Chippenham & Beyond

The England captain, Kevin Pietersen, will return from his holiday in Africa tomorrow to be told by the England and Wales Cricket Board that he cannot dictate terms about the future of the side and, in particular, its coach, Peter Moores.

An emergency teleconference of the England and Wales Cricket Board, which includes the chairman, Giles Clarke, and chief executive, David Collier, was held last night and there was a clear shift of support away from the autocratic Pietersen and towards Moores. It is unlikely to prevent the coach losing his job but it will serve as a warning that Pietersen's wishes will not necessarily be indulged after five very indifferent months in the job.

The outcome this week could even be that both men lose their jobs. The ECB has been angered that Pietersen has allowed the schism to be made so public, in effect forcing them to make a choice between the two men when the first instinct of Hugh Morris, England's managing director, was to broker a deal between them.

Morris is a personal friend of Moores and captained him at England Schoolboys level in 1981. He has canvassed opinion within the England dressing-room and discovered – or rather had his feelings confirmed, for he was in India with the side last month – that support for the egotistical Pietersen is less than unanimous, though respect for him as a great player is unquestioned.

Moores will not be England's long-term coach because important people at the ECB, including the players, remain unconvinced that he is the man to take England forward at a time when both India and South Africa have beaten Australia and now dominate the world game.

One of the favourites to take over from Moores, Kent's South African coach Graham Ford, has expressed an interest in taking over as England coach. Ford, speaking in Durban where he runs a cricket academy, said of succeeding the embattled England coach: "It would be a fantastic challenge. After my years with Kent I've a good idea of the players and the way things operate."

The 48-year-old Ford coached South Africa to eight Test series victories out of 11 between 1999 and 2002 and steered Kent to their Twenty20 triumph in 2007.

• England Cricket Team
• Kevin Pietersen
• Cricket

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A French sailor whose yacht capsized in the South Pacific during the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race was rescued last night by his friend, a fellow competitor, after he was trapped inside the hull of his upturned boat in heavy seas for 16 hours.

Jean Le Cam, 49, was helped to escape by Vincent Riou, who, with a third competitor, Frenchman Armel Le Cléac'h, had diverted to help him after hearing his distress call. Le Cam's 60-foot boat VM Matériaux capsized after losing its keel 200 miles west off Cape Horn.

A rescue operation by the Chilean navy and emergency services, which had dispatched a tug with divers and a helicopter, had been launched but would not have arrived before this morning. A tanker had also been standing by to assist.

Riou, on board his yacht PRB, was able to get alongside the wreck and could hear his friend's shouts, though in heavy seas and with winds at 25 knots it took over three hours for Le Cam to climb out of his vessel, whose emergency hatch was submerged, and get aboard the other boat, which itself sustained damage in the rescue.

A race spokesman said: "Jean Le Cam has been rescued safe and sound. A full-scale rescue operation was in place ... but in the end it was Vincent Riou who recovered [his] fellow skipper and friend. Riou circled repeatedly to retrieve the skipper from the water and on the fourth attempt he successfully rescued Le Cam.

"Le Cam appears to be unhurt as Riou reported that both skippers worked on deck to stabilise PRB's mast."

The yachtsman sent a distress call from his boat at 12.26am yesterday as he prepared to navigate around the southern tip of South America. About nine hours later a Chilean spotter plane said it had found the yacht. Philippe de Villiers, the race president, said Le Cam had been speaking to another sailor by phone when there was a sudden loud noise and he said: "My boat is capsizing."

His phone went dead shortly after midnight and a distress beacon was activated at 1.40am. At the time of his disappearance, Le Cam was third in the 26,000-mile race, which started last November. He came second when the quadrennial race was last run, in 2005.

Thirty competitors started the race, including seven Britons, but more than half have dropped out, with one sailor having to be rescued in the Southern Ocean after breaking his leg. Two competitors have died in previous races.

• Sailing
• France

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This Sunday, 10 million television viewers whose appetite for celebrity has not been sated by Strictly Come Dancing, I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big Brother, will tune into ITV at 7pm for the start of the fourth season of Dancing on Ice. Melinda Messenger will battle ace investigative reporter Donal MacIntyre and blonde southern soap queen Gemma Bissix (EastEnders) will attempt to trump brunette northern soap queen Roxanne Pallet (Emmerdale) - but Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean are believed to be the show's biggest earners. While the programme will attract vast audiences, and its winner and competent skaters will join a 30-date tour, it is clear that, in celebrity land, it is not the best programme to score a berth on.

For a start, there is the gruelling training. While that might tighten your bum, tum and thighs, there is the risk of tumbling mid-performance or, worse, of a serious injury. Then there is the pay, which is solid but not exceptional. Certainly not as much as the £175,000 that Channel 4 has reportedly forked out for inviting Ulrika Jonsson into the Celebrity Big Brother house.

But at least celebrities on Dancing on Ice are beloved by its audience. On Strictly, the chance to become the nation's sweatheart is tempered by weekly judicial humiliation and the risk of being paired to dance with Brendan Cole. The perks on I'm A Celebrity, an enterprise so vast it is said to cost ITV £1m an episode, include a free business-class flight to Australia for you and your family, who are put up in a six-star Palazzo Versace hotel. For many celebs, eating a kangaroo's testicle is a price worth paying.

Celebrity Big Brother might not be physically taxing but it can be just plain nasty. If it is not racist bullying (Shilpa Shetty), it can be national humiliation (MP George Galloway). Or even worse, your unhinged ex-mother-in-law, Jackie Stallone, might unexpectedly walk through the door to spend the next fortnight with you (Brigitte Nielsen).

But if you are famous and C4 wants you, it can be a nice little earner. Fees are a great source of contention. Ben Adams, a former member of boyband A1, was said to have collected just £20,000, a fraction of Jonsson's payment. By consensus, Strictly is at the lower end of the pay scale. All celebrities are paid a fixed amount, estimated to be about £25,000. And that is for three months of pretty gruelling rehearsals, 10 hours a day, six days a week. "If you work that out at an hourly rate, you are better off working at McDonald's," jokes Malcolm Blair, manager of 2007 winner Alesha Dixon. He says most singers could earn more in three gigs than they do on Strictly. But despite this, Strictly is the one that most celebs want to be on. It is a talent contest and gives massive exposure. It propelled Natasha Kaplinsky from a breakfast TV presenter to the nation's highest-paid newsreader, earning in excess of £1m a year on Channel Five News.

In last year's Strictly final, compere Bruce Forsyth was moved to proclaim Dixon "Britain's Beyoncé!". Not quite, but after winning last year, her album has gone gold and her single has been in the top 20 since November.

• Celebrity
• Dancing on Ice
• I'm a Celebrity ...
• Big Brother
• Strictly Come Dancing
• Television

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Stripes are one of the oldest fashion statements on the block. Try these fabulous stripy looks from top designers - or cheat with the high street versions

More than 15,000 Gazans are sheltering in UN schools because they have been forced to flee their homes in the face of the Israeli air and ground offensive, or even ordered out by Israeli troops.

The UN has opened 27 of its schools as shelters, most in the northern town of Jabaliya, where food, blankets and counselling are being provided.

It is the UN that has stepped in to help because it is by far the largest humanitarian resource in Gaza, particularly the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), which supports Palestinian refugees across the Arab world. More than 1 million Gazans are refugees: either they or their families were forced from their homes or fled in the 1948 war that brought the creation of Israel.

In Gaza, they rely on the UN, which provides them with regular food deliveries, now vital in the face of Israel's economic blockade of the strip, as well as housing, health services and education - which takes up most of the agency's budget.

The UN's humanitarian role is crucial, but it has often found itself at odds with Israel. This sometimes fractious relationship is conducted mostly behind closed doors, but sometimes their disagreements break out into the open.

