This article titled “Stasi files row as Britain refuses to return documents to Germany” was written by Helen Pidd in Berlin, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th December 2011 22.04 UTC

Britain has been accused of “sheltering communists” after refusing to hand over a cache of Stasi files revealing the names of British spies who worked for the East German secret intelligence agency during the cold war.

The cache belongs to a set of mysterious microfilm images, known as the Rosenholz (Rosewood) records, that contain 280,000 files giving basic information on employees of the foreign intelligence arm of the former GDR.

The records were obtained by the CIA in murky circumstances shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. American agents analysed the data before distributing relevant portions to countries in which the Stasi were active.

A swath of files relating to Stasi activity in the UK were given to MI5 by the Americans in the 1990s. Now Germany wants the files back, to add to its extensive archives on the GDR’s ministry for state security, commonly known as the Stasi.

If the files are returned to Germany, they will be made available, unredacted, to scholars and historians. That means that British Stasi sympathisers and spies could be outed for the first time.

Today, Germany only has those sections of the Rosenholz discs pertaining to activity in former West Germany – though the governments of Norway, Denmark and Sweden recently indicated they were ready to hand over the Rosenholz files they were given by the CIA more than 10 years ago.

Since the return to Berlin of the West German portion of the Rosenholz files in 2003, a number of public figures have been outed as Stasi collaborators, most recently a priest who allegedly spied on Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI .

“We need access to these British files in order to understand the cold war, which was a war fought by secret intelligence operatives all over the world,” said Helmut Müller-Enbergs, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Stasi.

With fellow academics, he is demanding that Britain return the Rosenholz files to the Stasi archives in Berlin. “Given that the Brits have long been considered world class in intelligence gathering, it is especially important for us to understand how the Stasi was able to operate in the UK.”

“The UK is not a country known for sheltering communists, so why then will they not reveal to us who in Great Britain was working for a communist regime?” said Müller-Enbergs, a researcher at the Stasi archives in Berlin (BStU) and visiting professor at Gotland University, Sweden.

Roland Jahn, the federal commissioner for the Stasi archive, said: “These records could offer an important complement to those Stasi files we already have, and thus make an important contribution to the reappraisal of the role of East German state security in Europe.”

The Stasi archives already encompass 69 miles (111km) of files, including 39m index cards, 1.4m photos and 34,000 video and audio recordings. But the Rosenholz files are key because of the systematic and deliberate destruction of most of the records relating to a Stasi division known as the Hauptverwaltung A (HVA), which was responsible for running an extensive network of spies in the west.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a high level committee agreed (with the blessing of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl) that the HVA archives should be destroyed – a decision described by Die Zeit recently as one of the worst mistakes made during reunification .

The microfilmed files obtained by the CIA – in what the Americans described as a “clandestine operation” which may have included a pay-off to a rogue KGB agent – are the key because they contain copies of the card indexes of the HVA, listing the real names of all the agents, informers and targets of the Stasi’s foreign operations.

Put together with files already in the BStU’s possession, they allow scholars to build up a picture of who the spies were, who they were spying on and how the Stasi carried out missions abroad.

Herbert Ziehm, deputy head of the disclosure/information division of the BStU, said it would be “lovely” for Britain to return their portion of the Rosenholz files. “Then we would be able to see exactly who was spying for the Stasi in Britain – from other sources we already know what information they were delivering, but this would enable us to work out who they were,” he said.

Ziehm was part of the negotiating team which persuaded the US to hand over the Rosenholz discs to Germany’s Stasi archives in 2003.

Even just getting those Rosenholz files pertaining to east and west was a drawn-out process, he said: “The negotiations took a number of years. “The Americans were reluctant to co-operate for some time.One CIA agent put it like this: when you get some loot from a mission, you don’t share it.” Ziehm believes the CIA obtained the files in 1992 “at the very latest”.

Ziehm said the files are important in puzzling how the Stasi operated abroad. “We already had three-quarters of the information – Rosenholz gives us the opportunity to gain the missing quarter,” he said.

Thomas Wegener Friis, an associate professor at the Centre for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, said the return of the files was about transparency rather than naming and shaming.

