A indication Islamic preparation from Turkey?

Simon Akam ISTANBUL Tue Feb 23, 2010 9:35pm EST < 1 / 12 >

Colourful Corsica: A family legal holiday in poke of the undiluted beach (ideally a still one)

From my recumbent position - framed perfectly by the outline of my feet - I am gazing over an infinity swimming pool, unbroken woodland, rocky crags and finally the gently scalloped outline of a white, sandy beach with deep-blue sea beyond.

No houses, no hotels, no car parks, no roads. Just a dirt track in an expansive 180-degree view that covers at least two or three square miles.

Of Corse it is: Bonifacio is just one of the many beautiful locations on Corsica"s coastline

This isn"t some far-flung outpost of South America or the Caribbean. It"s the utterly blissful south- eastern corner of Corsica.

Half a dozen years ago - just before my daughter Beatrice, five, was born - my wife Esther and I were blown away by this Mediterranean island. It was as beautiful as any stretch of Italy or Spain, but only as developed as the outer reaches of Scotland.

The gnawing fear, of course, was that property developers might have spent the intervening years addressing this apparent oversight.

And yet no such thing has happened. Have Corsica"s planning regulations kept the rampant developers in check?

Or do the bullet-holed and graffitied signposts of the mountainous interior suggest a more sinister explanation? More...Feature: Crazy for child-friendly CorsicaFeature: On Corsica for a fine villa holidayMore on Corsica in our France section

A quick flick through the guidebook certainly points to the latter. Corsica"s chequered history makes Chechnya seem like an oasis of calm.

The Pisans and Genoese spent centuries squabbling over this rugged, but well-located, island (a prevalence of pizza and pasta provided ample evidence of this).

Finally, a local hero called Pascal Paoli led a violent uprising in the 18th century to win a celebrated, but brief, period of independence before the island was turned over to the French.

And French it remains, but that doesn"t stop a small, but dogged, bunch of nationalists continuing to voice their protest at le continent by occasionally blowing things up.

French post offices have been relatively common targets. The French prefet, Claude Erignac, was assassinated in 1998.

Such horrors - rare as they are - do mean that if anyone is going to wreck this spectacular little island, it"s going to have to be the Corsicans themselves.

Not that there aren"t worrying signs that things are on the turn. A trip down to picturesque Santa Giulia beach later that day brings a big shock.

The water remains as crystal clear as any postcard you"ll ever see from the Maldives or Mauritius and the sand is pearly white. But there"s no getting away for it. The beach is rammed.

A trip to sensational Palombaggia beach a short drive north through the florid maquis - a dense shrubland of sage, juniper and myrtle - offers some reassurance.

Two more beach bars have materialised on the vast pine-backed strand since our last visit, but from 9.30am until 11am we have a swathe of powdery sand to ourselves.

By noon, however, vigorous games of bat-and-ball are beginning to encroach on our territory, and by half-past we beat a hasty retreat to the peace and simplicity of our picture-perfect stone villa.

By this stage, three-year-old Luke has all but melted in the 30-degree heat. And so the pattern emerges. Cooler mornings are spent enjoying glorious solitude on the best beaches this family has ever seen.

Barbecue lunches and searing afternoons are spent back at base admiring the view and sympathising with those who can"t resist buying a place in the sun. A place like this, in fact.

Gently shelving Santa Giulia scores highly for its calming curves and pretty beach, but it gets crowded early and also "smells funny," according to Beatrice. Perfect Palombaggia edges even Santa Giulia for scale and beauty, but costs e10 to park.

Faintly downmarket Pinarellu is a solid family choice, but much too far north of bustling Porto Vecchio to justify the trip, while rounded Rondinara is hotly favoured by the locals, but marked down heavily by Luke because of a surfeit of seaweed and scary waves. To get off the beaten track, we head for Petit and Grand Sperone, two perfect Caribbean-style bays accessible only by hiking from Piantarella beach in the direction of the golf club.

Sunhat required: The Bannister family (left to right - Luke, Esther, Beatrice) try not to melt in the Corsican sun

Thanks to their remote location, these beaches remain relatively crowd-free all day if only, we conclude, because other parents are having as much trouble coaxing their screaming infants to walk the walk as we are.

Corsica is not all about beaches. A vertiginous road trip into the remote and jagged centre reveals a stunning spine of near 10,000ft peaks rearing up sharply from the coast and running virtually the whole length of the 110-mile interior.

