It is good that not only British audiences should be reminded about the genocide in this way but also we Rwandans. At best that is a very violent form of therapy.” The questions go the heart of the way Rwanda is coping with an atrocity as desolating and communal as the genocide.Some argue that in a country where 44 per cent of the population is aged 15 or below and therefore too young to know what took place, the need to reinforce the lessons of what caused the genocide is constant.Florence Kyarera, vice-mayor of Kichukiro, said: “The trauma that Rwandans feel comes from what happened in 1994, not from a film. The decision to show the film to an audience of survivors, with trauma counsellors on hand, drew further concern from aid workers.One senior Rwandan staff member with a charity working with survivors said: “To put someone who may have seen their wife, husband, mother, brother cut down before them in front of images re-enacting that moment is invoking the same terror that they experienced 12 years ago. A group of schoolgirls close to the filming of a scene at the school had to receive treatment for flashbacks suffered at the sound of actors singing the old Interahamwe chants of “Let’s do the work”, signalling an imminent slaughter. By contrast, the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda was made in South Africa.But aid groups have expressed concern about the effects of making Shooting Dogs on the local population, in particular using the buildings of the ETO itself as the set. I think people understand a film is not a documentary.” Indeed, the makers of Shooting Dogs – financed by the film arm of the BBC, the UK Film Council and a German production company – have been eager to emphasise what they consider to be its key virtue – the fact it was made in Rwanda with Rwandans actors and crew and as much input from Rwandans as possible. All that broke the silence in the giant national stadium, turned into an open-air cinema for one deluged night, was the muted sobbing of people revisiting private nightmares.Shooting Dogs recreates in grim detail the militia roadblocks where Tutsi women were kept to be gang raped, their leg tendons slashed so they could not escape; it shows the murder of a mother and her infant while UN troops look on; and the conversion of Francois, the character of the ETO caretaker, from an untroubled Rwandan into a hate-filled Hutu who kills his friends and neighbours.Patience Myanagenge, 25, one of the extras attending the premiere, who lost a sister in the genocide, said such imagery will always have a ring of truth for Rwandans.She said: “What an outsider sees in this film is a woman you don’t know being killed But to us it is our mother, daughter, sister You don’t shout and scream Such a thing is normal for Rwandans It does not disappear because you cry It is the basic truth of what occurred.

There is always an essential compromise to ensure that the film does its job. In this case, it was telling the story of Rwandans and their unimaginable trauma Everybody on this film sought to achieve that. My hope is that a film like this helps them to own the trauma rather than let it dominate them.”They are sentiments with which others in the audience of the premiere – devoid of red carpets, limousines or crowds eager to catch a glimpse of celebrities – seemed to agree At the ending of the 100-minute film there was no applause. After a number of hours, they were slaughtered.Michael Caton Jones, the film’s Glaswegian director, confirmed that financial constraints on the low-budget project meant the Nyanza-Rebero massacre had had to be recreated at the school.But he insisted that the necessities of dramatic licence – such as creating the composite characters of Father Christopher and Joe – did not tarnish the integrity of the film.The director, whose credits range from Scandal to Basic Instinct 2, said: “Film can only be a dramatic re-enactment.

The overnight federal funds rate now stands at 4.75 per cent, compared with just 1 per cent in the summer of 2004 – the lowest level since the Eisenhower era in the late 1950s.
All attention, however, was focused on the finely calibrated wording of the statement from the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee. Albeit widely expected, the 25 basis points increase, coupled with the rates warning, sent stocks skidding on Wall Street, boosted longer-term bond yields and strengthened the dollar. In its first policy-making session under Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve yesterday raised its key short-term rate for the 15th consecutive time and signalled that one or more further rises may be needed before the current 21-month tightening cycle comes to an end. People still want to browse.” He predicted a better second half, with new books by Michael Palin, Bill Bryson and possibly Dan Brown.. Supermarkets are never going to be specialist retailers and the internet does not have the service we offer. The company said it spent £2.1m during the bid talks on its advisers, Hawkpoint and Bridgewell.