Yesterday, presented with reports of the heavy civilian death toll after the Israeli bombing of two UN schools serving as shelters in Gaza, some Israeli officials were quick to argue that militants had used UN property from which to launch rockets in the past.

But the UN underlined the fact that it had passed on the coordinates of the schools to the Israeli military to prevent these kind of killings, and called for an inquiry. "These tragic incidents need to be investigated and if international humanitarian law has been contravened those responsible must be held accountable," said Max Gaylard, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinians.

While Israel says that its war in Gaza is "unavoidable", it also argues there is no humanitarian crisis and it is allowing in sufficient aid. Unrwa has been critical of Israel's blockade of Gaza in recent years, presenting evidence of a mounting humanitarian crisis, particularly in the last 11 days of conflict. John Ging, Unrwa's director of operation in Gaza, yesterday described Israel's war as a "completely unjustified and unnecessary conflict".

It is not the first time the UN has found itself in the Israeli line of fire. During the Lebanon war two years ago four unarmed UN military observers were killed when their clearly marked UN position was bombed by the Israeli military in Khiyam, in southern Lebanon. Israel apologised and later said the building, which had been on the same spot since 1972, had been wrongly identified as a Hezbollah target.

A decade earlier, in 1996, the Israeli military fired artillery shells into another UN site, at Qana in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 Lebanese civilians who were among 800 sheltering from heavy fighting. Israel apologised and blamed incorrect targeting.

More often their disagreements have a strong political dimension. Last month Israel refused entry to, and then deported, Richard Falk, a Jewish American academic who is the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. Israel said he was being denied entry because in 2007 he described the Israeli blockade of Gaza as a "holocaust in the making".

More broadly, Israel objects to the UN special rapporteur position because it does not document what Israel sees as the other side of the story: Palestinian abuses of Israeli human rights.

Israel also objects to the UN Human Rights Council, which it says focuses unfairly on Israel's behaviour in the occupied Palestinian territories. So in 2007 Israel declined several times to give an entry visa to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel laureate, because he had been sent by the UN council to investigate the Israeli shelling of a house in Gaza in which 18 civilians, members of the same family, were killed. Israel blamed a technical error in the artillery gun.

Undeterred, Tutu made a rare crossing into Gaza from Egypt last year. He emerged from his interviews in what he described as a state of shock and called for an end to the "abominable" Israeli blockade. He later reported to the UN there was a "possibility" that the shelling was a war crime.

But as well as providing aid and investigating rights abuses, the UN is supposed to play a key political role in the Middle East. It is part of the Quartet of Middle East negotiators, alongside the EU, the US and Russia. But it does not hold political talks with Hamas.

A revealing insight into the frustrations of working in a high-level UN post in Jerusalem emerged in 2007, when the Guardian obtained a confidential "end of mission" report by the retiring UN Middle East envoy, Álvaro de Soto. He said the Quartet had become a "sideshow" and that in its role as an impartial negotiator the UN had been "pummelled into submission" by the US and its pro-Israel stance.

• Gaza
• Israel and the Palestinian territories
• Middle East
• United Nations

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The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.

• Gaza
• Israel and the Palestinian territories
• Middle East

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The controversy over Barack Obama's vacant Senate place took a twist yesterday when the man controversially appointed to replace him tried and failed to take his seat amid chaotic scenes on Capitol Hill.

Roland Burris, appointed last week by the scandal-hit Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, managed to get through the front doors of the Senate and up three flights of marble stairs. But he was denied entry to the chamber.

Back outside, Burris, said: "My credentials were not in order, I will not be accepted, I will not be seated." According to aides, he was planning to consult his lawyers about his next move.

Burris, who flew from Chicago on Monday, had threatened to turn up at yesterday's swearing-in ceremony for new senators on the opening day of the new Congress, even though senior Democrats had warned they would not accept him.

Both Obama and the leader of Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid, oppose Burris because he was appointed by Blagojevich, who last month was arrested by the FBI for allegedly trying to sell Obama's seat.

The episode is proving an embarrassment for the Democrats in Congress and a distraction for Obama in the run-up to his inauguration on 20 January. And there is little sign of an early resolution.

Burris and his supporters say Blagojevich was legally entitled to make the appointment and that the Senate authorities have no right to bar him.

The row has racial overtones since Democrats are denying a place in the 100-member chamber to a man who would be, with the departure of Obama, the only African-American. Burris, who is 71 and realises this could be his last chance of high office, burst through the Senate front doors in a media scrum just before 10.30 am, 90 minutes before the swearing-in ceremony. After officials tried to restore order, he was taken to see the Senate authorities on the third floor, within about 100 metres of the Senate chamber - as close as he was to get - where he was told he could not take his seat.

Blagojevich's appointment needs to be signed off by the Illinois secretary of state, Jesse White, who is refusing to do so.

Burris said later: "I am not seeking to have any type of confrontation. I will now consult with my attorneys and we will determine what our next step will be."

He is still hoping he can do a deal with Reid. The Democrats appear to have offered him a compromise in which he could take the seat until the next election, at which point he would stand down, but Burris wants to stay in the job beyond that. He is scheduled today to meet Reid, who has said there may be room for manoeuvre.

A legal challenge is an option. An attorney for Burris, Timothy Wright, said: "We were not allowed to proceed to the floor for purposes of taking oath. All of which we think was improperly done and is against the law of this land."

The Democrats have a majority of 57 in the Senate, and if Obama's seat is eventually filled and Al Franken, who is facing a Republican legal challenge after winning a recount in Minnesota, is allowed to take his place, that will jump to 59, just one short of the majority of 60 needed to overcome any Republican obstructionist tactics.

Illinois lawmakers were scheduled to meet yesterday to try to speed up impeachment against Blagojevich; if he were ousted quickly, his deputy would take over and a new appointment to the Senate in place of Burris would be made. But if the impeachment drags on, then so too could the Burris affair.

Burris's supporters have reportedly complained of a racial slant to the rejection. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther who is now an Illinois lawmaker, supports Burris, and has described the Senate as "the last bastion of plantation politics". But there has been little support from other African-American leaders, in part because they see Blagojevich's appointment as a cynical attempt to exploit the race issue.

Barack Obama's choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA met with scepticism from Democrats and Republicans in Congress yesterday because of his lack of intelligence experience.

A hostile response from Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who is to head the Senate intelligence committee, was followed by similar comments by Democrats as well as Republicans.

Obama had planned to appoint an experienced intelligence officer, John Brennan, but he turned the job down. The president-elect then opted to go outside the CIA and fulfil his promise on the campaign trail to increase civilian involvement in intelligence services. Panetta, like Obama, is opposed to torture techniques such as waterboarding sanctioned by George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Feinstein complained she had not been consulted about the appointment, and made it clear she had reservations about the nomination of an intelligence outsider. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time," she said.

Christopher Bond, the senior Republican on the intelligence committee, said: "In a post-9/11 world, intelligence experience would seem to be a prerequisite for the job of CIA director. I will be looking hard at Panetta's intelligence expertise and qualifications."

The appointment needs Senate approval and the negative reaction suggests his confirmation could be problematic.

The CIA has had a troubled decade: it was blamed for failing to anticipate the 9/11 attacks and for faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. Former CIA agents said the White House subverted intelligence to suit political ends.

Panetta, though his experience is mainly in reducing budget deficits, was a member of the non-partisan Iraq Study Group, which more than two years ago recommended an early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, which Bush ignored.

Panetta, 70, urged the president-elect to close Guantánamo and end torture. "Issuing executive orders on issues such as prohibiting torture or closing Guantánamo Bay would make clear that his administration will do things differently," he wrote last month in his regular column in the Monterey County Herald.

Panetta will not be the first outsider appointed to head the CIA. George Bush Sr was a congressman and diplomat before Gerald Ford made him director of central intelligence in 1976.

