the course. All they see is a 2:1 or a 2:2. So, in effect, the act of degree classification trivialises the student's achievement.

A full account of the student's academic record does exist. This is the graduation "transcript", which is issued to all graduating students: it detailas what subjects or modules were taken, and how well the student did in those specific areas.

A proposed standard version of the transcript for all UK universities, called the Higher Education Achievement Report (Hear), is currently being piloted in some universities. If the pilot is deemed successful, the Hear will then be issued to students on graduation.

This is being done on the recommendation of the Burgess Group, a national steering group looking at better ways to recognise student achievement, which envisaged that the Hear might eventually make degree classification obsolete.

As things stand, this will not happen. The degree class is still seen as the definitive mark of achievement by both students and employers. It's difficult to see how gradually changing attitudes among everyone – not just students and employers – by explanation and persuasion can possibly work.

We need to be more radical. We should stop classifying degrees, now, and allow the transcript to do its job.

• Professor Nigel Seaton is senior deputy vice-chancellor, University of Surrey

BY WARREN P. STROBEL | MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

WASHINGTON -- At a November 2009 meeting, top Iranian security officials allegedly discussed staging a student takeover of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Tehran, much as students had seized the U.S. Embassy there three decades earlier, according to a State Department cable.

But Ali Larijani, a powerful politician and speaker of Iran's parliament, urged caution as Iranian-Saudi tensions rose. Referring to the 1979-81 U.S. hostage crisis, Larijani told his colleagues that "one experience occupying a foreign embassy is enough -- in fact, we have not yet extricated ourselves from the last experience."

The secondhand anecdote, related to a U.S. diplomat by an unidentified Iranian in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is one of hundreds about Iran contained in classified U.S. cables obtained by WikiLeaks and recently passed to McClatchy Newspapers.

Taken together, the cables portray a U.S. government ravenous for any scrap of information about Iran, no matter how incomplete or contradictory -- and admittedly blind to much of what is taking place in a country where the U.S. has not had an official presence in more than a generation.

Filed by a special corps of U.S. diplomats known as "Iran watchers," the cables are a mix of surprising insights into life inside Iran and large blind spots about a country key to U.S. foreign policy. Most are classified confidential, a fairly low security classification, though about a third are labeled "secret" or "secret/no forn," meaning they should be read only by U.S. diplomats.

They are based on phone calls to and emails from sources inside Iran, interviews with members of Iranian rock bands on tour in neighboring countries, foreign journalists who've recently been to Iran, and conversations with Iranian businessmen, academics, and former officials traveling outside their homeland. One cable even recounts an Iran watcher's chats with truck drivers crossing the border into Turkmenistan.

How critical the work of the Iran watchers is to U.S. intelligence assessments of what is taking place in Iran is unknowable. The U.S. government refused to comment on the cables.

"The United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information," Mike Hammer, the acting assistant secretary of state for public affairs, said in an email. "In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals' security at risk, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with countries to solve shared problems. We do not comment on the authenticity of the documents released by WikiLeaks."

But the work of the "Iran watchers" brings attention to one of the realities that American decision-makers face: Without an embassy and consulates inside Iran, most of what they know about that country is second- and even thirdhand. In a world where such information helped mislead the Bush administration into asserting erroneously that Saddam Hussein still had active weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq, the prospect that U.S. intelligence may be guided, even in a small way, by such reports unnerves some.

Anyone who will talk to an Iran watcher "is someone who wants a (U.S.) visa, who wants money, is an expatriate, or someone with an explicitly anti-Islamic Republic agenda," said Flynt Leverett, a former White House and CIA official who's now a professor of international affairs at Penn State University.

"The whole concept is really flawed," said Leverett, a long-time critic of U.S. Iran policy. "It's almost structurally designed ... to make sure we get skewed information."

The Iran watchers' observations generally appear above the signature of other embassy officials, though their identities do not seem to be a secret; Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman named several, offering specific praise for their work, in a cable that was labeled unclassified. Nevertheless, at the State Department's request, McClatchy Newspapers deleted their names on the version of the cable that it posted on its website.

As for the people the Iran watchers talked to, McClatchy Newspapers also withheld the names of many -- as well as other information that might help identify them -- to protect them from possible retribution.

Of course, the Iran watchers are not the only source of information for the U.S. government, which trades information with its allies, most of whom do maintain a diplomatic presence in Tehran, and presumably spies on the country through more covert means.

Even so, the cables show, the U.S. often has a difficult time knowing what is going on there.

The largest mass protests in the Islamic republic's history "were unanticipated by most of us," Feltman acknowledged to the Iran watchers on June 26, 2009, two weeks after disputed presidential elections sparked massive demonstrations and rioting in a challenge to Iran's theocracy.

"Without a post in Iran and given the Iranian government crackdown on its citizens, journalists, foreign diplomats and most modes of communication, our ability to get reliable news and make sense of the situation here in Washington has proved most difficult," Feltman wrote.

The Iran watchers themselves are aware of the vulnerabilities of their information.

In the conclusion of the cable that recounted the alleged plot to seize Saudi Arabia's embassy in Iran, the cable's author notes that the source of the anecdote is citing someone with access to Iran's Supreme National Security Council. But the cable writer offers no assessment of the story's accuracy.

"What can be said in this cable is that the purported original source of most of the above information is credibly in a position to have access to the information provided," the cable said. "However, while our strong impression is that the Baku contact genuinely believes his information is accurate ... we cannot yet assess the credibility of the information itself ..."