It also incurred an impairment charge on its stores of £3.4m and stock write-downs of £1.3m.Mr Heneage said: “There is a structural shift towards supermarkets and the internet, but I think it will be finite. Some analysts think the bid is likely to be passed because the regulator has said it would take into account the impact of the internet on the books market.But if HMV decides to launch a new offer, it is expected to be lower than 440p a share, given Ottakar’s poor trading. Total sales rose 1.9 per cent to £176.5m.Mr Heneage offered to take the company private last year but was trumped by a £100m bid from Waterstone’s owner HMV. The 440p-a-share agreed takeover offer lapsed when it was referred to the Competition Commission, which is expected to publish preliminary findings this week A final ruling is due on 22 May.

This measure is unnecessary because the market and customer demand is driving roaming fees down.”. Soaring gas prices will push inflation above the Government’s target over the coming months, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned yesterday. Mr King told MPs the rise in gas prices was a “concern” and launched an attack on the lack of competition in the European energy market.
Giving evidence to MPs, he gave no hint of any plans to cut interest rates, sticking to the official Bank line that risks to growth and inflation were evenly balanced.Asked about the recent swings in energy prices, he said most of the volatility in inflation over the past year had come from movements first in oil and then gas prices. The Commission says its proposed regulation would save the consumer between 40 and 60 per cent on mobile calls abroad.But the GSM Association said: “A sample of key operators with customers in 12 European countries indicates roaming tariffs fell an average of 8 per cent across Europe last year.” A spokesman for Vodafone said: “During the last 10 months our call charges for roaming have decreased by 40 per cent. Before its introduction, Ireland’s Foreign Minister, Dermot Ahern, who lives in a border region, found different networks – with varying prices – operated in various parts of his own home.European operators are thought to earn about €10bn from international roaming each year, though the proportion of this derived from EU users is unclear. Unlike four years ago, when Republicans in the November 2002 Congressional elections rode the President’s tails to victory, senior party figures are now concerned his low ratings will undermine candidates contesting this autumn’s elections.While Mr Card has a low public profile, ordinary Americans remember him as the man who spoke into the President’s ear on the morning of 11 September 2001, informing him of the terror attacks on New York as Mr Bush sat listening to children read at the Emma T Booker primary school in Florida.Mr Bush said: “Andy Card has served me and our country in historic times: on a terrible day when America was attacked, during economic recession and recovery, through storms of unprecedented destructive power, in peace and in war.

Based on the natural gender ratio from other countries, they estimated that 13.6 million to 13.8 million girls should have been born in 1997 in India However, only 13.1 million were reported, the study said. It was not clear how many sex-determination tests Sabsani had conducted, Aggarwal said. The Christian foreigners occupying Afghanistan are attacking our religion.”The case has exposed the stark differences between Afghan society and President Karzai’s Western allies. The Chinese edition of Rolling Stone magazine ground to a halt after China’s media watchdogs stopped publication of the recently launched Mandarin version, blaming a legal technicality.

That could mean consumers could buy a SIM card in another country where tariffs are lower and save money on some calls by using it at home.The initiative follows a decision in Ireland and Northern Ireland where there is one tariff north and south of the border for most users. A mobile customer abroad would pay only the price applicable at home for a local or international call. Some consumers in other countries pay up to €13.05.The new plan would eliminate all roaming charges for receiving a call when abroad but in the EU. According to her survey, roaming charges have “generally remained at the same high level” across Europe over the past six months and in some cases have increased. The Commission document showed O2 customers from the UK being charged €5.50 (£3.80) for a four-minute call in France or Italy, while T-Mobile users paid €7.63 in Slovenia.

After weeks of criticism from members of his own party calling for the President to shake up his administration and kick-start his stalled agenda, Mr Bush said yesterday he was accepting the resignation of Andrew Card. President George Bush has finally bowed to poor approval ratings and ongoing criticism from Republicans by replacing his long-serving chief-of-staff – one of the most senior members of his administration and a stalwart supporter. The new proposals will also feature at this week’s summit in Cancun of the US, Mexico and Canada.The measure is a mixture of carrots and sticks – the latter centred on a beefed-up security operation along the Mexican border.Far more striking, however, is the effort to sort out the status of the large numbers of illegal immigrants, without whose work – usually in manual jobs and for wages that no American would accept – the national economy might grind to a standstill. Fleischer (the O didn’t stand for anything) in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916.