• US Congress
• Barack Obama
• Rod Blagojevich
• United States

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Roman Catholic leaders have pounced on a "confession" by one of the inventors of the birth control pill who has said the contraceptive he helped create was responsible for a "demographic catastrophe".

In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Roman Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tons of hormones" that had impaired male fertility.

The assault began with a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard by 85-year-old Carl Djerassi. The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step towards the earliest oral contraceptive pill.

Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction". He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete."

He described families who had decided against reproduction as "wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it".

The fall in the birth rate, he said, was an "epidemic" far worse - but given less attention - than obesity. Young Austrians, he said, were committing national suicide if they failed to procreate. And if it were not possible to reverse the population decline they would have to understand the necessity of an "intelligent immigration policy".

The head of Austria's Catholics, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, told an interviewer that the Vatican had forecast 40 years ago that the pill would lead to a dramatic fall in the birth rate in the west. "Somebody above suspicion like Carl Djerassi ... is saying that each family has to produce three children to maintain population levels, but we're far away from that."

Schönborn told Austrian TV that when he first read Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical condemning artificial contraception he viewed it negatively as a "cold shower". But he said he had altered his views as, over time, it had proved "prophetic".

Writing for the Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, the president of the World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, José María Simón, said research from his association also showed the pill "worked in many cases with a genuinely ... abortive effect".

Angelo Bonelli, of the Italian Green party, said it was the first he had heard of a link between the pill and environmental pollution. The worst of poisons were to be found in the water supply. "It strikes me as idiosyncratic to be worried about this."

A leading gynaecologist and member of the New York Academy of Science, professor Gian Benedetto Melis, called Simón's claims "science fiction", saying that the pill blocked ovulation only.

• Catholicism
• Religion
• Women
• Health

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Israel's assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.

The UN protested at a "complete absence of accountability" for the escalating number of civilian deaths in Gaza, saying "the rule of the gun" had taken over. Doctors in Gaza said more than 40 people died, including children, in what appears to be the biggest single loss of life of the campaign when Israeli bombs hit al-Fakhora school, in Jabaliya refugee camp, while it was packed with hundreds of people who had fled the fighting.

Most of those killed were in the school playground and in the street, and the dead and injured lay in pools of blood. Pictures on Palestinian TV showed walls heavily marked by shrapnel and bloodstains, and shoes and shredded clothes scattered on the ground. Windows were blown out.

Hours before, three young men who were cousins died when the Israelis bombed Asma elementary school in Gaza City. They were among 400 people who had sought shelter there after fleeing their homes in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.

Abed Sultan, 20, a student, and his cousins, Rawhi and Hussein Sultan, labourers aged 22, died. Abed Sultan's father, Samir, said the bodies were so mangled that he could not tell his son from the cousins. "We came to the school when the Israelis warned us to leave," he said. "We hoped it would be safe. We were 20 in one room. We had no electricity, no blankets, no food.

"Suddenly we heard a bomb that shook the school. Windows smashed. Children started to scream. A relative came and told me one of my sons was killed. I found my son's body with his two cousins. They were cut into pieces by the shell."

The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.

Israel accused Hamas of using civilians as cover, and said the Islamist group could stop the assault on Gaza by ending its rocket attacks on Israel.

The Palestinian authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, last night delivered an impassioned plea to the UN security council to act immediately to stop the Israeli operation, which he described as a "catastrophe" for his people. Israel has agreed a "humanitarian corridor" to allow Palestinians to get essential goods.

The rising casualty toll, more than 640 Palestinians killed since the assault began 12 days ago, gave fresh impetus to diplomatic efforts. The White House offered its first hint of concern at Israel's actions by calling on it to avoid civilian deaths. The president-elect, Barack Obama, broke his silence by saying he was "deeply concerned" about civilian casualties on both sides. He said he would have "plenty to say" about the crisis after his swearing in.

Gordon Brown said the Middle East was facing its "darkest moment yet" but hoped a ceasefire could be arranged soon.

Explaining its attack on al-Fahora school, the Israeli military claimed that a mortar was fired from the playground, and it responded with a single shell whichkilled known Hamas fighters; the resulting explosion was compounded because Hamas "booby-trapped the school". Two Hamas militants were among the dead, both part of a rocket-launching cell.

The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, John Ging, said three shells landed at the perimeter of the school. "It was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties," he said.

He said UN staff vetted those Palestinians who sought shelter at the school. "So far we've not had violations by militants of our facilities," he said, though responding to questions he accepted there had been clashes between Hamas and the Israeli army in the area.

Earlier in the day, Ging visited Gaza's hospital and was shocked at the scale of civilian casualties. "What you have in this hospital is the consequences of political failure and the complete absence of any accountability for actions that are being taken. It's the rule of the gun now, and it has to stop," he said.

At least 12 of one family, seven children aged from one to 12, three women and two men, were killed in an air strike on their house in Gaza City. Nine others were believed trapped.

Israel continues to insist most of those killed by its forces are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters - although its assertion it is going to extraordinary lengths to target only "terrorists" has been undermined by a tank firing on a building used by Israeli troops, killing four of them, on Monday.

Another soldier was killed yesterday as Israeli forces continued their push into Gaza City. Tanks and troops also moved on the southern town of Khan Yunis.

The invasion has yet to achieve what Israel says is its goal of stopping rocket attacks. Hamas fired more than 30 into Israel yesterday, one to within 20 miles of Tel Aviv at Gadera, wounding a baby.

The de facto Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, issued a statement from hiding, saying that the Gazans would defeat Israel. "[Israel] has failed to force the population to surrender," he said.

• Gaza
• Israel and the Palestinian territories
• Middle East
• United Nations

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The head of MI5 says today that the threat of an immediate attack in Britain by al-Qaida-inspired extremists has diminished because a string of successful prosecutions has had a "chilling" effect.

Jonathan Evans warns, however, that al-Qaida leaders still intend to mount an attack, and that there are individuals in Britain able to do so. In the first newspaper interview by a serving MI5 director general, Evans warns that:

• Israeli attacks on Gaza give extremists in Britain more ideological ammunition.

• The Afghan conflict and its outcome has a "direct impact" on UK domestic security.

• The international economic crisis could affect Britain's security.

• Dissident republican groups in Northern Ireland are a growing threat.

• Not getting access to emails and data on internet sites would be detrimental to national security.

Speaking on the centenary of the establishment of MI5, Evans said his agency believes "core-al Qaida", the leadership based on Pakistan's north-west frontier, retains a strategic interest in carrying out attacks in the UK, using British nationals or residents.

"There is a significant number of individuals in active sympathy," Evans said. He added: "They are doing things like fundraising, helping people to travel to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. Sometimes they provide equipment, support and propaganda."

However, MI5 does not believe al-Qaida has what he termed a "semi-autonomous structured hierarchy" in the UK. And: "We have probably seen fewer 'late-stage' attack plans over the last 18 months."

Evans pointed to 86 successful prosecutions in terror trials since January 2007. In more than half, the accused pleaded guilty: "That has had a chilling effect." However, while the networks might keep their heads down, they had not gone away. "There is enough intelligence to show they have the intention to mount an attack here," he said. And the period between first talk of a plot and its active planning could be just a few weeks.

Evans predicted that the Israeli invasion of Gaza would see "extremists try to radicalise individuals for their own purposes". Research had shown "no single path" on the way to violent extremism, but foreign policy was certainly one factor, along with economic, social, and personal circumstances.

Three out of four al-Qaida and Islamist-related terrorist attacks in Britain had a Pakistan link, Evans said. Potential jihadists had made their way to Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan (and now increasingly to Somalia) by circuitous routes. "There is no super highway. Lots of little lanes will get there," he said.

He played down any idea that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in November had links to Britain. "Alarming statements" had been made, but MI5 had not found "any connections of national security significance to the UK".