The Iran watcher program is relatively small, current and former U.S. officials say, comprising about 15 diplomats stationed in Azerbaijan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Great Britain, Germany and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Its unofficial headquarters is the State Department's Iran Regional Presence Office in Dubai, where an estimated 700,000 Iranians live.

A State Department official in Washington said the program was established in 2006 for three reasons: to improve U.S. knowledge about Iran; to prepare a cadre of diplomats should the United States ever re-establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran; and to build up a corps of Farsi-language speakers.

Before the program, the number of State Department Farsi-speakers with knowledge of Iran "was three, maybe four," said the official, who was not authorized to speak for the record.

Iran seems well aware of the U.S. effort, which the regime no doubt considers little short of espionage.

In a bit of spy vs. spy, the U.S. consulate in Istanbul reported in September 2009 that several of its contacts "have separately cautioned us in the past week that they have been asked (or warned) by Iranian officials to cease contact 'with American diplomats asking questions about Iran.'"

One constant theme in the cables is pleas to U.S. officials from Iranians unhappy with their system to focus more on human rights abuses and less on Iran's nuclear program -- a shift that critics say Obama undertook belatedly.

But mostly the cables are an avalanche of information: on why Iran scotched the visit of the U.S. badminton team; on Iran's planned car exports to Turkey; on how a single Iranian company controls the market for Iranian pilgrimages to the Shiite Muslim shrine in Karbala, Iraq.

Bright, popular, rebellious and creative, 21-year-old Louise Cattell had everything to live for. Then she made a fatal mistake. She took the party drug ketamine and was found dead in the bath by her flatmate. There are 125,000 other ketamine users in the UK. Louise's parents want to make sure it never happens to any of them…

When Vicky and Ross Cattell woke at the usual time on Wednesday 2 March they had no reason to think the day would not pan out just like any other. They were at their flat in Geneva, where they had been living for just over a year, and their first thought, as always, was for their children in London, Tommy, 23, and Louise, 21. Both, as far as they knew, were still safely in bed, Tommy at the family home in Belsize Park and Louise at her bachelor-girl flat in Clapton, further east.

Ross set off for work at Deloitte, the financial advisory firm, and Vicky prepared for her daily exercise routine. Everything seemed utterly normal. Then, just before his 8.30am meeting, Ross's phone rang with the news that would rip their world apart: Louise was dead, drowned in the bath after taking ketamine, the horse tranquilliser that is currently the "party drug" of choice among young people across the UK.

"When I first found out , I couldn't believe it. I thought there must have been a mistake," says Ross. "It was the most terrible shock." Vicky nods in agreement: "You have this nightmare so many times as a parent that something like this is going to happen and then you wake up and think, 'thank God, it's not true'," she says. "The problem is that now it is actually true. The worst thing that could happen has happened and there's not a thing we can do about it."

We are talking at the Cattells' house in London just a few days after their daughter's funeral. It is a lovely light-filled space, full of bright rugs and cushions, books and paintings: an elegant yet unpretentious family home. There are photographs of Louise everywhere: smiling at the camera alongside her brother, her parents and her friends; striking poses in a succession of crazy frocks, her hair a different colour and style in every shot. Beneath the stairs is an impromptu shrine to "our darling girl" complete with scented candles, flowers and yet more photographs – Louise hula-hooping in giant sunglasses and a leopard print mini-dress; Louise winking and pouting in a long black wig and matt black lipstick: Louise with lilac hair in a black corset, competing in The X Factor (she got through to the second round). Among some wilting lilies stands a solitary half-bottle of champagne, its label customised with diamanté studs. Vicky shows me the card tied to its neck. "Dearest Louise," it reads, "Something to help you on your journey".

Given what she has been through in the past few weeks, Vicky is remarkably composed. So, too, is Ross, who provides coffee and biscuits on a tray, then listens thoughtfully as his wife tells me about the last few weeks of their daughter's life. Stroking Louise's cat Pickle on her lap, Vicky recounts how Louise had returned in early February from a month in Australia visiting friends – a 21st birthday trip funded by her parents – and thrown herself into applying to art college.

Already established as a photographer and DJ, and with a track record in the fashion industry (she did a foundation course at the London College of Fashion and worked as a production assistant during several London Fashion Weeks for names such as Giles Deacon and Julien Macdonald), Louise had decided it was time to develop her talents as an artist. "She was very, very creative, always artistic as a child, but she'd never focused like this on her art before. She did amazingly well getting her portfolio together so quickly," Vicky says. "That was what we talked about during the last conversation we had – I told her I was so proud of her for getting it done in time."

It is only when she talks about the night Louise died that Vicky's voice breaks and the emotion she must be feeling spills over. "She had dropped off her portfolio to Chelsea College of Art the night before and spent the day hanging out in her flat, working in the garden. In the evening three male friends came round to supper. Her best girlfriend, who was living with Louise at the time, was also there. Apparently, they had a nice meal – Louise was a terrific cook – and they drank some wine. At some point in the evening, I'm told, Louise and some of the others took ketamine.

"The girls watched TV for a while and then Louise's friend went to bed. Louise was tired too but didn't think she'd be able to sleep, maybe because of taking the drug but also because she had things on her mind. She had given up her job [as a visual merchandiser for the fashion chain New Look] before going to Australia and she knew she had to find another one because she had bills to pay. She'd been worrying about that. So she said she was going to take a bath to help her relax. About an hour later her friend woke up and realised straight away that something was wrong. She just had a feeling. She went into the bathroom and found her. She had fallen asleep in the bath and drowned."

Horrified, Louise's friend called the emergency services who told her how to try and resuscitate her but by then it was too late.