We are so impressed by the three-hour Porto Vecchio-Col di Bavella-Solenzara circuit that we make the trip twice during the fortnight, once in each direction.

And while the outrageously good French restaurant we"d remembered so fondly at Quenza has closed, pretty Zonza remains well worth a stop on the way up to the dramatic Col.

Once there, the 360-degree view makes you go weak at the knees, before you recover and realise that this is the start of the GR20 coastto-coast walk, a 100-mile northsouth trail dubbed the toughest in Europe.

For something rather less energetic, we love Parc Aventure a few miles inland near Conca.

Here, a spider"s web of ropes, ladders and zip wires strung up at various heights above the forest floor keeps Luke and Beatrice amused for hours.

They even persuade me to don a helmet, climbing harness and carabiners to have a go at the adult version - not for the faint-hearted with drops of 70ft or more.

And then there"s ancient Bonifacio, a postcardprinter"s dream of a town perched precariously on vertical - and sometimes overhanging - cliffs on the furthest southern tip of the island overlooking Sardinia.

Huge gin-palaces of the mega-rich pull into its natural harbour to window-shop the steep cobbled streets of the old town.

We peer nosily into the most vulgar boats while lapping up local specialities such as pork with honey and chestnuts, and bean and charcuterie stew at the magnificent Kissing Pigs on the harbour.

We are back at the Kissing Pigs the very next day. We hope to be back on the island this summer.

Travel Facts

Simply Travel (0871 231 4040, www.simplytravel.co.uk) offers seven nights at the U Paese di l"Ondella in Porto Vecchio from 492 per person. Price includes self-catering accommodation (based on four sharing), return flights from Gatwick, car hire and all taxes and charges.

OnLive threatens to finish video gaming as we know it

Mike Harvey, Technology Correspondent, San Francisco & , : {}

The epoch of the video games console is underneath hazard after the launch currently of a make use of that streams high-quality games over the internet to the computer or TV set.

For years those who longed for to fool around sophisticated, action-packed games have used controllers and consoles. Now gamers will get the possibility to fool around high-end immersive games over the internet with the attainment of OnLive, that promises to broach the majority modernized games on direct to their Personal Computer or Mac computer.

Onlive, that emerged last year after 7 years of development, voiced yesterday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco it was rising the make use of in the US in June. It has the subsidy of multiform big edition and growth names in video games together with Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive Software and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

The experience of personification "serious" titles such as the movement role-playing diversion Mass Effect 2 will be only similar to listening to song over the internet: seamless and with no time lag, according to the company. The make use of cuts out the need for exclusive consoles undermining the multi-billion bruise commercial operation models of Nintendo"s Wii, Sony"s PlayStation and Microsoft"s Xbox.

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The direction over consoles and titles on earthy disks is accelerating fast as tens of millions of people spin to Facebook to fool around online games similar to FarmVille or download gaming applications for their mobile phones.

The touchscreen interface of the iPhone has turn a gaming height in the own right with billions of downloads from the online App Store of simple, easy to make use of games. For the initial time Apple"s smartphone is an critical sufficient height to aver the own "summit" inside of GDC, the premiere gaming eventuality in the world.

Thousands of developers fervent to take value of the iPhone"s success lined up to attend to panels and discussions in sessions with such titles as: "How to keep your diversion on tip of the charts". Apple hopes the iPad, the touchscreen inscription computer, that will arrive in the UK late subsequent month, will be an additional strike with gamers.

OnLive claims that the new record breaks the console cycle" where gamers have to ascent their hardware each couple of years. Launch titles for the new make use of are approaching to embody Dragon Age Origins, Assassins Creed II, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands and Borderlands.

The association is backing up the UK and Europe to be the subsequent market, The Times understands.

OnLive says it has grown a interpretation application record that allows games to be powered on remote servers, rather than on diversion consoles. Users will not have to buy games in stores but will be means to fool around them as they are streamed opposite the network - but downloading them.

Users will have to compensate $14.95 to allow to the make use of and afterwards buy or rent games over the internet. Pricing sum for particular games are not nonetheless available.

OnLive says the application record enables it to send diversion calm opposite a broadband internet network, permitting for back-and-forth fool around in between a players shade and a server roughly instantly. The association says that for customary clarification games, users need a 1 megabit per second connection. For high-definition games, the make use of needs a 5-megabit per second connection.

