Cheaper Rings

Opening tomorrow, Guys & Dolls is an exhibition hosting a collection of works by photographer Terry O’Neill. Born in 1938, O’Neill has achieved worldwide success documenting the fashion, style and celebrities from the 1960s.

His pictures are now highly collectable and feature many of the style icons he captured in unconventional or candid settings, including Faye Dunaway the morning after she won an Oscar in 1977.

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William Hague faced fresh questions about his judgement yesterday as he made his first public appearance since the resignation of his special adviser over "untrue and malicious" rumours of a gay relationship between the two men.

Downing Street insisted yesterday that the Foreign Secretary was backed "100 per cent" by David Cameron, who continued to have full confidence in him. However, doubts were expressed by prominent figures in the Conservative Party over Mr Hague's wisdom in sharing a hotel room with 25-year-old Chris Myers, whom he subsequently put on the public payroll.

Some reports claimed yesterday that Mr Hague may quit his job in exasperation at what he is undergoing. The Foreign Secretary said of Mr Myers: "He is clearly someone who is rather fed up with politics, and who can blame him" – drawing the inference that he too was feeling the same way.
This was denied by allies of Mr Hague's, but the pressure continued with critics charging that the Foreign Secretary's decision to make a public statement about the affair, including intimate details about his married life, served only to turn the affair from a subject of gossip in the "Westminster Village" to international news.

According to Conservative officials, Andy Coulson, the party's director of communications, played a key role in the decision to release the statement on a day when attention was focused on the publication of Tony Blair's autobiography.

The timing of the statement, after weeks of speculation about Mr Hague and Mr Myers, was also queried. One theory was that Mr Hague was advised to address the public in the expectation that the embarrassment factor would be subsumed on the day Tony Blair's autobiography was published.

A number of senior Conservative backbenchers, however, feel that it served only to provide the distraction of a Tory scandal on a day which should have been devoted to the exposing of Labour's bitterness and divisions.

Mr Hague admitted to "occasionally" sharing a room with Mr Myers during the election campaign, adding: "Neither of us would have done so if we had thought that it in any way meant or implied something else. In hindsight I should have given greater consideration to what might have been made of that, but this is in itself no justification for allegations of this kind."

The Conservative peer and former cabinet minister Lord Tebbit accused Mr Hague of being "naive at best, foolish at worst". John Redwood said the statement was "unusual" and had "invited people to comment" on the couple's private life, adding: "Let us hope this is now an end to the matter. Mr Hague himself now seems to understand that it was poor judgement to share a room with an assistant."

A senior backbench Conservative MP stressed: "In this day and age, one has to be very, very careful. We were not so cash-strapped during the campaign that such a risk had to be taken. Then the person concerned gets a job in the private office and, hey, the rumour mills start.

"It will be worthwhile finding out who in the party advised William to make the statement in that form. It was a mistake, and that should be recognised."

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When Silvia Petretti was diagnosed with HIV she thought her life had come to an end.

She was 30 years old and had contracted malaria after a holiday in Senegal. The doctors ordered blood tests and asked whether she wanted to have an HIV test at the same time. When the results came back, malaria was suddenly the least of her worries.

"I was completely devastated, paralysed and terrified," she recalled. "I thought I was going to die a horrible death. I couldn't tell my friends or family. I went home, locked myself in my room and cried for three days straight."

To be diagnosed with such a fearful disease was heartbreaking, but there was one small silver lining. Ms Petretti discovered she had been diagnosed just as the first batch of successful anti-retroviral medicines were coming on to the market. She was immediately put on a gruelling course of medication to stop the virus from replicating.

"To begin with I was on 18 pills a day, some with food, some without food. I had very dry skin, nausea, tingling over the body, diarrhoea. It was incredibly demoralising," she said.

Over the past decade, scientists have drastically improved the medication used to fight HIV, allowing patients to live increasingly normal, healthy lives. With the right treatment, HIV-positive mothers have a 99 per cent chance of giving birth to HIV-negative children. The life expectancy of someone living with the disease has also increased significantly.

Ms Petretti, who is now 44, takes only four pills a day with no side effects. Her viral load – the measure of the amount of HIV in her bloodstream – is undetectable and, she says, she hasn't had a sick day since being diagnosed. But, although improvements in medicine have changed the quality of life of thousands for the better, many in the HIV community are unhappy about the way society views them.

"HIV isn't epidemic anymore, not in the UK," says Ms Petretti. "Do you want to know what the new epidemic is? Stigma. Stigma is everywhere."