The police called at the Cattells' home in Belsize Park at 7.30am to inform Louise's brother she had died. "It was terrible," Tommy tells me over the phone after I've seen his parents. "I can see it so clearly in my mind, it is imprinted on my brain. Me in my pyjamas, the policeman and policewoman sitting on the sofa looking awkward and tired, the disbelief I felt in my heart – I just kept thinking it could not be true." Too shocked to use the telephone, Tommy asked a family friend who was staying at the house to ring Ross and tell him what had happened.

Before leaving Geneva, Vicky posted a message on Louise's Facebook page. "Our darling Louise is dead," she wrote. "Please help us through this very difficult time." Within days she had been contacted by hundreds of her daughter's friends, offering and seeking condolence. On the Saturday after Louise's death they held an "open house" for everyone who had known her and around 200 people turned up throughout the day. "Obviously our own grief is terrible," says Vicky. "But for the young people involved it is also incredibly hard to bear. Her friend who found her, the poor girl, I can only imagine what she is going through. We realised we had to support them all."

Because of the scale of the response to her death, the Cattells changed their original plan for a small, private funeral and opted instead for a "big send-off" at Golders Green Crematorium. Upwards of 400 people attended the humanist service, where in place of the usual hymns and prayers there were poems written by Louise's friends and songs from her Spotify playlist, such as "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses and "Just Like Heaven" by the Cure. The order of service was a fanzine-style brochure again put together by friends, full of touchingly goofy photos of Louise vogueing for the camera in outrageous, barely there clothes, mad wigs and kooky make-up, and with a heartbreakingly simple coverline – Louise 1989-2011 – that brings home the brevity of her life. The service ended with a mass singalong to the theme song from the movie Cabaret "in celebration of Louise's love of life and karaoke", which her mother thought a fitting tribute to "someone who never sat alone in her room".

Reading the many tributes on the memorial website set up by her parents, and talking to her friends and family, you get the sense that Louise Cattell was an absolute one-off. "Rest in peace you truly fantastic and much-loved beautiful person," reads one testimonial. "Louise I'll miss you for ever. You were the greatest, funniest, most amazing person I'll ever know. RIP darling. I love you," says another. And so it goes on. "She was full of energy and fun, she was always smiling and positive and you felt so happy and excited in her company," says her friend Charlie, who was a classmate at Francis Holland School in central London. "She was a true original."

Her mother recalls Louise going to school aged 12 with green hair, being sent home, only to return with a subtle shade of aubergine, which they let her keep. "I think they secretly admired her chutzpah," says Vicky. She admits she and Ross always let Louise do "exactly what she wanted to do, to a degree, and there were people, parents of her friends, who disapproved of that. But we tried things like curfews and it was hopeless. We found it worked best for the whole family when we trusted her to use her freedom wisely and she almost always repaid our trust. She got all her GCSEs and A-levels despite running club nights and doing gigs as a DJ from the age of 14. No doubt, there will be people who say all this happened because we let her be too wild but I simply don't think that is true. Dying your hair a different colour every week and staying out late does not necessarily mean you are heavily into drugs."

Louise was in no sense a habitual drug user. "I'd talked to her about drugs quite a bit," says Vicky. "She'd come across some quite serious cocaine and heroin addicts on the north London music scene and she said to me, 'Mum, I've seen what drugs can do to you and how they've messed up people's lives, and I'm never going to go there.' She may have taken the odd ecstasy tablet but she didn't even like smoking cannabis. I asked Tommy about that the other day – he said she didn't like the taste."

According to her friends, ketamine was something Louise took on an occasional basis, as many of them do too. "It's a new thing which is everywhere at the moment. People of my age are all doing it," says one of her close friends, who is 21. Louise's brother adds: "I was not surprised to hear she had taken it because it is very much part of the arty, east London scene she was involved in. It's quite socially acceptable. They all take it, it is definitely the fashionable drug of choice at the moment."

Vicky believes that while young people of Louise's age are very aware of the dangers of addiction to hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine, they are much less alert to the risks attached to occasional recreational use of ketamine. "We've been talking about this to a lot of Louise's young friends, and I think because ketamine is so widely used and available, despite being illegal, there's this idea among young people that it is somehow safe, but it is incredibly dangerous. I've found it too painful to do too much research into the drug but what I do know is you never know what is in it – and none of the people taking it seem aware of the dangers of using alcohol with it, for example. If Louise had not drunk alcohol, would she still be alive? We don't know."

Also known as Special K, Vitamin K, Super K and just K, ketamine is actually a powerful dissociative general anaesthetic originally used as a tranquilliser for horses and other large animals, which depresses the nervous system and causes a temporary loss of body sensation. It was briefly fashionable in the 1960s as a psychedelic drug but then largely disappeared from recreational use, resurfacing in Europe and north America during the 90s. It was made a class C drug five years ago, but despite this ketamine now boasts an estimated 125,000 users in the UK, and more users among young people in England and Wales than heroin and crack cocaine combined. In 2008 the British Crime Survey revealed it was the fastest growing "party drug" among 16-24 years olds, leading it to be called the "new ecstasy".

Users taking a small amount experience a euphoric rush which wears off fairly quickly. Larger amounts can cause people to "trip" for about an hour – they call it "going into a k-hole". Often they experience hallucinations and out-of-body experiences similar to those caused by taking LSD. Some report conversations with God. Because you cannot feel pain when you have taken ketamine it is possible to injure yourself quite badly and not be aware of it. Users may also become incapable of moving while under the influence, again exposing themselves to physical risk. It can cause dangerously high blood pressure if mixed with ecstasy or amphetamines. And, crucially, in relation to Louise's case, if the drug is taken with other depressant drugs such as alcohol, even a small amount can dangerously suppress breathing and heart function and can lead to unconsciousness.