Co-founded with the painters Halima Nalecz and Frank Avray Wilson, the NVCG aimed to provide a broad and democratic voice, something that the seemingly ?tist Institute of Contemporary Art sometimes failed to do.Many artists had early exhibitions at the New Vision; Peter Blake and the comedian Charlie Drake enjoyed solo shows there. His artistic pantheon was not distant or academic, for in London this ubiquitous and lifelong gallery-goer met heroes like Giacometti, Pierre Soulages or Georges Mathieu, artists that, through their process-led aesthetics, consolidated Bowen’s own belief in “pure painting”.Bowen was a “gallery man” par excellence. He also had stints at Hammersmith, Ealing, the RCA, the Central School and later at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Orphaned at an early age, Bowen returned to England with his brother and two sisters in the mid 1920s. As a result, ministers were offering free tuition up to the age of 25 to sit A-levels, adult learning grants worth £11million to help with accommodation costs, £11million to improve the quality of the workforce by aiming to recruit high flyers from the world of industry to teach and £20million to promote courses to help at least 5,000 women return to learning. “We need a much more honest debate about this issue,” he said.

Extra visas would be allocated for nurses, and for 1.5 million more agriculture workers.But the key provision is the process that would permit illegal immigrants to seek citizenship without having to return to their home country first Critics say that it is tantamount to an amnesty.. Half a century after it sent out trills of outrage and delight from the Royal Court Theatre, Look Back in Anger will soon be causing trouble again. With accomplished performances from McGraw and the superb Marie Windsor, a riveting pace and some neat twists to the story, it has remained a classic example of compulsive story-telling on a minimal budget (it was shot in just 13 days).The film ended Fleischer’s RKO contract, and for the producer Stanley Kramer he made The Happy Time (1952), a family comedy starring Charles Boyer. The package endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday broadly backs the conciliatory approach of President Bush, which has been fiercely criticised by many of his own Republicans.
The move follows a weekend of huge demonstrations by supporters of immigrants’ rights, most notably in Los Angeles where at least 500,00 people turned out.

They were taken to Paddington Green police station in west London on suspicion of carrying an explosive device which turned out to be the harmless battery charger. “I needed to know whether, under Islamic law, it was allowed for partners in a firm to be paid wages – he told me it wasn’t and so I thanked him and left.”Four days after Wahab had arrived in Gambia he went to Banjul airport to meet his brother, Mr el-Banna and Abdullah el-Ganudi, a British citizen.Three days earlier, the three men had been arrested at Gatwick airport when they first tried to fly out to Gambia. The brothers had come to rely on him as an authority on Islamic law and that was why Wahab had gone to see him. Mr Qatada is now imprisoned in Britain as a terror suspect and was once called Osama bin Laden’s spiritual representative in Europe. On the day of his departure flight, Wahab was detained at City Airport in east London by two men who described themselves as airport security officers but whom Wahab suspected of being MI5 officers.The men wanted to find out about an alleged terror suspect called Abu Qatada whom Wahab had known for many years and had met four days before his flight. “I had this business idea for a mobile peanut-oil processing factory,” he told The Independent “I had done the feasibility study, it was all ready to go. I had my team and we brought Bisher in on the deal towards the end.”From the start there were ominous signs that the trip was not going to be straightforward.

Wahab read mechanical engineering at Salford and Bisher read material engineering at University College London. In 1992 Wahab took British nationality while his brother decided to retain his Iraqi citizenship as he did not want to damage his ties with his home country.It was Wahab’s business interests that brought the two brothers to Gambia in November 2002. They lived in Cambridge where they took their O-levels before continuing their schooling at Millfield School, Somerset, and Concord College, Shropshire.They later attended separate universities. MI5 “intelligence” on the men also revealed that they carried copies of the Koran and had had an electronic device which turned out to be an ordinary battery charger.Bisher al-Rawi, 38, and Wahab, 40, came to this country in the early 1980s after their father fell under the suspicion of Saddam Hussein.