Overall, Evans painted a more sanguine and less alarming picture of the terrorist threat than ministers have done of late. They and some senior Whitehall officials have suggested the threat level was close to being raised to its highest - "critical" - in recent months. Evans appeared to dismiss such a suggestion.

What MI5 was very concerned about, he said, was an "upsurge" in plots by dissident republicans with sophisticated booby-trap bombs aimed at police officers.

The London Olympic games in 2012 were a potential target but he said any real threats to the event would be more likely to come from extremists already known to MI5. rather than any dedicated team established to target the games.

• UK security and terrorism
• Al-Qaida
• Global terrorism
• Foreign policy

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High up in the Mendip hills in Somerset last night, Lydia's Loaf was doing a roaring trade in hot curry pasties and steaming cups of soup.

As temperatures dipped past -4C (24.8F) and below, the shopkeeper who owns the bakery and village stores in Chewton Mendip, Peter Ireson, was enjoying boom times. "People are coming in to warm up and have a bite of something hot. This cold snap isn't good for many things but it's been good for our business."

Weather watchers were predicting that the south-west of England would face the lowest temperatures in the early hours today with the mercury expected to dip as low as -12C. Oxfordshire, Hampshire and the south-east were expected to experience the coldest conditions.

If this wasn't already the coldest place in Britain overnight, it certainly felt like it. Dru Flannigan, a joiner, was nursing one of those pasties as much for the warmth as the flavour. "It said -10C on my wife's car this morning and it feels as if it's getting even colder," he said. Verity Le-Bas, 19, was taking no chances. She had four jackets on as well as a tightly wrapped scarf. "I'm OK when I'm at home - I got an electric blanket for Christmas but it's a bit of a struggle going out."

According to the Met Office, the coldest place in the UK on Monday night through to yesterday was Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, where it was a distinctly parky -11C, colder than the Norwegian Arctic Circle town of Narvik and parts of Antarctica. In Pershore, Worcestershire, residents were waking up to -10.5 while temperatures fell to as low as -10C in Farnborough, Hampshire, and in Capel Curig, north Wales. And all that chilliness comes on top of the coldest December for 12 years.

Good news if you are a purveyor of hot goodies, bad news for most people, including the government. The weather has cost the government £100m so far in cold weather payments. Yesterday it had to fork out £15m to 600,000 in London. If the cold weather continues as predicted, it could cost the Treasury £200m.

The AA and RAC said the situation on the roads was as bad as they had been for four years, with an estimated 50,000 call-outs over two days. There were a string of accidents. A woman cyclist with serious injuries after a collision with a Land Rover which skidded in Clevedon, Somerset.

In Dorset, a man just about escaped injury after his BMW 325 convertible spun off the road and hit a telegraph pole, while in Devon and Cornwall, police warned drivers to delay journeys after seven crashes yesterday morning.

Staff at Bourton-on-the-Water primary school, Gloucestershire, were counting the cost of the weather when water from burst pipes flooded a classroom and caused the staff room ceiling to collapse.

A string of other schools - including several in west Wales, Surrey and Berkshire - were also forced to turn pupils away.

It was so cold in Allenheads, Northumberland, that oil froze in kerosene-heated boilers used to warm many homes.

There were some unusual sights. In Allenheads children did a spot of skiing while in central London, shivering tourists witnessed the unusual sight of the fountains in Trafalgar Square frozen. An 8ft-long icicle formed at a marina in the West Midlands.

And despite those cold weather payments, the temperature inevitably became a political issue. The shadow energy secretary, Greg Clark, said the cold weather payments would be welcomed but said pensioners would have benefited more "if Ed Miliband had delivered on the promise he made in October to take urgent action to cut the high prices being charged by energy companies".

Barnardo's policy and research director, Julian Walker, called for children to be remembered too. "Poor children will still be in extreme discomfort in their homes when this sub-zero weather has passed."

And according to the Met Office the cold snap looks set to continue. "Temperatures will stay really, really low until next week," said Sarah Holland, a spokeswoman."We're advising people to take care and keep an eye on the forecast. The roads are very dangerous."

Back in Chewton Mendip, the title of toughest worker surely went to the master thatcher Ian Shelley. As night fell and the temperature plummeted, he was to be found thatching a roof: gloveless. "You can't feel the thatch if you have gloves on," he said. "It does get cold. When I can't feel my feet I go for a run and have a coffee. I've known worse." But not much worse."

Feeling the cold

Early hours of 6 January

Aboyne, southern Aberdeenshire -11C

Pershore, Worcestershire -10.5C

South Farnborough -10.2C

Capel Curig -10.1C

Odiham -9.9C

Senny Bridge, Powys -8.8C

Forecast for 7 January

Rural Hampshire and Surrey and across to Wiltshire -10C

Bristol -6C

Cardiff, Birmingham and Nottingham -5C

Plymouth -3C

Ipswich -5C

Heathrow -3C

30 December 2008

Aviemore - 12.9C

Shap, Cumbria -9.6C

• Weather
• Food & drink

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Leading snow crystal scientist publishes book in bid to persuade the world that no two flakes are exactly alike

The police service, banks and management consultants top the league table of gay-friendly employers in Britain, outperforming the public sector, the media and education, according to the latest workplace equality index.

High street and investment banks fared particularly well, with Lloyds TSB rising from sixth in the 2008 table to take the number one slot this year, and Goldman Sachs winning 11th place. Three police services featured in the top 10 including Hampshire constabulary in second place and Kent police at fourth, while 17 forces were listed in the top 100. The metropolitan police came in at number 43.

Professional services companies also performed impressively with KPMG, Ernst and Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers all making the top 25.

Now in its fifth year, the index from campaigning group Stonewall tracks the impact of workplace culture on gay, lesbian and bisexual employees. It has quickly become a key baromoter of diversity practices.

The 2009 index, which also included a survey of more than 7,000 gay and lesbian employees, had a record 371 entries across 23 sectors. This is more than double the number of submissions in the 2005 launch year. Some sectors, such as law and housing, have improved markedly year on year.

Organisations which apply to be inlcuded on the index are examined on the success of their diversity policies and the extent to which they encourage job applications from lesbian and gay workers. Stonewall also surveys gay employees on whether their workplace experiences match up to the claims made by employers.

As well as shining a spotlight on the top performing organisations, the index also notes those sectors such as media, retail, construction and the NHS that consistently fail to make the grade, shown by their absence or low rankings.

"There are sectors such as the police which perform exceptionally well in the index but then there are sectors such as construction and media which don't," David Shields, director of Stonewall's Workplace Programmes said. "But it can take a few years from when an organisation decides to improve in this area to begin to see some results. We are always working with organisations in [under-represented] sectors such as the NHS, retail and the media to help them improve."

The country's single largest employer, the NHS, was notable for its absence in the upper reaches of the index. Only one NHS trust, Tower Hamlets, was among the best, ranked at 58.

The public sector's performance was shored up by local authorities with 49 entries submitted, the largest tranche from a single sector. Fourteen councils made the top 100 with three reaching the top 10, including Brighton and Hove which took third place. Three of the 20 fire services that entered also made the top 100, while the Home Office wmade the top 20.

The voluntary sector did not feature strongly, although last year's overall winner, the crime charity Nacro, remained in the top 10. The media industry, which might have been expected to perform better, has consistently failed to make an impression on the index. Only five media companies entered this year and just one, Time Warner, made it into the top 100, in 90th place.

According to Shields, it can be difficult to pinpoint why some sectors far outstrip others. The strides made by so many police forces may be part of "a broader effort to effect cultural change" he suggested, adding that complacency may have something to do with why media companies barely feature.

"I think for banks, for example, there is a real emphasis on the bottom line and they are recognising that fair employment practices directly impact on performance. I wonder if with the education or media sectors they believe they are already good and don't feel the need to measure it."