Louise's brother does not believe she would have been aware of these kinds of side-effects before taking the drug. "I think she would probably have thought, everyone's taking it so it must be safe. The fact that it is only a class C drug could well have reinforced this view," he says.

David Nutt, the former chairman of the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, suggested before he was sacked from his post in 2009 that ketamine should be upgraded from a class C drug due to the harm it can cause to users. However, Louise's parents are not convinced that a change in classification would have a great effect on the numbers of young people using it. Ross does not believe young people pay much attention to drug classifications anyway. "I think raising awareness is much more important than legislation. Young people need to be more risk-aware when it comes to ketamine," he says.

Vicky has a background in the media and PR – she has worked for the Telegraph Group and was most recently media director for the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development – and she is planning to draw on this to start a campaign to increase awareness of how dangerous ketamine can be. "We're going to work with some of Louise's friends and some of my contacts in the film industry to put together a short film using Louise's life as a showcase, an example of a bright young life cut short, coupled with facts and figures to let young people know what is going on and to raise awareness of the dangers and risks associated with the drug," Vicky explains. "It is going to be made by young people for young people. It doesn't need to cost a lot of money. We'll make it a viral campaign, on the internet, which is where it will reach young people."

Another close friend who did not want her name mentioned claims that Louise's story has already had a profound effect on people who knew her and even on those who didn't. "This has certainly woken up a lot of people," she says. "I know a lot of people who regularly use ketamine who are stopping and thinking about what they are doing. I really want to warn people about it now." She and other friends of Louise think it is especially important to get the message about the dangers of ketamine into schools and youth clubs because the people taking it are getting younger and younger. "My friend's little sister who is 14 was caught taking it at school. Apparently loads of other girls in her year had been taking it."

As well as their campaign, Vicky and Ross are planning a memorial gathering for Louise on 21 June. This will be a simple Quaker-like ceremony where people will be able to contribute memories from the floor, after which they will launch magic lanterns over London in her memory. Next year the Cattells will stage a tribute concert to commemorate Louise's life and highlight the ketamine awareness campaign. "We want to prevent any other young person from having a horrible accident like this," says Ross. "If any good can come from this…" His voice tails off.

In the meantime, he and Vicky are faced with the unbearably painful business of clearing Louise's flat and tying up the loose ends of her young life, which had barely begun. "I've been to her flat once to collect her jewellery," says Ross. "It was quite tough. But somehow not as tough as going to the bank to close her bank account, or ringing the water company to tell them to stop sending the bills." Hardest of all was "ringing Ucas and telling them there was no point in progressing her applications to art school any further".

Louise's brother Tommy doesn't think he will ever get over her loss. "People say you grow to accept it but at the moment I just feel a really sad feeling in the pit of my stomach all the time. I'd always imagined that in 30 years' time we would still be going on holiday together, going out of each other's houses and our children would be friends. Now that's never going to happen. It makes me feel empty and alone."

www.louisecattell.com

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Recent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) enforcement efforts relating to duty-free entries under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) have revealed compliance gaps. The result is significant duty increases and penalties relating to faulty claims. To qualify for duty-free entry, importers are required to prove that the imported goods satisfy all program requirements and not simply that the goods were shipped from a GSP-eligible country. Before making a GSP claim, importers should perform a detailed review of all qualification requirements and ensure that satisfaction of each requirement can be fully documented to CBP's satisfaction. 

This 1.5 hour presentation will provide the following:

• A detailed review of all program requirements, including the "product of," direct import and minimum value content requirements;
• A discussion of the documentation necessary to support each requirement;
• A review of recent rulings issued by CBP relating to GSP; and
• A summary of the current status of GSP, including a discussion of what importers can due to protect claims made after the expiration of the statute.

The webinar will be presented by Larry Ordet, Esq. Mr. Ordet is a member of Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, P.A., resident in the Miami office, and serves on the firm's Operating Committee. He concentrates his practice on general customs compliance matters, with particular emphasis on tariff classification, NAFTA duty deferral and preference program qualification issues. Mr. Ordet has worked extensively on WCO tariff classification issues involving the modification of the Harmonized System and related Explanatory Notes.

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This blog post (yes, the one you are reading) is number 2,000 in this blog. The blog turned 10 years old on December 31, 2010, but other than a quick mention of it on Twitter, I more or less let that pass.

The vanderwal.net domain name started was initially purchased in 1997 and was used for a general personal website, of which my links page is a early remnant of that (it is a continuation of links page I had on my personal website initially hosted in Compuserve in 1995) and it has moved to all versions of my personal site since then. The blog was started in late 2000 as it was on my to do and try list and I started in with Blogger while waiting for the New Year�s ball to drop on tv. The first post, is now gone (it was likely the very profound �hello world� sort of thing or �FuBar is testing�. I, like many others who were using Blogger, then a product of Pyra, went through the growing pains of Blogger with its outages (all pages from Blogger were sent via FTP to my site) that meant no new updates could be made using that service. Pyra imploded one fine day and was left with just one employee, Ev Williams to run it with bits and pieces of help until it was later bought by Google. But, I only lasted on Blogger for nine months or so as I had been pulling together a travel blogging tool that would allow me to post to my blog and not have to use FTP.