His brother, Bisher, and Jamil el-Banna, both residents in Britain, were flown to Bagram air base in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantanamo.Intelligence reports made by MI5 which have been submitted to the all-party group on extraordinary rendition support Mr al-Rawi’s testimony and show the weakness of the case against the four men.Part of this evidence, which was passed on to the Americans, includes allegations that Bisher al-Rawi had an interest in “extreme sports” while Wahab was described as playing a lead role in setting up a peanut-processing factory in the Gambia. The new claims confirm previous allegations that Britain has played a major role in the “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects by handing them over to the Americans without legal authority.
In his first interview since his arrest in November 2002, Mr al-Rawi says soon after his detention he asked to see someone from the British High Commission in Gambia but was told by the Americans: “Who do you do think ordered your arrest in the first place? They don’t want to talk to you.”Mr al-Rawi claims that the only reason he and another man were allowed to return to Britain after 28 days of questioning by US intelligence officers was because they could claim British citizenship. Wahab al-Rawi, whose brother Bisher has been held in the US naval base in Cuba for three years, says that US interrorgators told him the British were directly responsible for his arrest and detention. One of four British citizens and residents seized by the Americans in Africa before two of them were flown to Guantanamo Bay has told The Independent that they were victims of an MI5 plot. Some Tory donors are said to be worried that their companies could miss out on government contracts if their names become public.The Tories’ annual report disclosed that they had struck agreements with some donors under which the party was allowed to delay the repayment of loans if they could not meet the scheduled repayments.The commission may regard such flexible arrangements as a backdoor donation which should be disclosed under a law brought in by Labour in 2000 rather than a loan on a commercial basis.A former Tory treasurer Lord McAlpine called on his party to release the details of the loans, telling BBC’s Today programme: “If the loans are completely honest and straightforward there should be no reason why anyone would worry about that.”. We are not doing them a favour by putting them on the policy group. They are doing the party a favour by agreeing to serve on it.

All these people are highly successful entrepreneurs with a huge amount of knowledge on economic competitiveness.”The Electoral Commission has given the political parties until today to provide assurances that any loans they received were on commercial terms similar to those obtainable at high street banks.Jonathan Marland, the Tory treasurer, has resisted pressure to disclose the names of supporters who made loans because they were made on a confidential basis. “This is another example of Mr Cameron’s hypocrisy.” A spokesman for the Conservative leader dismissed Labour’s charge, saying: “It’s frankly ludicrous to suggest that membership of the policy group has been affected by donations to David Cameron’s leadership campaign. He now acts as a fundraiser for the party.”It looks like dodgy Dave is rewarding his personal paymasters by handing them control over party policy,” said a senior Labour official. His family firm, Jayroma, donated to the leadership campaign and he is credited with helping to raise £415,000 for it. The other co-chairman is John Redwood, the former cabinet minister.The group, which will help to draft new Tory policies by next year as part of Mr Cameron’s root-and-branch review, also includes Adam Afriye, MP for Windsor, who gave money to his leadership campaign and donated £11,000 to the Conservative Party last year.Another member is Andrew Feldman, a friend of Mr Cameron from Brasenose College, Oxford. An economic competitiveness policy group, appointed by Mr Cameron, is co-chaired by Simon Wolfson, chief executive of the Next fashion group, who gave £10,000 to his leadership campaign. The revelation may undermine Mr Cameron’s attempts to distance himself from the controversy over the estimated £24m of secret loans accepted by the Conservatives.
The Tory leader became embroiled in the row as Scotland Yard warned MPs at a private meeting that a police investigation into the “cash for peerages” allegations against Tony Blair could be widened to cover corruption charges.

While abortions are legal in India, revealing the sex of the baby and aborting on grounds of gender are not. In 1994, the government outlawed prenatal sex-determination tests, but the law is widely flouted especially among better-off Indians despite pledges by officials of a crackdown. Cases can take years to make it through India’s severely overburdened judicial system. “However, we had received complaints about him, which is why we set up the appointment,” he said. Aggarwal, who was part of the team monitoring the state’s doctors, said there were cases pending against three other doctors on similar charges in Haryana courts He was not certain when those cases would go to trial.

In 2001, authorities responsible for monitoring physicians sent an undercover team to Sabsani’s office to see if he would reveal the gender of a fetus, said R.C Aggarwal, Haryana’s chief medical officer. Sabsani told the undercover team he would reveal the sex if he was paid an additional 1,500 rupees (US$35). After being paid, he told the woman the fetus was female, adding: “But that can be taken care of,” Aggarwal said. They were tried in Palwal, a Haryana city about 95 miles south of New Delhi where Sabsani had his practice. Hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are believed aborted every year in India in sex-selective procedures.