Fiona Cannon, head of equality and diversity at Lloyds TSB, said good diversity policies "simply make good business sense".

"I think the financial services sector is good at recognising this. At Lloyds we have worked hard and it's wonderful that it's paying off."

Gavin Wills, managing director for corporate services and real estate at Goldman Sachs, said the Stonewall index had provided considerable impetus for many organisations within the investment banking sector. "The index has been a phenomenal success for Stonewall over the years. You start getting employers who you never would have dreamed were supportive of lesbian, gay and bisexual professionals competing to get on to it."

Chief executive of Stonewall, Ben Summerskill, said the bar was set even higher for the 2009 index than in previous years, with additional proof of long-term effectiveness required from entrants. "To make the top 100 this year, employers had to demonstrate that equality and diversity were not optional extras but core values. Ninety seven percent of the top 100 had an organisation-wide equality and diversity strategy which links LGB equality into wider organisational aims. "

• More at www.stonewall.org.uk

• Equality
• Gay rights
• Work & careers

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Few musicians would allow a journalist to accompany their band through one of the world's most dangerous countries. Even fewer, one suspects, would be happy about that journalist being their father. But Manu Chao is not just any musician, and his father, Ramón, a critic for le Monde Diplomatique, is not just any journalist - so perhaps it should surprise no one that they ended up together on a legendary 1993 tour of Colombia by train, carrying not just musicians, acrobats and tattooists, but a fire-breathing dragon and an ice museum as well.

Ramón's account of that journey, The Train of Ice and Fire, is published in English next month. For Manu's growing army of admirers, the book provides a magical-realist insight into how his music has developed. More than 15 years ago, Manu and his then band, Mano Negra, took a special train across the country, performing free at stations for people unable to afford the concerts. A 50-strong Colombian-French team constructed the train out of a functioning locomotive and decommissioned carriages and off they went, ignoring all warnings of kidnappings and worse.

Part of the plan was to pay homage to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, by taking a slab of ice to Aracataca, the town that inspired the novel. Ice is a key theme in the book, from the opening sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Clearly, the journey needed someone to write it down.

Chao Jr set a few conditions. "What you write must be accessible to everyone," he told Ramón. "You mustn't use too many literary references. Your last novel was too ornate. I couldn't finish it."

The train travelled through territory contested by Farc guerrillas and the army, attracting the curiosity of both - plus spectators in their thousands, and stowaways. Manu was impressed by the resilience of his audience. In the book, he recounts spending time with Bogotá's street children: "Life's hell for them. But despite everything, they're more cheerful than you or me. They're 12 years old, drugged to the gills and not one of them's a virgin. When they go to sleep at night, they don't know if they're going to wake up - a plastic bag over the head, in the boot of a car, over the mountain and, pow, a bullet in the head."

Ramón was stunned by what they saw of the country during the tour. "It is hard to believe that there is so much violence in such a friendly, affectionate people," he says, on a recent visit to London. To judge by the book, the father, now 73, seems to have indulged in more rock'n'roll behaviour than the son. Although he had never taken drugs and did not even smoke cigarettes, he could not resist some marijuana cake on offer on Christmas Eve. "I was in the clouds and totally out of it for two days. Manu said, 'Honestly, Papa, I can't leave you anywhere.' On another occasion, when I got a tattoo, his reaction was the same. But I think he really liked the fact that I came."

Music runs in the family. Ramón was a child prodigy, a classically trained pianist who left Spain to study at the Conservatoire in Paris. "My father thought I would be the next Mozart but I wanted to be Cervantes," he says. Did he inspire Manu? "When I was 10 or 11, he tried to make me play the piano but I preferred football," says Manu.

The 1993 tour did, in the end, split the band, some of whom departed before the final concerts. Manu returned to Paris disheartened, and went on to form his new band, Radio Bemba. He nearly recruited a new band member in Colombia - a street kid, Rondelle, who could sing and dance brilliantly. Every time Mau and Ramón return to Colombia, they look for him.

The Latin-American connection continues. Manu's new single, La Vida Tombola, features in Maradona, a documentary about the Argentinian footballer. The pair also have an enduring involvement in Radio La Colifata, which translates as Radio Loony, and broadcasts live from a mental hospital in Buenos Aires. Manu will be appearing on the radio station again this year, perhaps recounting again the tale of that train of ice and fire.

• The Train of Ice and Fire is published by Route on 9 February.

• World music

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There is just time to gather round the screen and pay your last respects. After 15 years and more MIs, EKGs, tox screens and central line insertions than it is possible to count, the nonpareil of medical dramas is about to leave us. It will be a sad parting.

In the early 90s, the cop show was king. Hill Street Blues had captured the nation's attention in the previous decade and spawned countless imitators. The best of them - Homicide: Life On the Streets and NYPD Blue - dominated the networks' schedules, imaginations and commissions. The medical drama was all but dead.

Then on September 1994 the two-hour pilot episode of ER, written by blockbuster novelist and former medical student Michael Crichton (who died last year) and co-produced by Steven Spielberg's company Amblin, hit our screens and suddenly, like a mighty defibrillator, reanimated the genre's moribund form. It won eight Emmys in its first year and quickly became the most successful hospital drama in the world, both in terms of viewing figures and in setting new narrative and visual standards for television drama. It took the multiple storylines and kinetic camerawork on Homicide and NYPD Blue, shot them full of steroids, adrenaline, amphetamines and sent them whizzing exhilaratingly past us on a weekly basis. The thumping music segued into the percussive bleeps, clangs and clashes of the modern American emergency room. Sirens wailed and ambulances disgorged their bleeding, broken cargo into the care of the waiting staff of the teaching hospital in Chicago. Medical equipment bristled in the background and in the foreground Steadicams tracked trollies carrying at least a dozen gunshot/stroke/heart attack/assault/cancer victims per episode down corridors, in and out of operating rooms as doctors shouted impenetrable diagnoses and instruction over them. An hour of ER contained 700-800 edits - twice as many as a standard hour of television - and was described by one critic at the time as "channel surfing without pressing the button". It was dizzying, disorientating and utterly addictive from the off.

Apart from the unprecedented speed with which scenes whipped past (even NYPD Blue suddenly started looking like The Potter's Wheel), the unapologetic embrace of jargon commanded most of the attention at first. Gradually, hapless lay viewers such as me began to decipher the code, just as we had slowly got to grips with Detective Sipowicz's "perps" and "skells". A "perfed appy" was a burst appendix. The "PID shuffle" was the unique gait of a prostitute with another bout of pelvic inflammatory disease. Although I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to realise that what I was hearing as "pull socks" was not a command to denude a patient's extremities but "pulse ox", a request for a device to measure a patient's blood oxygen levels and a much more sensible option in the circumstances.

Now, after 14 series, I daresay the committed ER fan could walk into any county hospital and confidently order a tox screen, CBC, chem-7 and cross-table C-spine with the best of them, prepare a thoracotomy tray and even, if pressed, remedy a pleural infusion for at least as long as it takes to get the unfortunate infusee up to the OR. Actor Alex Kingston, who played the (terribly) British surgeon Elizabeth Corday for eight seasons of the show and is returning for the 15th, recalls that when she first started she did not know what she was saying. "Not at all. But when you hear it daily and have real doctors on hand to make sense of your lines and procedures for you, it gets easier. Quite often you could kid yourself you were doing it properly, especially as everything on set was real. All the machines worked. The only difference was that with blood that was actually sugar water and KY Jelly you didn't have that amazing iron-y smell in the operating theatre."