October 2001 I moved to my own hand build blogging tool that also included a redesign. This has all pretty much stayed since then. In October 2004 the commenting was turned off after I woke to 1400 porn SPAM comments and I deleted the SPAM comments and removed the code for commenting. I had intended to bring comments back at some point in the my own tool, but then comment SPAM got worse my thought was to move to add an external commenting service (none have been satisfactory enough to move forward with). I then have been planning to move all of these posts into another blogging tool that had an easier to manage workflow for editing and also had a good commenting system. That has yet to happen and increasingly I am fine without there being any comments here. I miss the days of old when there were great conversations in a blog�s comments, but those days rarely happen any more outside of four or five blogs I can think of. One of the reasons I went with building my own blogging tool was the ability to have multiple categories assigned to each post to make aggregation of like posts much easier. The volume of content here has made that ease of use, much more difficult to pull off and it is one of the things I am back playing with in a dev version of the tool.

When I look back to my first blog posts that were created in Blogger, I see a huge change in the writing style and content from where posts have ended up today. The blog is named �Off the Top� as it was posting of things that were coming off the top of my head and were just a random collection of things (hence the URL naming for where the blog sits). The rough gathering and sharing of ideas shifted in after the first few months to a longer and a little more serious style. My style shifted a little bit when I moved to my own blogging platform, but the biggest shift was when I added headers to posts in March 2002. The style of the posts went from many short (paragraph or so) posts highlighting of things found and shared for others, but also shared for a future me to comeback to. By 2003 the posts were getting longer and there were fewer posts per day.

The changes on blog writing style were paired with other services and blogs easing content out of the blogs pages here. The catchall blog I started with included posts of a sentence or two and occasionally a paragraph or so, changed quite a bit over time.

Delicious was the first to really move content out of the blog here. The small snippets pointing to web pages and putting them in context all fell into Delicious (for a short time I built a my own bookmarking tool, but it lacked the social benefit of seeing others interactions around the same pages).

Twitter altered the site by the quick bon mots going straight there. The short snippets not only disappeared, but the frequency of blogging really slowed down. The posts that still showed up here were longer and more detailed.

This shift was somewhat good as it allowed me to really focus on subjects I was working through. One of the longer early pieces was in 2002 and was not posted in the blog as it was very out of character. When I moved to my own blogging platform I not only set it up to have multiple categories / keywords, but to classify posts as blog posts, journal, or essay. This last classification was statements and short pieces, longer more personal pieces, and essays were longer. Over the time, most everything has been classified as a blog post, but fits my initial framing that these would be called essays.

The longer pieces were also trending to a more central theme that I was working around. The mixing of work and much more fun content was getting a lot of feedback from people reading that it should be separated. That more professional writing also seemed likely to benefit from comments, which were not coming back anytime soon here. At this point I used my TypePad account and pointed www.personalinfocloud.com to it. For quite a while I was cross posting, but that slowed down in 2008 or so.

This blog is continuing on. I have a lot of pent up content that fits well here. I really want to get back to posting things about what I am reading and have a means to capture and share other ideas out. The demarkation of what goes here and what goes over to the Personal InfoCloud blog is a little fuzzy. But, I am fairly sure I am not going to add comments back here on this blog. Watching other blogs the number and quality of blog comments have dwindled, drastically. There are few blogs that have great comment threads anymore, but far fewer than benefit from tools like Disqus that aggregate poor comments (most are not comments and not really relevant to the posts) from elsewhere around the web / internet.

Here is to another 2,000 posts! Perhaps (I didn�t plan 2,000 posts when this started and would have called anybody crazy should they have suggested such a little over 10 years ago).

The best of the action from the second round of the 2011 County Championship. Updates thoughout the day and click here for scores

6.40pm: A round-up of scores before we close for the day, comments will be open over the weekend if you fancy carrying on discussing the games:

Leics 230 & 4/0 v Derbyshire 439/9d
Glamorgan 202 & 185/3 v Gloucs 188
Middlesex 277 v Essex 115 & 215 (f/o)
Kent 202 v Northants 429/7
Hampshire 218 v Notts 293/9
Warwickshire 642 v Somerset 147/6
Durham 327 & 64/3 v Yorkshire 149

5.08pm: Trent Bridge has brought some food for thought for the England selectors: a Samit Patel hundred, a somewhat slimmed-down Patel, too, yet again reviving hopes that he might address the fitness issues that have stalled his international career, writes David Hopps.
Patel's hundred had a large slice of fortune. He was dropped four times in the slips, three times by Neil McKenzie, the last of them off Friedel de Wet when he was in the 90s. He was not cowed by that in a second fifty that came at almost a run a ball and struck Danny Briggs for a straight six before hooking De Wet for another boundary and celebrating his hundred with a leap in the air that told of his new-found athleticism.
 
Cricket might never have taken root at Trent Bridge if William Clarke, who was later to become the founder of the All England XI, had not taken a shine to the widowed landlady of the Trent Bridge Inn, married her and decided that the spare land at the back of the pub would make a wonderful cricket ground.
 
Trent Bridge has become one of England's best-loved grounds, but in recent years The World Renowned Trent Bridge Inn, as it proclaims itself, had become an eyesore.  But better times lie ahead for one of cricket's most famous hostelries; it has been bought by Wetherspoons and will reopen as a cricket-themed pub in late May.
 
For once, the cries of "waiting" that could be heard on an overcast day came not just from batsmen contending with a difficult early-season pitch but from builders hauling equipment onto scaffolding. Nottinghamshire had toyed with the idea of trying to purchase the inn and demolish it, so removing a piece of history for the sake of another 1,000 on their ground's capacity. As enlightened as their development of Trent Bridge has been, William Clarke, described by John Arlott as "the first man to make a fortune out of cricket" would drink to that.