Moneysupermarket, the online price comparison service, monitors more than 100 execution-only stockbrokers. Buying one share a month online, assuming an investment of £500 each time, would cost just £77 over a year at Hoodless, according to Moneysupermarket. The most expensive broker in its tables would charge £296 for the same services.To make the picture even more complicated, some brokers charge “inactivity” fees – if you don’t trade regularly, your quarterly administration charges will increase. At the other end of the scale, frequent traders may be able to negotiate a better deal; Barclays Stockbrokers, for example, charges £12 for each online trade, but this falls to £7.50 after you have made 10 trades in a quarter.Barclays’ Emma Rees says: “It’s true that people charge in different ways so you need to work out how your investment behaviour fits with the various pricing structures.”Even so, there are some basic rules The cheapest way to deal is over the internet. The headline dealing commissions advertised by brokers can therefore be meaningless. “What we quickly realised was that clients were looking for the simplest charging structure possible, which is why we switched to flat fees.”There’s no doubt that the majority of brokers are still getting away with overcomplicated charges. The first issue with which investors must grapple is basic commission charges.

Hoodless is unusual in charging a flat fee – many brokers’ fees are a percentage of the value of the trade you’re making.This means that investors placing large trades lose out – and as there is usually a minimum charge, small deals can be expensive too.On top of what you pay on each trade, many brokers have administration fees ranging from a few pounds each quarter to annual charges of £100 or more. Hoodless Brennan, a smaller broker based in London, launched its flat-fee dealing service in 2003 and has charged just £7 for online trades ever since, comfortably undercutting its rivals.”We first launched an internet dealing service in 2001, with commissions charged as a percentage of deal sizes,” says Mike Rayden, online trading manager at Hoodless. Critics of the stockbroking industry – including some who are in the business – warn that charges remain overexpensive and overcomplicated.
As a result, there’s a real danger that investors who don’t choose their broker carefully could end up paying thousands of pounds too much in charges every year, substantially reducing the potential profits on offer, even assuming that share prices keep rising.Michael Foulkes, the chief executive of TD Waterhouse, the Canadian broker that is vying with rivals such as Barclays, NatWest and Halifax for the biggest share of the UK’s stockbroking market, says commissions must come down. It charges £12.50 for each trade – buying or selling – in the UK, considerably more than its sister companies in North America.”Until now, dealing volumes have not been sufficient to enable most brokers to cut charges,” Foulkes says. “As a result, UK investors pay significantly more to trade than their counterparts in the United States and Canada.”However, there are still bargains to be found. The latest figures from Compeer, which conducts regular surveys of how many investors are dealing directly on the stock market – rather than using funds – show that the number of trades has doubled to 50,000 a day since the end of last year. The bad news is that, with investors staying out of the market over the past five years, share dealing firms have been struggling to keep their heads above water rather than spending time thinking about product innovation or modernisation.

Demand for housing loans should therefore continue to grow.Clearly, investors need to be mindful of the risks of investing in less developed markets, but with tighter monetary policy in the US creating a headwind for US banks, there remains considerable potential for European banking stocks to continue to outperform.Guy de Blonay is manager of the New Star Global Financials Fundcash independent.co.uk. More than four years after the UK stock market began climbing back from rock bottom, investors have finally begun buying shares again. It also intends to equalise the tax burden on domestic savings instruments.This should trigger a shift in savings from government securities into bank deposits and mutual funds. This would create a cheap source of loan funding as well as generate greater commission on investment products.In 2005, mortgage lending in Turkey represented 1.9 per cent of the gross domestic product. The corresponding figure in the UK is 80 per cent, while in Hungary and Poland it is 9 and 5 per cent respectively. More fundamental and immediate from an investor’s perspective are changes to the tax regime and the mortgage market.The Turkish government proposes to cut the corporate tax rate this year from 30 to 20 per cent, causing a 16 per cent average upgrade to banking profits for the country’s three leading banks. Alpha Bank, the Greek bank, expects earnings from these countries to account for 20 per cent of total earnings in 2009, up from 9 per cent in 2005.As in Greece, Turkish banks are benefiting from the country’s strong rate of domestic economic growth.