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Knights manoeuvre as Nomura joins Round Table

Ian King, Deputy Business Editor & , : {}

The Red Knights, the organisation of investors looking to buy Manchester United from the Glazer family, reliable currently that they had recruited Nomura, the investment bank, to suggest them.

The acknowledgment of the move is something of a manoeuvre for the Knights given the Nomura bankers advising them will be led by Guy Dawson and Andrew McNaught, both of whom suggested the Manchester United house when the association was paid for by aristocrat Malcolm Glazer in 2005.

The headlines comes hours after the anti-Glazer run won a outrageous progress from United old child David Beckham, who, returning to Old Trafford with AC Milan for a Champions League clash, donned a immature and bullion headband a representation of believer antithesis to the family"s tenure of the bar as he left the pitch.

In a short statement, the Red Knights said: "The Red Knights are gratified to endorse that Nomura, the tellurian investment bank, has concluded to suggest on a probable merger of Manchester United. Nomura will work closely with the Red Knights, MUST [the Manchester United Supporters Trust] and alternative intensity investors to prepare and delineate the offer to be put to the Glazer family."

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It pronounced that the Nomura team"s initial charge would be to hit "the most expressions of monetary support" that the Red Knights had perceived to date.

The Times suggested last week that as most as 60 individuals, each pledging in between 10 million and twenty million, had contacted the Red Knights given they pennyless cover at the commencement of last week.

The appointment of Nomura will be taken as a pointer that the Knights are aspiring about shopping the club.

Members embody Keith Harris, the arch comparison manager of Seymour Pierce; Mark Rawlinson, a comparison partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; Paul Marshall, the co-founder and authority of Marshall Wace; and Jim ONeill, the head of tellurian mercantile investigate at Goldman Sachs.

Nomura, that is Japans greatest investment bank and that enjoys top-level contacts opposite Asia, is approaching to trawl the continent for some-more super-rich investors who could behind a intensity takeover.

According to United"s own research, Middle East is the club"s fastest-growing market, with an estimated 40 million supporters in the region, quite in China, Japan and South Korea.

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QA : Lord Ashcroft the non-dom

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What has Lord Ashcroft told us that is new?

After years of speculation, the Conservative Partys main donor has certified he is non-dom, radically definition he pays no British taxes on his abroad fortune. This is authorised if a proprietor has clever links to an additional country.

What alternative countries does he have links with?

He is a adult of Belize, where most of his commercial operation sovereignty is based. He is additionally a belonger of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Both are in the Commonwealth.

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What does it meant for the Conservatives?

Lord Ashcroft has since some-more than �10 million to the Tories and his aim seats plan might bind feat for them in a parsimonious contest. Critics might contend it is astray that a domestic celebration is being saved from unfamiliar money that has been free from UK taxes. But the Conservatives point to Labours billionaire donor Lord Paul, a self-confessed non-dom.

Didnt Lord Ashcroft contend that he dictated to rearrange his affairs in sequence to lapse to live in Britain?

He did. He betrothed William Hague, the Tory personality who due his chair in the Lords, that he would take up permanent chateau in Britain prior to entering the Upper House.

If he is a permanent resident, because doesnt he compensate taxes similar to the rest of us?

Lord Ashcroft says currently that, in successive discourse with the Government, permanent chateau was to meant a long-term resident.

Isnt it astray for legislators to set taxes that they dont have to pay?

See Lord Paul (above).

Five questions that Lord Ashcroft and the Conservative Party still need to answer

1 When, if ever, did Lord Ashcroft discuss it a) Mr Hague b) Iain Duncan Smith c) Michael Howard and d) David Cameron that he paid no UK taxes on any of his estimated �1.1 billion abroad fortune?

2 Why has Lord Ashcroft one after another to lay in the House of Lords even after Mr Cameron pronounced such non-taxpayers should be released from Parliament?

3 Why did Lord Ashcroft and Mr Hague furnish a signed, witnessed, transparent and undeniable . . . honest and contracting declaration that he would turn henceforth proprietor in Britain usually prior to he was since a nobility usually for the newly ennobled office worker to outlay ten years avoiding full UK taxes?

4 Why did the Conservative Party accept some-more than �5 million from Lord Ashcroft after nominating him for a chair in the Lords whilst his abroad gain stayed free from British tax?

5 Why has Lord Ashcroft right away certified he is a non-dom after insisting for years, to the annoyance of Tory politicians, that his taxation standing is private?