4.25pm: A (very) small amount of good news for Yorkshire: their total was revised upwards to 149, so Durham's lead was adjusted down to 178.

4.14pm: For the second time in as many Championship matches this season, Durham have earned the right to make their opponents follow on - and decided not to bother, writes Andy Wilson at Headingley. Just as at Hampshire last week, although this time under a different captain (Benkenstein rather than Mustard), they will first try to bat Yorkshire completely out of the game, and then hope to bowl them out for a second time - but this time, Durham regulars suggest, on a pitch that is already offering more help to messrs Blackwell and Borthwick than the Rose Bowl track that flattened into a shirt front.

It's funny to think that the afternoon session began with Yorkshire 93 for two, and apparently well set to make progress towards Durham's 327. But then their captain Andrew Gale played an appalling shot at Graham Onions to spark a collapse, with the last eight wickets falling for 47 - 16 of those from the last pair of Brophy and Ashraf.

Onions ended with five for 51 from 15 overs, an outstanding return after so long out, and was generously applauded to the pavilion by Yorkshire's players and members, as well as his own team-mates.

3.46pm: Warwickshire were finally dismissed for 642, 142 better than they have ever made at Taunton before, writes Mike Averis, and are now making about three appeals an over as their bowlers get the ball to do things Somerset found impossible.

With 10 on the board, Trescothick was still to score having played and missed or "left" either Woakes or Andrew Miller half a dozen times. After 21 balls the former England opener finally got off the mark with elegant boundaries either side of the wicket, before playing and missing again.

After eight overs Somerset are 31-0 with Arul Suppiah surviving a big appeal for caught behind.

2.59pm: Graham Onions has just taken his sweater with figures of four for 40, having seized the advantage for Durham in this absorbing northern battle, writes Andy Wilson at Headingley. Onions, playing his first senior game after 16 months of injury misery - full circumstances explained below, and yesterday, and in various previews over the last couple of weeks - fired out Andrew Gale, Jonathan Bairstow and Joe Root in consecutive overs as Yorkshire slipped from 100 for two to 113 for five.

It was high-class stuff in front of the watching England selector James Whitaker, especially considering Onions was obviously feeling his way back as he has so far bowled seven no-balls in his 11 overs.

He was given a big helping hand by Gale, just as he had been by Adam Lyth for his first wicket with his second ball of the season, as the Yorkshire captain top-edged a misguided pull to Ian Blackwell at mid on. But the next two scalps were earned not gifted, with Bairstow lbw and Root edging a late outswinger which the debutant wicket-keeper Michael Richardson did well to take.

Root had done more than enough to underline his promise by grafting to 45 with a couple of stylish boundaries, but Yorkshire are now looking to Gerard Brophy to rescue them for the second time in consecutive Championship matches.

2.38pm: Only 11 overs after lunch and the records keep coming, writes Mike Averis. A full toss from Mendis not only brought up Warwickshire's 600 – by 100 runs their best score at Taunton – but also the Sri Lankan spinner's worst figures in his first class career – 173 for two in 39 overs.

With Woakes making his third championship century, Trescothick's decision to ask Warwickshire to bat will take some explaining. The only good news for Somerset is that Woakes has gone for 129, mistiming a drive to mid-off.

1.57pm: Adeel Shafique, Notts' academy wicketkeeper, continues to keep wicket for Hampshire at the start of the afternoon session against Notts at Trent Bridge, writes David Hopps. This news goes under the classification of something I should have told you earlier if only I had found the time.

Hampshire's wicketkeeper Nic Pothas plays no further part after injuring a calf on the opening day and after clearance from the ECB Shafique gets a chance to step in until Hampshire's reserve keeper Michael Bates makes it to Nottingham from the south coast. Not the best time for the M1 to be closed and presumably clog up traffic in all directions.

Notts will have to negotiate a post-lunch spell from David Griffiths before they begin to feel settled. Griffiths bowled both Notts openers and had Samit Patel dropped in the slips on 0 and 9, firstly by Dominic Cork and then by Neil McKenzie. Alex Hales was also dropped by Cork, this time probably unnerved by the suggestion that McKenzie might go for the catch. That edge was forced by Freidel de Wet who then gave up the unequal struggle of bowling for slip catches and knocked out Hales's leg stump instead.

12.34pm: David Hopps writes: This is how hants_cricket told the story of the Trent Bridge morning so far on Twitter
 
BREAKING NEWS: David Griffiths has conceded a run, an Alex Hales single, after a succession of unplayable brilliance. (4-3-1-2). Notts 44-2
 
That sums it up really. Griffiths has produced an excellent morning's under thickening Trent Bridge cloud cover, bowling Nottinghamshire's experimental opening pair of Paul Franks and Mark Wagh and repeatedly passing the bat. He has also just had Samit Patel dropped at second slip by Neil McKenzie, a chance that he made look more difficult than it really was. Patel and Alex Hales are digging in for Nottinghamshire in the expectation that conditions will ease this afternoon. Griffiths' spell stands at 8-3-14-2 and Notts are 63-2 in reply to Hants' 218.

12.30pm: Ten overs into the day and Chopra went to his maiden double century, having added 26 to his overnight 174 in rapid time, writes Mike Averis at Taunton. He and Woakes were going along at just under seven an over when the opener, who managed only 409 runs in the entire championship last season, edged Hussain to third man for two.
The 200 took 330 deliveries, starting carefully but going on to add 30 boundaries, three of them sixes. Unfortunately the innings didn't last much longer.
Ajantha Mendis, so expensive and so obviously rusty yesterday, first baffled Woakes with balls that turned away from the right hander, then trapped Chopra lbw with one that came back. The stand had put on 123.