So you had the language, the machines, the documentary feel of the camerawork - but was ER truly realistic? Perhaps the honest answer is: it was as realistic as a drama aiming at widespread popularity can be. I watched it while I was flatsharing with a group of medical students who used to laugh hysterically as a lifetime's worth of rare and wonderful diseases were presented to a doctor in a single hour. The lectures, conferences and the exam-cramming that junior doctors have to fit in went largely unrecorded. And more fundamental and uncomfortable truths were undoubtedly glossed over, most notably that of payment for the state-of-the-art treatment all patients receive. As Anne Karpf, author of Doctoring the Media, points out, the first question patients are asked in a US hospital is "Are you insured?" and if the answer - as it frequently is - is no they are unceremoniously shown the door. "It's not exactly social realism," says Karpf. "You wouldn't use it as a primer of what's going on in medical care, but you can't have it be warts-and-all and still work as a drama. When you think how the insurance industry has completely skewed healthcare provision and is the major obstacle to providing an American NHS and means that most of the US population is either crippled by their premiums or living in dread of falling ill - well, how many episodes can you get out of that?"

Nevertheless, like our own Casualty at its inception, ER did frequently protest against the bureaucrats, the budget cuts and compromises forced upon doctors and uninsured patients by an unjust system. This, combined with its frenetic energy, was enough to make it seem like cinema verité compared to what had come before.

ER should have come with a health warning to anyone raised on Dr Kildare and Marcus Welby, MD (or over here, Dr Finlay's Casebook and Emergency Ward 10). Gone were the selfless, idealised and idealistic secular saints in white coats. Here instead were doctors who were - whisper it - human and fallible, whose personal lives were usually a mess and frequently intruded on the professional and vice versa. Out went Kildare's languorously holistic approach. In came the modern urban medical mantra "Treat 'em and street 'em". Instead of one all-seeing, all-knowing doctor we had a decidedly non-omniscient team who seemed most of the time to be struggling to keep their heads above water, as the neverending tide of sick and injured, drink-, drugs- and gang-battered humanity threatened to drown them.

Some of the iconography endured, of course, otherwise we would all have become very depressed very quickly. Among the original cast members, John Carter (Noah Wyle) embodied Kildarean idealism, but he looked in vain for a Dr Gillespie-ish mentor in the fearsome Peter Benton, his fantastically irascible supervisor played by Eriq La Salle ("a pussycat" in real life, Kingston assures us). Dr Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) was the moral centre of the show - an essentially decent man, but unlike Welby (a physician who experienced just one patient death in 50 episodes, for which he was not culpable), human; capable of making mistakes, dogged by debt, divorce and eventually disease, dying of a brain tumour in season eight. (The infallible Welby and Kildare, we must assume, simply ascended bodily into heaven.) Dr Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield) was another good doctor, but broke with tradition by being a woman.

And then, of course, there was Dr Doug Ross. He was - and people do tend to forget this, so I'm going to put it bluntly - a total shitbag, but he had two redeeming features. First, he was a talented paediatrician who would always go the extra mile for his tiny charges, and second he was a talented paediatrician played by George Clooney; basically the man-holding-baby Athena poster made flesh. For this, the world forgave him for driving lovely Nurse Hathaway to attempted suicide in the opening episode (she was supposed to die, but the producers decided she was too good an actor not to put through the mill a few dozen times more, so they resuscitated the role) and innumerable idiocies thereafter. He left in season five but the show survived his loss and into the void stepped Noah Wyle as Carter, whose storyline about his painful, faltering physical and psychological recovery after being stabbed by a patient was a revelation. It unfolded over several series, and in the course of it both Carter and Wyle were transformed from callow youths to proven professionals, a useful reminder to everyone perhaps in these increasingly base and reality-TV obsessed times of the kind of rewards that can only be reaped by commitment to long-running dramas.

ER was embraced by the public on a grand scale because it was a show that recognised that we are an assertive, informed, cynical, brutal and brutalised society that is not ready to accept authority - with or without a white coat - unquestioningly. So it gave us both a credible collection not of Good Doctors, but good-enough doctors, who succeeded more often than they failed, but failed nevertheless. Through the "frequent flyer" patients - the drunks, addicts and chronically ill who return time and again to the emergency room - and the halt and the lame gloriously restored to health it gave us a view of modern medicine that recognised some of its limitations but also revelled in its possibilities. Our faith was tested but not destroyed.

Now it is almost over. After 15 years, some of the bloom is inevitably off the rose. Its pacing and style is still there, but now looks less novel since it was adopted and absorbed by almost every television genre as soon as their creators could get hold of a Steadicam; such is the price of innovation. Moreover, as the seasons have worn on, the original central cast has left and a range of shorter-term characters have replaced them, the soap aspect of the show has come to greater prominence. The rage against the machine has been subsumed in the lather of concerns about the doctors' complex personal lives. What interest in wider and political considerations there was has dissipated the further it has moved in time from Dr Crichton's original experiences. The underlying acknowledgement that modern medicine is frequently a palliative rather than a solution - explicit in storylines that have the ER staff tending to multiple gang victims as the latest drug feud escalates, unable to do more than patch the wounds and wait for the next one - has also become harder to find.

But if it is not ending quite at the top of its game, it is certainly quitting well before viewer or production fatigue has set in. The final series promises to reunite much of the old school - including Benton, Greene, Corday, Weaver, Romano and Carter, either in flashback or in "real" time. "For an audience that has followed all our characters, it will be a very nice way to say goodbye," promises Kingston. "None of it will seem cheesy or contrived. Everything is totally reasonable, totally feasible." It should be a fitting end for a well-loved and deservedly admired show that redefined the way we see both medicine and drama. In an ideal world, it would be succeeded by the medical equivalent of The Wire; a programme sophisticated enough to examine and wrest compelling drama even - especially - from the biggest questions about the flaws and failures of our most fundamental social systems. As it is, we will be left only with the increasingly risible and formulaic House (whose utter infallibility would impress even Kildare) and the unforgiveable Grey's Anatomy.

Nurse, the screens - switch them off.

• The final season of ER starts on More4 on Thursday at 9pm

• Television
• Television

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I've always assumed that boring schoolteachers were the norm. At school, it never entered my mind that teachers ought to be anything else. After all, school was not meant to be fun. Lessons existed for the sole purpose of eventually passing exams. If there was anything in their content that turned out to be quite interesting, that was a bonus, rarely achieved. Stimulating lessons or teachers was not something I hoped for, expected or encountered. I have paid a price, part of which has been a lifelong inability to properly appreciate Shakespeare, a direct result of the ennui instilled in me by our English master.

A few days ago, Ofsted announced a "crackdown" on boring teachers, accusing them of far more than spoiling their pupils' appreciation of literature. There was a link, according to Ofsted, not only between boredom and destructive behaviour in the classroom but also, more seriously, between the inattention paid to boring teachers and the subsequent achievements of their students. Quite how Ofsted proposes to carry out this crackdown is not made clear. It is my experience - in life, not just in education - that boring people cannot be taught to be not boring, let alone to be motivating and stimulating. Anyway, if there is a method of enlivening teachers, should it not have been applied during their training, rather than waiting until their dampening effect was let loose on the children?

And how do you make arithmetic and basic maths exciting? A report published this week by KPMG concludes that innumeracy costs Britain £2.4bn a year, in addition to the damage caused to the lives of people who can't add. The Every Child a Chance Trust, the charity that commissioned the report, claims that 30,000 pupils leave primary school each year unable to do simple calculations. KPMG adds that such children are more likely than their numerate peers to play truant, be excluded from school, become unemployed and even turn to crime.

What are the reasons for this lamentable educational failure? Is there something wrong with the syllabus, or are we back to blaming Ofsted's boring teachers? I do not know how you make sums - call them mathematical calculations if you must - fascinating for children. But as far as I know, no comparable European country has such a high level of child innumeracy, and I cannot believe that British children have a DNA preventing them from being competent with figures.