Nowhere are society's attitudes towards HIV more fraught than during the criminal prosecutions of people who have passed on the disease to their lovers through unprotected sex. Earlier this week, the German pop star Nadja Benaissa appeared in court charged with one count of grievous bodily harm and two counts of attempted bodily harm for allegedly sleeping unprotected with three men between 2000 and 2004, despite knowing she was HIV positive. Only one of the men is now HIV positive – but that hasn't stopped German prosecutors from charging her for "assaulting" her two other lovers.

For many, such prosecutions are clearly justified. If you are HIV-positive, failing to use protection is wrong, and people who do so should be brought to justice. Infecting someone with HIV, prosecutors argue, is akin to murder.

The prosecution of "deliberate" or "reckless" HIV transmissions, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon and – ironically – has coincided with the disease becoming less deadly.

About 40 countries around the world have either enacted laws or used existing legislation to bring prosecutions against HIV carriers who have infected others. In Britain, at least nine people have been convicted, primarily under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, a law that treats the HIV virus as a potentially deadly weapon. Nobody has yet been prosecuted for "intentional transmission" because it is so difficult to prove. Instead, prosecutors go for the lesser charge of "reckless transmission", which critics say criminalises behaviour rather than proving intent.

Outside of Britain, HIV carriers have been jailed even when they haven't passed on their infection. There has been no recorded incident of HIV passing through saliva, but that didn't stop a court in Texas in 2008 from handing down a 35-year sentence to Willie Campbell, a 42-year-old homeless man who spat in the face of police officers. Edwin Cameron, a South African judge, commented: "It stuns the mind that someone who has actually not harmed anyone ... could be locked away for 35 years. The inference that his HIV status played a pivotal role in sending him away for so long is unavoidable. In short: the man was punished not for what he did, but for the virus he carried."

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Imran Khan is crestfallen. Throughout the morning, his BlackBerry has been in a state of perpetual agitation. He is intending to spend the day delivering relief goods for those devastated by the worst floods in Pakistan's history, gathered by his new charitable fund, but another story has overtaken the public's interest in that. Instead, the world's media wants to hear Pakistan's greatest living cricketer's reaction to the scandal that has suddenly involved the national game.

"It just took everyone by surprise because it was so embarrassing," says Mr Khan. We are heading down the motorway into the north-west, an area that was first ravaged by militancy and now devastated by the floods, and a destination that puts the apparent greed of his successors in the national team that much more difficult to take.

"There's the war on terror, this flood devastation, all of this just made it that much more demoralising," he goes on. "We still call them allegations, until we hear the other side. But, potentially, this is the biggest setback to Pakistani cricket ever."
Over 18 years since he led Pakistan's only World Cup triumph, Khan remains its only genuine global celebrity. As leader of the Justice Movement, he sits in the political wilderness, having lost the party's sole parliamentary seat by boycotting the last elections. But his philanthropy has seen him establish both Pakistan's only free cancer hospital – for which he raises $20m a year – and a heavily subsidised university in his ancestral town.

"I'm the biggest fundraiser in this country," Mr Khan says, returning waves to admirers in a passing car. "I realised that we had to do something. There's no question of us sitting back and watching this tragedy unfold."

Teaming up with Geo, Pakistan's most-watched television channel, Mr Khan has set up his own flood relief fund. The government failed to rise to the occasion, he says. "We launched the appeal eight days ago," he says, "and the response has been phenomenal. We've already raised five million dollars. The money's coming in all the time." It's well short of what the British people have raised, but still the largest sum yet collected privately in Pakistan.

The plan today is to dispatch 150 trucks, laden with wheat, rice and other goods, to various towns in the north-west. One problem: the trucks are marooned in different places, with only six accompanying Khan.

Meanwhile, the texts and calls are unrelenting. Briefly trading his black Ray-Bans for an unfashionable pair of reading glasses, he reads out a message saying that an official refused to shake the hand of Muhammad Amir, one of the accused bowlers. The spectacles are then lifted to reveal his pained disappointment.

The controversy recalls a moment in 1989, when he was warned of a plot to corrupt his team. "I was called in the middle of the night," he says. "It was the final of the Australasia Cup against Australia in Sharjah. I was told that four of our main players had either been bought or would throw the match."

The next morning, Mr Khan summoned his team. "I told them, 'Look, I know all of you and I know cricket. If I see any of you underperforming, I will not just have you banned, I will ensure that you go to jail." He told the coach to bet the team's entire prize money on winning. It worked. "We won the match," he says, and later it was "confirmed that bookmakers had tried to influence the players".

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They are the living seams that have typified the British countryside for centuries. But now hedgerows are disappearing fast, and a report published tomorrow will say we are not doing enough to protect them.