12.20pm: An unusual story from t'other side of the Pennines, in fact the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, about the Surrey opener Michael Brown taking over as chairman of Burnley CC, writes Andy Wilson at Headingley. Brown, who is one of six players in the last 15 years to make it into county cricket from the Turf Moor club - most famously James Anderson - hopes to tap into some of his former colleagues on the Stock Exchange to give the finances a boost.

"We are not talking a lot of money in the general scheme of things," said Brown. "But it is difficult for all clubs, not just cricket clubs. The culture is changing. People don't drink in the clubs any more and even the players' attitudes are changing. When I was coming through the ranks the players used to go into the bar after nets and have a couple of pints - you look now and the club is not even open. There needs to be a change, clubs need to be multi-purpose, not just a bar. You look at the likes of Rawtenstall where they have the clubhouse and the functions. You can't just rely on people to come in."

He has already sent Anderson advance notice that he'll be mithering for some practical support.

Yorkshire 46-2 here, Plunkett has taken over from Onions whose figures of 6-1-25-1 included six no-balls, which cost a total of 16 runs, for reasons explained by the anoraks who lurk below the line. Elsewhere Alastair Cook gone for 19 to Corey Collymore as Essex have slumped to 63-4 against Middlesex at Lord's, with no wickets yet for Steven Finn.

12.17pm: David Hopps has some news on New Zealand's latest appointment:

John Buchanan, a cricket coach variously described in his time as a genius or a charlatan. Buchanan has been confirmed as New Zealand's director of cricket and will take over the role in May. This new post puts him in charge of New Zealand's high-performance programme and he will also oversee the selection panel and implement a new system to identify emerging talent.

This is Buchanan's first major international job since he resigned as Australia's coach following the 2007 World Cup win, although he did have an unsuccessful stint in the IPL with Kolkata Knight Riders where he decided to implement a whole series of captains because of the fast nature of Twenty20. Suggesting to Soarav Ganguly, Lord High Everything in Kolkata, that he might like to limit his captaincy input to, say, setting the field in the first 10 overs, did not go down well. Shane Warne was among those who treated him with derision and that is putting it kindly.

 Despite this, nobody can question his record. He was in charge of a great Australian side that during his eight years that brought them three World Cups and a record 16 consecutive Test victories. He also coached Queensland to their first Sheffield Shield title.
"John's appointment is an exciting one for New Zealand Cricket," NZC's chief executive Justin Vaughan said. "He has a great cricketing pedigree and will provide outstanding leadership as NZC look to move forward."

One thing is certain: the ECB will no longer be calling up Buchanan for a summer brainstorming session.

11.52am: Day two started only 16 minutes late and with Somerset in an obvious hurry, writes Mike Averis at Taunton. Otherwise, how do you explain Marcus Trescothick helping to push the covers from the wicket and Craig Kieswetter driving the ground-staff tractor. Unfortunately Chopra had a similar mind set, taking nine off Charl Willoughby's first over - two off the first ball and a sweet cover-driven four to round things off.

Woakes twice played and missed against the South Africa, then after warming up with a few fours to third man off Gemaal Hussain, belted Willoughby through the covers to go to 50 from 46 balls with eight boundaries. The first seven overs have produced 40.

11.28am:Ten minutes before the start of the second day at Taunton the covers were back on and it's spitting with rain, writes Mike Averis. There was some heavy stuff early on, but we seemed set until the clouds rolled in. However, the umpires and the ground staff are in the middle suggesting that if there is a delay it will be a short and that Varun Chopra and Chris Woakes will soon be adding to the overnight score of 416 for six - 174 of them to Chopra.

11.26am: A dream return for Graham Onions, writes Andy Wilson at Headingley. He was given the new ball from the Kirkstall Lane end by the acting Durham captain, Dale Benkenstein, and after a sight-setter angled harmlessly across Yorkshire's left-handed opener Adam Lyth, the Whitby dasher tried to pull the next ball, got a bit tucked up, and picked out Ben Stokes just in front of square on the leg side. Joy unconfined for Onions and his team-mates. Yorkshire, replaying to Durham's total of 327, were 0-1.

Anthony McGrath has joined Joe Root, Yorkshire's bright batting hope for 2011 - aiming to replicate the impact Lyth made last year, no doubt - and Callum Thorp is sharing the new ball with Onions, leaving Liam Plunkett to come on first change.

10.51am: Another prompt start here, with the clouds a little higher than they were yesterday, writes Andy Wilson at Headingley, and Yorkshire and Durham staging some lengthy pre-match entertainment before Leeds face Huddersfield in the Super League on the other side of the Rugby Stand tonight. Graham Onions will start the day with his pads on, having picked up for Durham where he left off for England as a stubborn No11 as if the last 16 miserable months had never happened, but there will be much more interest in how he bowls. Talking of Durham seamers, and a quick word for Liam Plunkett – the new edition of Wisden provides a handy reminder of how badly his batting form fell away last season, but he's rediscovered his all-round ability with an excellent unbeaten 64 here.