Dr David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge (I haven't made up that title), has called for schoolchildren to be taught about probabilities and risk assessment, to enable them to make sensible, considered decisions when they enter the real world. It's an interesting proposal, but how can we even think of it when our schools don't even seem able to convey the basics of maths?

In a week packed with stories about schools, the one that attracted the most publicity told of Sheffield's Watercliffe Meadow primary, which intends to call itself a "place of learning", because of the "negative connotations" of the word "school". How we jeered at this example of ridiculous euphemism. And yet, looking at Ofsted's strictures and the KPMG report, is there not some validity in the argument? School, to many, including to some extent me, represents tedious lessons on subjects of no interest to the recipient, learning by rote, learning without understanding, and exams requiring regurgitation of material rather than thought. Does this not amount to "negative connotations"? Where I part with Watercliffe Meadow is in its alternative choice. To me, a "place of learning" is just as fearsome and off-putting as a school.

Have you heard of Mimie Mathy? According to a poll published on Sunday, she's France's most popular woman, and the only woman in the top 10 of the country's favourite people. Heard of Gel Elmaleh? He was fourth overall (and the most popular among the 16-25 age group); he had not even been in "Le Top 50" just six months ago. The Journal du Dimanche (JDD) commissions these polls twice a year, and the winner is rarely a surprise. Until 2003, it was almost always the undersea explorer Commander Cousteau, or the priest L'Abbé Pierre, champion of the homeless. Since then it has been either Zinedine Zidane, captain of France's greatest football teams, or Yannick Noah, the former tennis champion turned popular singer and committed worker for charities. He won again this time. More interesting are some of the other rankings - President Sarkozy at 42; Ségolène Royal's 47; Carla Bruni's 48. (Just in case you didn't know, Mathy is a 50-ish comedienne and chanteuse, Elmaleh, 37, a stand-up comic and actor.)

The French are not as besotted as the British in discovering their country's favourite whoever or whatever and I think the JDD provides the only poll presenting a vaguely persuasive picture of their national attitudes (even though it was flawed by the fact that interviewees had to choose their favourites from a list shown to them, and could not offer their own selections). I haven't found a British equivalent. For all the hundreds of surveys claiming to assess public preferences in hundreds of categories, there doesn't seem to be one, methodologically valid, asking straight out, "Who is your favourite British person?" (a public figure is implied, to exclude lovers, offspring etc). My feeling is that Sir David Attenborough would win it here, until England wins the 2010 World Cup, when its captain, Sir Steven Gerrard, would take over.

• This week Marcel saw the RSC's Hamlet: "Having no David Tennant didn't matter; Edward Bennett was admirable, if slightly young and under-tormented. Oliver Ford Davies was the best Polonius I've ever seen." He also saw Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood: "An interesting, worthy film, especially enjoyable if you think Angelina Jolie acts wonderfully. I don't."

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America's largest aluminium maker, Alcoa, is to cut 15,200 jobs as it struggles to cope with a slowing global economy and sagging prices for metal.

The Pittsburgh-based company last night announced that it was reducing its smelting capacity by 18% in a wide-ranging downsizing intended to save $450m (£300m) annually which will involve one-off costs of between $900m and $950m.

Its decision is likely to sound alarm bells throughout heavy industry. Alcoa is widely considered a barometer of the fortunes of industrial and raw materials companies.

"These are extraordinary times, requiring speed and decisiveness to address the current economic downturn," said Alcoa's chief executive, Klaus Kleinfeld. The "aggressive but prudent" measures would "ensure Alcoa maintains its competitive lead in today's challenging markets".

Alcoa's global workforce will fall by 13,500 people, a reduction of 13%. The company will also shed 1,700 contractor positions and will impose a freeze on salaries and hiring.

Troubles afflicting the motor manufacturing industry have affected demand for aluminium, as has a broader downturn in electrical appliances. The price of ­aluminium fell by more than a third last year on the London Metal Exchange and is at its lowest point since 2002.

Alcoa intends to sell four operations: its electrical and electronic systems ­business, its global foil arm, a car wheels operation and its European transport products division. These employ 22,600 people at 38 locations but lost $105m after tax last year.

There was no immediate indication of the impact on Alcoa's operations in Britain, where the company has seven sites including a sheet and plates plant in Birmingham, a castings and forgings operation in Exeter and an automotive design shop in Essex.

Some believe that more cuts could follow. Tony Robson, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, told Bloomberg News: "The news is pointing in the right direction but we believe Alcoa has to take even more drastic action in cutting high-cost smelters."

In October, Alcoa revealed that its third-quarter profits had slumped by 52% to $268m.

The company owns a 12% stake in London-listed Rio Tinto in partnership with Chinalco, a Chinese producer of aluminium.

• Manufacturing sector
• US Manufacturing data
• Manufacturing data
• United States

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The day may come when upheaval is no longer the natural state of Tottenham Hotspur but neutrals will miss the volatility. Even the club's supporters would have a twinge of nostalgia for chaos as invigorating as this, particularly since Tottenham Hotspur are virtually guaranteed their chance to retain the Carling Cup at Wembley.

Burnley must have been as unsuspecting as everyone else when they led 1-0 at the interval. A 4-1 deficit for the return leg at Turf Moor in a fortnight was inconceivable then. The ultimate role reversal reflected the impact that the Tottenham manager, Harry Redknapp, had when he delivered a splenetic address at the interval.

David Bentley was uneasy on the left and also turned out to have been unwell. His replacement by Jamie O'Hara gave the side natural width on that flank for the second half. The substitute even scored on his own account. It is true that Burnley can reproach themselves for all but one of the goals they conceded but the collapse reflected the shock experienced when they were suddenly put under pressure by a Tottenham team that had previously been incapable of aggression.

The initial passivity had been an incitement to the visitors. Burnley, with no anxieties to burden them, had a spring in their step then. Their previous triumphs over Fulham, Chelsea and Arsenal this season seemed fully explicable. It was ­Tottenham, and in particular their left-back Gareth Bale, who were weighed down by care, when Chris Eagles darted inside him before placing the low cross that allowed Martin Paterson an elementary finish in the 15th minute.

The returning Jermain Defoe had emerged beforehand to be feted by the White Hart Lane crowd. Those spectators then spent 45 minutes or so wishing that they could have hailed him on the pitch instead. Afterwards Redknapp still had a residual anger about the sluggishness of the display at the start.

The trouble for the Tottenham manager was also associated with the open nature of the game. Ledley King, as is regularly the case, was resting his bad knee with a view to playing in the Premier League on Sunday but the central defence still did not look as if it had got used to operating without him.

After 24 minutes Robbie Blake was heading fractionally wide from another Eagles delivery. Burnley had to cope with an additional disappointment when Joey Gudjonsson's injury after half an hour saw the introduction of Kevin McDonald, whose two goals in the previous round had eliminated Arsenal. The Burnley supporters, forgivably, had no inkling of the sorrow to come and were soon chanting, "Are you Chelsea in disguise?" It was a means of reliving improbable triumph at Stamford Bridge while simultaneously mocking the opposition here.

There was no sign before the interval that Tottenham would silence those visitors. Aaron Lennon, whose crossing has been more telling of late, disappeared back into his former aimlessness and Spurs were also undermined by profligacy. Jonathan Woodgate nodded down a Bentley corner but Roman Pavlyuchenko mishit his shot. Much as Redknapp seems to delight in the transfer market, he would still have been disturbed to see so many of his staff looking like candidates for replacement.

It took O'Hara to remind him that those already on the books have their uses. His immediate contribution made Burnley reel for the first time. His deep corner evaded Clarke Carlisle and was piloted into the net by Michael Dawson's splendid header. An individual error permitted Tottenham's next goal, but that slip also reflected the panic being experienced. Pavlyuchenko drove into the penalty area and the ball broke from the head of Luka Modric before dropping to O'Hara. Brian Jensen should have saved the midfielder's drive but let it squirm past him.