Research from the Campaign to Protect Rural England has found that though hedgerows enjoy more protection than ever before, in England their overall length fell by 26,000 kilometres between 1998 and 2007. The study, England's Hedgerows: Don't Cut Them Out!, calls for current legislation to be strengthened.

As well as having a nostalgic place in the aesthetics of the countryside, hedgerows are a vital part of the ecosystem. Research by Hedgelink, a network of British hedge conservation groups, shows that without them some 130 species – from the hedgehog and the dormouse to stag beetles and the cuckoo – would be under threat.
Although "important" hedgerows are protected by law, the majority can be taken down if a landowner wishes, which has resulted in many being dug up to create larger fields that are easier to harvest. For the past 20 years, the Government has provided financial help to landowners to restore and manage hedgerows. But most have still been left unmanaged, sometimes growing into larger trees offering fewer benefits to wildlife because they are less dense at ground level.

The CPRE study focused on England, but the picture nationwide is similarly grim.

Nigel Adams, vice-chairman of the National Hedgelaying Society, said: "The hedgerow is the unsung hero of our countryside. It's often overlooked, but visitors to England say it's what makes it so special. The majority are not used for their original purpose [as an animal barrier], but people recognise their importance in terms of wildlife and history."

Since 1998, the number of legally protected hedgerows has risen by 18 per cent. Currently, 42 per cent of the UK's hedgerows are protected, but the CPRE fears that the narrow criteria required to register a stretch of hedge as "important" will mean many more are lost.

To qualify for legal protection, a hedge must be at least 20 metres long, 30 years old and meet strict criteria on heritage and numbers of animals and plants relying on it. Some hedges were easy to register, such as Judith's Head in Cambridgeshire, which is Britain's oldest, having stood for more than 900 years. But for non-celebrity hedges, the future is dicey. More than two-thirds of local authorities surveyed by CPRE said that the current Hedgerow Regulations needed to be simplified to make them more effective.

Emma Marrington, author of the report, said: "The length of hedgerows in the country is declining, which is worrying. They're a part of our heritage, but they also offer huge benefits to wildlife and the environment in general. It's over a decade since the introduction of the Hedgerows Regulations, and the time is ripe for the Government to make improvements that give local authorities the power they need to better protect the great diversity of England's hedgerows."

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Should we be offended that a British government and police force colluded with the Irish Catholic hierarchy to protect an IRA priest mixed up in the 1972 Claudy bombing?

Nine people – five Catholics and four Protestants, among them two children – were killed in the blast, which happened without warning. Thirty more were injured.

You have to take a very deep breath before answering: "No, but we should learn lessons from what the authorities did."

The story of Father James Chesney's role as the IRA's local "director of operations" (don't you love the title?) in South Derry is in today's papers because an official report has just been delivered to the British government.

But the outline has been known for years. Chesney was a tall, dark and handsome rascal who drove around in an open-topped Austin Healey, the life and soul of many a party. His ardent republicanism was not revealed to people such as Ivan Cooper, the distinguished local nationalist MP at the time.

Newcomers to the story have learned today that the RUC – now the reorganised, de-sectarian PSNI – had its suspicions, but insufficient evidence to arrest Chesney.

Senior officers, fearful of making a very violent year (in which some 500 people died) even worse, intervened to prevent it. Arresting a priest who would protest his innocence might have provoked riots, and worse.

Willie Whitelaw, the then newly-appointed Northern Ireland secretary, was advised to ask Cardinal Conway, the Pope's man in Ireland, to have Chesney transferred to the safety of the Republic. Distant Tipperary would be ideal, someone suggested, but Conway, while admitting (police reports say) that the priest was a "very bad man", put him over the border in Donegal.

Chesney died of cancer at 46 in 1980, allowing good Catholics to wonder, I expect, whether the almighty was not a tougher disciplinarian than the cardinal.

As the paedophile priests scandal has underlined yet again – and on five continents, too – the hierarchy has always been willing to subordinate the needs of individual justice to the greater, eternal needs of Mother Church.

We're long past the stage where we should be surprised – as distinct from disappointed – that the priesthood should be mixed up in violence, whether of the repressive or "liberation" tendancy.

Most faiths (I think Buddism may be in the clear) and most denominations within them contain violent reactionary strands. So do lack of faiths, don't they?

Thus the political priests of Tehran are currently engaged in a mutually menacing dispute between pure Islamist fundamentalists and the nationalistic tendency surrounding President Ahmadinejad. In the US, some on the Christian right advocate the killing of abortion doctors to uphold the sanctity of life, and do so without universal condemnation from the pulpit.