Professor David Kerr to turn Conservative adviser

Sam Lister, Health Editor & , : {}

One of the architects of Labours NHS reforms is to turn a key confidant to the Conservatives since the Government has lost the tract on mending studious care.

Professor David Kerr, a eminent oncologist who led efforts to cut watchful and give hospitals larger independence, pronounced that the Tories right away charity the most appropriate possibility for the NHS, that had been driven in to a whisk of careless tick-box exercises.

Professor Kerr, a lifelong Labour believer who campaigned with Tony Blair in the 2001 ubiquitous election, told The Times that the key beliefs of giving patients a improved preference of health services and a improved bargain of how they were behaving had been driven in to the sand.

To contend that we have run out of steam, I would contend definitely, unequivocally yes, Professor Kerr said. We have got lost in the snowstorm of increasingly not pertinent targets. The on all sides right away is disenfranchising, lifeless and disconnected. That is the clinical reality.

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The doctor, a highbrow of cancer disinfectant at the University of Oxford, was a visit caller to Downing Street as Labour drew up the remodel bulletin in Mr Blairs initial and second terms. Before 1997 he conducted the initial inhabitant review of cancer services identifying delays that authorised patients cancers go from curable to incorrigible whilst they sat and waited.

Under New Labour he worked on ways to urge entrance as chair of the inhabitant Cancer Services Collaborative and became a initial government official of the Commission for Health Improvement, the initial regulator to consider NHS clinical performance.

He was additionally one of the main drivers of the substructure certitude scheme, charity the most appropriate hospitals the possibility to turn some-more independent, hold larger shortcoming for their budgets and have clinicians some-more intent in use improvement. A knife-edge Commons multiplication on substructure standing was won by seventeen votes after Professor Kerr wrote to all MPs underlining the advantages that it would bring.

In 2005 he was since the charge of building a 20-year plan for the destiny of the NHS in his local Scotland, well known as the Kerr Report.

Professor Kerr pronounced that he felt for the initial time in [his] hold up that the Tories charity the health use a improved future. He pronounced that the Conservative priority of removing NHS interpretation out to patients in an distinct form, permitting them to select the top customary of use most appropriate matched to them, was a mission that left with the depart of Mr Blair.

[The Tories] are some-more committed to the NHS that we love and assimilate as free at the point of entrance and charity concept care. Only that grade of faith would remonstrate me to go and work for them.

Professor Kerr would not be drawn on either he had been a part of of the Labour Party, but pronounced that right away he was not a part of of any domestic party.

He pronounced that he hoped to pull by the ideas of preference and the empowered patient, enlivening the NHS to have some-more high-quality report publicly available. People need to be means to assimilate how their sanatorium is improving, he said.

Another concentration will be to concede patients to ask clinicians key questions about caring standards but compromising the doctor/patient relationship.

I resolutely hold for the initial time in my hold up that we have a Conservative care that is committed to the destiny of the health service. If I didnt hold that I wouldnt be there.

On sensitive preference for patients, he pronounced that underneath the Government the total big thought finished up in the foothills of dodgy websites. No one was unequivocally enchanting with it.

He identified the loss of movement around when the passing from one to another happened, with things starting to lose the tract underneath Patricia Hewitt as Health Secretary, afterwards Alan Johnson, who is great on most fronts, but was some-more meddlesome in keeping the NHS out of the headlines.

Andrew Lansley, the Conservative health spokesman, pronounced of Professor Kerr: His imagination and believe will be consequential in assisting us to emanate a NHS that has patients at the centre. That a key designer of the Blairite health reforms is right away operative with the Conservatives shows that underneath David Camerons care we have indeed turn the celebration of the NHS.

Brazil could have initial lady boss after Lula picks inheritor World headlines

Brazil"s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his arch of staff Dilma Rousseff at the launch rite of her presidential candidacy in Brasilia. Photograph: Reuters

Brazil"s statute Workers" celebration has nominated President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva"s arch of staff, Dilma Rousseff, to reinstate him, raising the awaiting of the country"s initial lady president.

Lula, who cannot mount for a third term, picked the 62-year-old riotous personality incited economist to lift his centre-left ensign in October"s election.

A celebration association permitted her with a ensign that review "With Dilma, along the trail that Lula showed us".

Rousseff has never run for open bureau and lags at the back of a regressive rival, Sao Paulo administrator Jose Serra, but polls show the opening narrowing.