Investors should avoid getting caught up in the prospects for EU accession, since this is still a distant event, although Turkey’s attempts to reform its economy in potential readiness are nonetheless helpful. Greek banks only lend out 89 per cent of their deposits compared with an EU average of 145 per cent, marking a significant opportunity to increase lending. Revenues are also likely to be boosted by rising commission income as banks grow their asset management operations and shift customers away from interest-based to fee-based investment products.Greek banks are also among the leaders in expansion within Romania, Bulgaria and the Balkan states Romania and Bulgaria join the EU in 2007. Half of Asia’s billionaires, says UBS, are clients of its wealth-management divisions.Farther east, making money from the eastern European banks has been par for the course for the past couple of years, as the sector has benefited from convergence with the rest of the EU. Higher economic growth rates and an immature banking market have led to rich profits. The low-hanging fruit has already been picked, however, and investors may find better performance from more southerly banking markets, such as Greece and Turkey.Credit penetration within Greece is low by EU standards. UK credit card debt represents about two-thirds of total credit card debt in the whole of the European Union.

MORTGAGEMarcus Hodges says Joanne will be in a far better position to take out a mortgage once she has cleared her debts. Not doing so would mean she wouldn’t be able to borrow so much in the first place. Most lenders take outgoings as well as income into account when deciding on the amount you can borrow so this is crucial.Once her debts are cleared, if she is earning £15,000, any mortgage within Joanne’s grasp would be limited. Northern Rock’s Together mortgage, which allows borrowers 4.8 times their income, would give her a mortgage of up to £72,000.Some graduates seek the help of their parents, either with a deposit or asking them to be guarantors, says Hodges.

The solution to paying off debts is to cut outgoings to the bone and use any surplus income to clear debts as quickly as possible.Ashley Clark says assuming a starting salary of £15,000, Joanne’s debts will be unmanageable. She should reduce interest costs as early as possible by shopping around for banks with low rates rather than settling for the one she started with, as so many students do.Loan rates at Cahoot and Northern Rock are 5.8 per cent, compared with the 12.9 per cent she would pay were she to stick with Barclays. This is not going to be easy when you consider that, earning £15,000 a year, she’ll end up with around £1,000 a month after tax and National Insurance. This won’t leave her much to live on after meeting debt repayments of £400 a month relating to a career development loan and overdrafts.Joanne’s biggest hope is self discipline, he says. She would also like to start paying towards a pension.We asked three independent financial advisers for help: Justin Modray of Bestinvest, Marcus Hodges at Savills Private Finance and Ashley Clark at Needanadaviser .Case notesPersonal: Joanne is about to complete a postgraduate diploma at Cardiff University.Income: £100 a week from her parents and grandparents (until completion of diploma).Monthly outgoings: about £700 a month on general living expenses and travel.Debt: £12,000 in student loans; £6,500 career development loan with Barclays Bank; £5,000 graduate loan and overdraft, also with Barclays.Savings: noneDEBT Justin Modray says that Joanne’s priority has to be clearing her loans since the interest charged will compound the problem. Since she has other debts to deal with, she will defer repayment of this sum, on which the interest rate is only 3.2 per cent, until she has started earning at least £24,137, at which threshold she must start repaying.Joanne has no savings but is keen to get a mortgage as soon as she can. Her current spending at university is about £700 a month on living expenses including bills, going out and food.

Since so many magazines are London-based it is likely that this is where she will start work, which concerns her as wages in the capital are not usually high enough to offset higher living expenses.Joanne has taken out student loans of £3,000 a year amounting to £12,000. Like thousands of students, Joanne has a serious debt problem. Although she accepts responsibility for her predicament, she feels a little cheated by the system that made it so easy to get there in the first place.
“The banks positively bend over to help you out by increasing your overdraft limit, credit-card companies invite you to jump on their bandwagon and, perhaps most worryingly of all, the Government condones student loans which, for me and many others, represent the largest segment of debt,” she says.In June, Joanne hopes to get a job as a magazine journalist with an average starting salary of around £15,000. Joanne Walker, a 29-year-old taking a postgraduate course in journalism at Cardiff university is dreading the financial struggle she faces on graduation. Take showers rather than baths and tell staff that you are happy to reuse towels and bed linen, rather than requiring freshly washed replacements every day.* Consider making a donation to the Travel Foundation, which funds carbon reduction programmes in resorts around the world. It is currently working with operators in the Caribbean, for example, on an energy-efficiency scheme for tourist accommodation that will be the equivalent of taking 2,800 cars off the road.* Useful contacts : Carbon Neutral Company: 08701 99 99 88, www.carbonneutral ; Climate Care: 01865 207 000, www.climatecare.co.uk; Friends of Conservation: 020-7603 5024, www.foc-uk ; the Travel Foundation: 0117 927 3049, www.thetravelfoundation .uk..