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There's something very lovely about picking a bunch of grapes. Reach in to the leaves, cradle the fruit in your hand, search with your fingers for the stalk, the umbilical chord to the vine, and with a delicate pair of red-handled secateurs, snip. There you have it, a beautiful bunch of grapes to be laid in your basket.

I can see that if you were here for the whole harvest, and you were being paid not very much to stoop all day long in the sun, then the novelty could wear off quite quickly. I'm not though, I'm just playing at working. And it's amusing me.

There's something even more lovely about picking these grapes here outside the village of Oger in north-east France. Because this bunch I've got in my hand isn't going to end up in a bar of Cadbury Fruit and Nut, or a value pack of Tesco muesli. Oh no. These little babies, white Chardonnay grapes, will be turned into the finest champagne. Oger – because of its position in the Champagne region, its elevation, its micro climate and the quality of its soil – is one of only 17 villages to have Grand Cru status. In layman's terms Grand Cru means very good.

Joining in the champagne harvest is one of the perks of the tour of the region I'm taking, a three-day "harvest weekend" with Grape Escapes.

Next stage is the pressing. I'm witnessing this at a small family champagne house called Jean Milan. Four thousand kilos of grapes, a (very) few of which were picked by my own fair hands, are tipped into the press, a big playpen made of slatted oak. This one has been in use since 1945, though the muscley Frenchmen who used to operate the press have been replaced by hydraulics. They still have to tip the boxes of grapes in, and pitchfork them around a bit, before the press starts to do its squeezing. I could probably get involved here too if I wanted, but I'm now on strike.

It takes a while to squeeze those grapes dry – five pressings, each an hour long. From 4,000kg of grapes, you get around 2,500 litres of sweet juice. Delicious, but no good for a wedding, a birthday, or even just a Tuesday night. Let's turn it into bubbly.

I see the next stage over the road at Henry de Vaugency, another family-run champagne house. Current boss Pascal shows me his special room, where all his wizardry and magic happens. From the press the juice runs into a big vat, where it sits for 24 hours. This allows the sediment – pips, bits of vine, ladybirds (I saw several), etc – to settle. The clear juice then runs off into another vat, sugar is added if needed (not this year, the grapes are sweet enough), and over a few months the first fermentation takes place. At the end of which, you have white wine. Pretty rough white wine to be honest. But it's OK, there's a whole second fermentation to come.

The wine then goes into bottles, with a little yeast and a little sugar (I have to be vague at this point, if I were more specific I would then have to kill you).

Under strict conditions it develops for at least another one and a half years. A good place to see this is at the Ruinart champagne house on the outskirts of Reims. A staircase descends steeply into a network of tunnels and cellars that lead to extraordinary old chalk pits. It's cool and dark and a bit creepy down here, easy to get lost. But that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because the constant year-round temperature is perfect for millions of bottles of champagne to be aged. Death by champagne, not a bad way to go.

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Britain faces a "new wave" of home-grown terrorist attacks led by up to 800 Muslim ex-prisoners who have been radicalised by jihadists while serving their sentences, a think-tank has warned.

Large-scale and co-ordinated attacks such as the 7 July bombings are likely to be replaced with terrorist assaults by highly motivated but poorly trained lone individuals whose lack of connection with any major terrorist organisation will make them more difficult for police or MI5 to detect.

A study published in the journal of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) warns that one of the key threats from this next generation of terrorists comes from within the ranks of the 8,000 Muslims currently serving prison terms who are at risk of being converted to extremism by hardcore inmates jailed for terrorist offences.

The report cites estimates by prison probation officers that up to one in 10 Muslim inmates are being successfully targeted while inside jail, leading to the creation of a new generation of potential attackers who are due for release in the next decade and whose previous convictions do not relate to terrorism.

All major sporting events such as this year's Commonwealth Games in India and 2012 Olympics in London should be considered as possible targets for this new generation of "lone killers" who have been radicalised by preachers in the hope that eventually at least one of their number will be successful.

Michael Clarke, director of Rusi and co-author of the study, said: "Perhaps some 800 potentially violent radicals, not previously guilty of terrorism charges, will be back in society over the coming five to ten years... The natural reaction to improved counter-terrorist operations is for jihadist attacks to evolve towards more individual efforts."

The report suggests that radicalisation is taking place in British prisons at a rapid rate, especially in the eight high-security establishments where most terrorism offenders are detained.

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This is not just a salad – it's a Marks & Spencer salad, and it contains five times more salt than a packet of crisps.