There was a higher tempo to Tottenham's play and Burnley, for a while, could have felt only bewilderment and some nostalgia for the comfort enjoyed in the opening 45 minutes. For a few moments hints of revival were sighted when, for example, Blake put a curler narrowly off target and, soon after, the Spurs goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes and his defence had a few chaotic moments.

All the same Burnley's deficiencies were illustrated. Following Bale's pass in the 65th minute, Pavlyuchenko slipped past Carlisle as if barely conscious of the centre-back before placing his shot into the net with ease. It was nearly comic to witness such svelte confidence in a footballer who had been so inept at the beginning of the evening.

When a side's form veers so wildly, their opponents are at risk of being taken by surprise. The visitors were at the mercy of misfortune as well. After 67 minutes, O'Hara's inswinging free-kick from the right was headed past his own keeper by Michael Duff.

Having seemed so menacing initially, Burnley had become a danger purely to themselves.

• Carling Cup
• Tottenham Hotspur
• Burnley
• Harry Redknapp
• Wigan Athletic

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For an agency whose job it is not to be surprised, nearly everything seems to surprise the CIA these days. So it's not surprising that the agency was surprised by the choice of Leon Panetta to head it. I was surprised too. My first reaction: It is an odd and unsettling choice. Here's why.

First, it's a bad idea to pick a politician to lead the CIA, because it is supposed to be an agency that is not political. Don't laugh – that's the way it's supposed to be. Think about George Bush's most overt effort to politicise the CIA by picking Republican ideologue and hatchet man Representative Porter Goss in 2006. Goss's tenure was a disaster, even though he had the advantage of being a former CIA officer and chairman of the House intelligence committee. Panetta is a know-nothing when it comes to intelligence.

Which brings up the second problem: The Obama transition team is telling reporters that Panetta had experience as a "consumer" of intelligence when he was chief of staff at the Clinton White House. Well, I have experience as a purchaser of computer equipment, but you wouldn't want me fixing your laptop. Fixing the CIA – and believe me, it needs fixing, along with serious downsizing – requires someone who knows how the insides work, and Panetta has no clue.

Third, while Panetta may oppose torture – a "no-brainer", to quote Dick Cheney's phrase when he asked about waterboarding – there are hundreds of former CIA top officials who actually know how the CIA works who were appalled by the torture regime. Any one of them might have been a better choice.

So opposing torture is a good idea – and yes, it's amazing that we're even debating whether torture is acceptable – but Panetta gets no points for me on that score. That's like saying he opposes child pornography. Duh!

Fourth, Panetta is a relentless centrist and a conciliator. He's one more cog in the centre-right national security apparatus that Obama is patiently assembling. Which raises another very important issue: Is Panetta the one to stand up and fight for civilian control of the intelligence community? Of course not. His boss, it appears, will be Admiral Dennis Blair, yet another top military man appointed to run the US intelligence community as head of the office of the director of national intelligence (DNI).

Now the very office of the DNI is a useless post, and the entire office ought to be abolished by Obama on day one. Who needs it? It was created by Congress – with President Bush's support – as part of the helter-skelter intelligence reorganisation that also saw the creation of several other vast, unneeded agencies: the northern command, the department of homeland security, the national counterterrorism centre and others. Obama should get rid of all of them.

In the meantime, by appointing Blair, a man deeply entangled in the military-industrial complex, Obama is guaranteeing that the CIA and the other 15 or so agencies that comprise the "community" will be ever beholden to the Pentagon, which already absorbs something like 80% of the intelligence budget.

The Panetta appointment is doomed. I give him a year before he gives up over there. He's no match for the hard-headed spooks who run the place, and he's no match for the military brass who are elbowing their way to more and more control of intelligence spending and priorities.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global

• United States
• Barack Obama
• US national security

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The millions of songs available for download from Apple will no longer be tied only to iPods and customers will be able to transfer their tracks freely.

Apple today announced that its entire iTunes music catalogue will soon be available without any copy protection, after agreeing a new deal with the world's major record labels.

The move means customers will soon be able to buy songs via iTunes – the world's dominant digital music retailer – without being locked into using an iPod.

Music fans will be able to buy tracks without digital rights management (DRM) from iTunes and easily transfer them between computers, many different brands of music player or even onto their mobile phones.

Later this year, Apple said, the company will add a further 8m new unprotected tracks to iTunes, and shortly afterwards expects its entire library to follow suit.

"By the end of the quarter all 10 million songs will be DRM free in iTunes and iTunes plus," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

DRM was originally designed to prevent downloaders from sharing files illegally, but it has become a divisive issue.

Customers can already download some unprotected files from iTunes, and from other retailers, but the news marks a significant shift for Apple. It has struggled to convince the record labels to agree to drop DRM for iTunes downloads in a power struggle over who controls the future of the music industry.

The plan to drop copy protection was accompanied by the news that Apple would also allow variable pricing for the first time – meaning tracks could be sold for prices other than the standard 79p. In the UK, tracks will be available for 59p, 79p and 99p.

The move is thought to have been part of a deal to convince the major record labels to offer their music libraries for sale without copy protection mechanisms. Until now Apple has refused to incorporate pricing flexibility, but it is thought that the music industry's increasing support for competitors such as online retailer Amazon's MP3 store helped it change its mind.

According to the usually furious rumour mill surrounding Apple announcements, the company's final keynote address at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco had all the hallmarks of being a damp squib. Early speculation had focused instead on the health of its talismanic chief executive, rather than the products that the company might unveil.

But even without the presence of Steve Jobs – who finally admitted yesterday to health problems caused by his cancer surgery – Apple did its best to please fans today, with a slew of new products and services.

The task of delivering Apple's valedictory address fell to Schiller, who started off by thanking the audience for their presence. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate you all showing up," he joked.

Among the other announcements were an updated 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop and new versions of the company's iLife and iWork software.

The new MacBook Pro was widely expected following updates to the company's smaller models late last year, and will go on sale starting at $2,799 (£1,900).

It claims to be the world's thinnest and lightest 17in laptop, with a larger built-in battery that can hold up to 8 hours of charge.

Updates to iLife, due at the end of this month, include a new version of iPhoto incorporating face recognition, an improved version of iMovie, and the addition of downloadable music lessons to Garageband, featuring artists including Sting and Norah Jones.

Schiller also announced a beta version of iWork.com, an online document sharing service, intended to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live and others.

The crowd, famous for whooping with excitement at every utterance from Jobs, did their best to recreate the traditional atmosphere – but things were noticeably subdued compared to the usual furore of Apple's January announcements.

In comparison to previous years – which have seen the unveiling of the iMac, iBook, iPod mini and iPhone – this year's address was devoid of significant breakthrough.

Many of the products predicted by analysts and industry observers – including a low-cost Apple laptop and a smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone – failed to materialise.

A small group of fans queued overnight to make sure they got places inside San Francisco's Moscone Center, but there was little sign of the enormous lines and crowds that usually mark the occasion.

Apple's decision to end its involvement with the conference , which is organised by an independent company, IDG, left many preparing themselves for the eventual death of the 24-year-old expo – despite insistences from the organisers that there would be "many successful years of Macworld to come".

"This is my first Macworld and possibly my last, because if Apple's not presenting then it's not necessarily 100% worth it to make the trip all the way down here," said Nik Lensander from Santa Barbara, California, who was the first in the queue.

Apple's legion of obsessive followers, however, still regretted that there was no surprise appearance from Jobs.

"I actually made plans to come here to watch him, and when I found out he wasn't I was disappointed," said Alex Lee, who travelled from Dubai to attend. "However, life moves on."

• Macworld
• Apple
• itunes
• Steve Jobs
• Music and the internet
• Apple

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