Here, in the open-air square at midnight, we watched a large salsa band play.Some tourists come to Trinidad especially to dance with locals in the square. The Cuban style of salsa is apparently more “twirly” than other types, and the standards in Trinidad were amazing. The atmosphere is inclusive, so if you want a dance, you’ll get one whatever your standard.The one sad thing in Trinidad that has come as a result of the arrival of mass tourism is high-visibility state security – the private enterprises and hostels are carefully policed Security personnel stand on many of the street corners. Their presence in the key tourist locations may also account for the reduction in begging compared with my last visit and noticeably fewer prostitutes on street corners in Havana.

A 10-minute taxi ride from Trinidad takes you to Ancon Beach – a long sweep of white sand and warm sea. You can stay in a hotel on the beach and just relax for a day or so before either heading on to nearby towns of Cienfuegos and Santa Clara or, like us, heading back to Havana.Havana will soon be transformed far more profoundly than in the past five decades. With Castro in his 80th year, Cuba is on the brink of change. I feel guilty for saying this, but although the island is still wonderful, I think Cuba was more fun in the old days – more serendipitous.

I have a personal pension with Standard Life, to which both I and my employer contribute. But the May Day performance at the Swan Hunter yard marks the latest phase in the regeneration of an area that has provided its inhabitants with a cultural renaissance, and visitors to the area with an opportunity to recharge their batteries.. Those who live outside “NewcastleGateshead”, as the region has rebranded itself, often presume that the twin Tyneside municipalities are remnants of a once-thriving industrial region that has suffered at the hands of national political regime-change and economic realignment. A battleship under construction will provide a backdrop to the performance. That there are any ships at all being built on the Tyne may come as a surprise to at least some of the people attending the screening. The event will be remarkable not just because all 14,000 tickets for the occasion were gone within 48 hours, but for the choice of venue: the Swan Hunter shipyard at Wallsend, on the north bank of the Tyne. For a place of its size, NewcastleGateshead has an extraordinary choice of live music..

On 1 May, Pet Shop Boys will be performing their newly composed soundtrack to accompany an open-air screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, The Battleship Potemkin, the story of a Russian naval revolt. Many of the venues here are the envy of Europe, from the world-class Sage Gateshead to the newly refurbished Carling Adademy. This has led to an unbroken aural tradition, with songs being passed on through the generations. Many of the most popular contemporary performers – like Eliza Carthy, Kate Rusby, and local folk star Kathryn Tickell – all learned from older musicians.

Folk music has always been strong in the North-east, partly because this is the only region in England which has a musical instrument – the Northumbrian pipes – unique to the area. He founded Folkworks, now based at The Sage Gateshead, in the belief that by bringing great musicians to the area, and giving local people the opportunity, the music would flourish. Several local personalities can take the credit for this, particularly Alistair Anderson, a Northumbrian piper and concertina player who has always had a passion for passing on his art. Those in the industry put the musical success of the North-east down to a number of factors. Standards are high: promoters and venues work together with the local authorities; as a result the musicians perform to higher standards, and the region gets noticed elsewhere. Every aspect of the NewcastleGateshead music scene is thriving. Local bands, such as Maximo Park, are establishing themselves nationally, while newcomers such as Catweasels are signing recording deals; new venues have opened up, providing space for every kind of musical performance; opportunities for study – the degree course in folk and traditional music offered at Newcastle University – are attracting musicians and music lovers to the region; and the Orange Evolution Festival, the largest festival of its kind in the North-east, is attracting nationally known artists as well as aspiring local musicians.

Starting on 18 May, Orange Evolution encompasses haunting melodies from Mali’s Toumani Diabate, jazz from the James Taylor Quartet and hip-hop from Baltimore’s Spank Rock, as well as gigs from local-boys-made-big the Futureheads and recent chart-toppers Orson.. Orange Evolution ‘06

Running through the full spectrum of popular music, from blues through to dance, this 12-day festival reaches a crescendo on both sides of the Tyne on the 29 May bank holiday Monday with a medley of free performances including a hotly awaited appearance from Mercury Music Prize nominees Hard-Fi. So now is the perfect opportunity to test the “great destination” theory The only issue is where to start. The regenerated quayside? One of the region’s many green spaces? No.