Usually regarded as a healthy option by workers popping out of the office for lunch, many salads sold on British high streets have potentially harmful levels of salt, research has shown.

Only 2 per cent of 268 salads checked at shops, cafés and fast-food chains had less than the 0.5g salt contained in a bag of Walkers crisps. One in 10 had more salt than the 2.1g found in a McDonald's Big Mac.

Marks & Spencer had seven of the 10 saltiest supermarket salads. Its Taste of Asia product was found to contain 2.8g of salt – the equivalent of eating more than five bags of crisps in a single sitting.

Excessive salt consumption can lead to heart attacks and strokes, and the Food Standards Agency recommends no more than 6g a day for adults.

Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) estimates that at least 15,000 people in the UK die early each year as a result of eating too much salt, most of which is consumed through processed foods. Previously Cash's concern has centred on major dietary sources of salt such as bread and breakfast cereals, but its latest survey found heavy salting of salads by sandwich shops, fast food chains and supermarkets.

The spicy crayfish noodles at EAT, a sandwich chain, contained 3.5g per portion, more than half an adult's recommended maximum in a single salad. Pret A Manger's super houmous salad had 3.2g of salt, while, among KFC salads, the Zinger had 3.1g and the original chicken 2.9g.

At supermarkets, Cash found that average salt levels in salads had fallen by 23 per cent, from 1.64g to 1.26g a portion, since it did its last survey five years ago. But some salads, including many so-called "healthy options", still had high levels. Marks & Spencer made three of the five saltiest shop salads, including its Taste of Asia (with 2.8g per 258g portion), chicken pasta with bacon (2.65g salt per 380g portion) and avocado and feta (2.40g salt per 320g portion).

Only 22 per cent of salads branded as "healthy" would receive a green traffic-light label on salt from the Food Standards Agency. The least salty salad of all was Pret A Manger's No Bread Tricolore with a balsamic vinegar dressing, which contained 0.2g salt.

As well as putting shoppers at risk of heart disease, Cash warned that salty salads could lead to a bloated feeling. "Many women choose salad as a healthy and convenient lunch, particularly when watching their waistline," said Katharine Jenner, its campaign manager.

"Rather than feeling healthy however, they often feel bloated and sluggish – symptoms of water retention which can be caused by the hidden salt in these salads. In the long term the health problems are more serious as salt intake is linked to osteoporosis and high blood pressure."

Professor Graham MacGregor, of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine and chairman of Cash, said: "It is absurd that only six salads contain less salt than a packet of crisps. Clearly the manufacturers still have a long way to go if we are to reduce our salt intake to 6g a day and save the maximum number of lives."

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It was one job that Nick Clegg could not deputise for. In one of the more surprising interruptions to a family holiday, David Cameron was at his wife's side in a Cornish hospital last night after she gave birth to the couple's fourth child yesterday.

Samantha Cameron, who is 39, had contractions in the morning. She and the Prime Minister went to the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, where their 6lb 1oz daughter was delivered by Caesarean section at midday.

The baby had not been due for another fortnight and the Camerons decided to go ahead with their summer break even though they knew it could arrive at any time. Friends said there were no complications and no emergency. The couple's other children were delivered by Caesarean section after complications at the birth of their eldest, Ivan, who had celebral palsy and severe epilepsy, and died aged six last year. Mr Cameron spoke of their hopes of having another child after Ivan's death.

It is normal practice for a mother who has had one Caesarean to have her other children delivered in the same way. The Camerons' other children are Nancy, six, and Arthur Elwen, who is four.

Their new arrival is the third born to a serving prime minister since 1849, when Francis Albert Rollo Russell, son of Lord Russell, was welcomed to No 10. The second was Leo Blair, in 2000.

A beaming Mr Cameron, 43, told reporters outside the hospital that mother and baby were doing very well. Although his "unbelievably beautiful girl" did not have a name yet, he said it would "have to have something Cornish in the middle".

"It was a bit of a shock," he conceded. "I always thought it was possible because Samantha's have tended to come a bit early and she'd been having contractions for the last couple of days on and off and just thought this was time to come to the hospital and check out to see if everything was fine and the next thing we knew they were all getting into the gear and the baby was coming out."

Mr Cameron will take paternity leave but has not finalised it yet. He may take some time off next week, and return to work fully the following week, when the House of Commons returns from its summer recess. He could take the second part of his paternity leave during the party conference season, when the Commons does not sit.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, already "holding the fort" during Mr Cameron's holiday, may have an extended spell in the role. Despite the early arrival of the Camerons' baby, Mr Clegg will still represent the Government at a United Nations conference on global poverty in New York next month, even though it overlaps with the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool.

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