Durham's overnight total of 326 for nine represents a fine recovery after their slipped to 134 for six shortly after lunch, and as well as Plunkett, their debutant wicket-keeper Michael Richardson deserves the lion's share of the credit. Richardson, the 24-year-old son of the former South Africa wicket keeper Dave, has been living in England for the best part of a decade, studying at Stonyhurst College near Blackburn then Nottingham University, and spending a couple of years at Lord's with the MCC Young Cricketers before joining the Durham staff last summer. When grilled last night, he confirmed that he intends to complete his residential qualification to play for England, which has been delayed after he spent one winter playing domestic cricket in South Africa, meaning he is relying on his mother's German heritage to play for the moment. Wonder how Richardson senior would feel about his boy 'keeping for England? And this morning's quiz question, how about fathers and sons who have represented different countries in international cricket?

Another quick quote from Wisden, and David Warner's Yorkshire review. "The more rounded a cricketer Adil Rashid becomes, the less interested England seem to show in him." Always a good read.

10.48am: We've got a press release through from the ECB on Paul Collingwood's fitness:

England and Durham all rounder Paul Collingwood has successfully undergone routine arthroscopic surgery on his left knee to remove 'loose bodies' and correct cartilage damage.

Collingwood will begin his recovery and rehabilitation period with Durham CCC and is expected to be available for Durham ahead of the NatWest International T20 and ODI series against Sri Lanka in June.

10.44am: There is the mouthwatering prospect of watching the new ever-so-slightly slimline Samit Patel have his first bat of the season for Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge today, writes David Hopps. He abounds with talent, was in great nick on Notts' pre-season jaunt to Abu Dhabi, and I'm looking forward to it.

Andy Wilson sounded convinced that Patel has slimmed down in his piece on Wednesday and he certainly does seem to have shed a few pounds. In an effort to find out exactly how much weight he had shed, I buttonholed Notts' chief executive Derek Brewer and media manager Michael Temple. "It's not something we want to quantify in pounds and ounces," said Temple, who has thereby become the early favourite in the Media Manager Quote Of The Year award.

Neither is there much quantifying going on from Notts in kilos, waist-size or indeed in litres of lost body fluids every time somebody utters the word "beep test." Suffice to say that Patel looks as if he has gone from woefully overweight to potentially not far from the range where he might begin to interest England again. But England's interest depends not just on weight but a minimum level of fitness and on that the situation is less clear. They did not call him up for the World Cup when Michael Yardy returned home with clinical depression, but opted for Adil Rashid instead. And Samit only had to make the four-hour hop from Abu Dhabi to Colombo.
 
Patel's weight readings have been a source of much amusement whenever the Cricketers' Who's Who comes round. He was officially recorded as 12st 7lbs in 2008 and then made a quite miraculous drop to 12st a year later when presumably he had one foot on the floor or there was a certain amount of PR involved in the reading. In 2010, I'm told, his weight was not recorded, presumably because by then it had become a source of national debate or because it was ballooning around dramatically depending on whether the ECB was due to make a visit. So if Who's Who records him at, say, 14st 7lbs next season, his slimming-down efforts will have been so successful that the figures available will actually suggest that he has put on two-and-a-half stone. He will then become the first cricketer ever to officially put on weight after a successful diet.
 
I must admit that I am wary of Patel dietary stories. I penned a "I've given up the chocolate for good" story two or three years ago, only for Samit to be discovered a few weeks later by the match umpires before start of play lurking in a dark corner of McDonalds, just across from the ground. He had said nothing about giving up cheeseburgers and milkshakes.
 
But even that did not match the day that I interviewed Freddie Flintoff in Cheshire on how he was going to cut back on the booze. Immediately after I had turned off the recorder, Freddie jumped into his car and roared out of the drive in the general direction of Manchester. He could feel a thirst coming on. At about 3am he was snapped by a News of the World photographer stumbling across a dance floor, somewhat the worst for wear. It was roughly four hours before anybody read his blithe assurances in the Guardian that he would never drink again. The News of the World told a different story 24 hours later.

10.15am: Some early reading for you before play gets under way: a Small Talk with Michael Holding, in which he discusses intimidating opponents, why there are few great fast bowlers these days, and Caribbean Christmases, among other things.

9.20am: The second round of County Championship games continues today:

Andy Wilson is at Headingley, David Hopps is at Trent Bridge and Mike Averis at Taunton.

A preview of all the counties can be found here.

You can find full fixture lists for the season here.

And you can follow the action throughout the season here.

And there's county cricket commentaries on BBC local radio here.

County tables can be found here: Division One and Division Two

You can follow our cricket team here and on Twitter: David Hopps, Andy Wilson, Andy Bull and Steve Busfield.

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Just a quick heads up on a new WSUS/Windows Update Knowledge Base article we published this morning. This one talks about an issue where after a Windows Update client connects to an internal server that has custom content published to it, the client encounters error code 0x80240fff. After encountering this error, the client can no longer install updates:

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Symptoms

When a Windows Update client connects to an internal server that has custom content published to it, the client may encounter error code 0x80240fff. After encountering this error, the client can no longer install updates.

Cause

This error can occur if custom content uses a Product name that matches an existing Category name. For example, this can occur if you create a product within SCUP named "Tools". This leads to an issue when evaluating the categories since there is now a product named "Tools" and an update classification called "Tools".

Resolution

In order to resolve this issue, you must find the custom content that uses a Product name matching an existing Category name, and decline or modify that custom content. The problem will be corrected when there are no longer any custom updates with a Product name that matches an existing Category name.

In environments using multiple WSUS servers, you must make sure that the problematic custom content has been declined or modified on all servers in the hierarchy.

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The information above was published today in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

KB2521187 - Windows Update may encounter error 0x80240fff when updates published on an internal server have the same Product Name and Category Name

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

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