“It’s not just a question of outing people – though we should not be shy to name those who worked for the Stasi abroad,” he said. “More important is being able to understand how intelligence agencies worked on an operational level during the Cold War. It will allow us to learn lessons for the future.”Asked by the Guardian why Britain refused to hand over the Rosenholz files, the Foreign Office, which handles press requests for MI5 and MI6, said: “We don’t comment on intelligence matters.”

No Briton has ever been prosecuted in the UK for spying for East Germany, according to Anthony Glees, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and director of its Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies.

In 1999, the then home secretary, Jack Straw, told MPs that MI5 was investigating more than 100 Britons suspected of having been Stasi agents.

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This article titled “Al-Qaida offshoot hopes to turn Africa’s Sahel region into a ‘new Somalia’” was written by Simon Tisdall, for The Guardian on Thursday 8th December 2011 19.02 UTC

An offshoot of al-Qaida is working to turn the whole of Africa’s Sahel region into a “new Somalia” and terrorist bases there pose a growing threat to European and pan-African security, a panel of experts has warned.

Jerome Spinoza, head of the Africa bureau in the French ministry of defence, said the sub-Saharan Sahel area, up to 1,000km wide and stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east, presented challenges that western policymakers ignored at their peril.

“Instability is on the rise,” Spinoza told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday. “Without a meaningful policy, the area could constitute a lasting safe haven for jihadists.”

Robert Fowler, a former UN special envoy to Niger and Canadian diplomat who was kidnapped and held hostage for four months in 2008-9 by al-Qaida in the Maghreb (AQIM), said the 31-strong group of captors was well-disciplined and wholly concentrated on its aim of creating an Islamic caliphate embracing the Muslim lands of Africa and the Middle East.

“These men are highly motivated and totally ascetic,” Fowler said. “These guys have no needs. They are dressed in rags. They have a bag of rice and a belt of ammunition and that’s it. I was held in 23 different locations in about 70 days. They are organised. They can break camp in under four minutes.”

Fowler continued: “This was the most focused group of young men I have ever encountered in my life. They are totally committed to jihad. They said to me, ‘We fight to die, you fight to go home to your wife and kids. Guess who will win?’ Even if it takes 200 years … They want to turn the Sahel into a new Somalia.”

Fowler said the terrorist threat to Europe’s southern flank had risen after advanced weapons were plundered during the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. “They (AQIM) are now equipped with enormous amounts of Libyan weapons and I mean sophisticated weapons such as 20,000 [shoulder-mounted] SA-24 missiles, heavy mortars, heavy artillery and thousands of anti-tank mines … The UN has demanded they be handed over. Well, good luck with that.”

The Sahel region embraces southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Algeria, Niger, northern Nigeria, Chad, South Sudan and Darfur in western Sudan, northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Spinoza said a host of critical issues faced the region going beyond terrorism. They included recurring rebellions by nomadic Tuareg tribesmen, some of whom were armed by and fought as mercenaries for Gaddafi in this year’s Libya conflict, cocaine trafficking to Europe from the west African coast, and people and arms smuggling.

The region was also confronted by rapid population growth, weak and ineffective governance, inter-state tensions, poor access to education and employment, and increasingly acute food supply problems exacerbated by climate change and the southward advance of the Sahara desert, he said.

AQIM was exploiting the resulting instability, he suggested, spreading its influence south from Algeria and raising the prospect of transcontinental link-ups with Boko Haram militant Islamists in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Spinoza called for a joined-up approach by the international community, suggesting interested countries including France, the Netherlands and the US needed to coordinate their policies with regional and local players. “The EU’s strategy for security involves development, rule of law and (non-military) security but the EU needs to be more concrete,” he said.

Speaking this week, Kristalina Georgieva, the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid crisis response, said the Sahel was likely to experience severe food shortages next year because of erratic rainfall and localised dry spells.

Seven million people were already facing shortages in Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, she said. Current trends pointed to a massive problem of food availability next year.

The European commission last month increased humanitarian funding to the Sahel by €10m (£8.5m) to a total of €55m this year. Niger and Mauritania have already declared a crisis, prepared national action plans, and appealed for international help.

At the eastern end of the Sahel arc, 13 million people remained in need of emergency help and the crisis there was expected to last until the spring and perhaps the summer of 2012, Georgieva said.

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This article titled “Lithuania faces legal action over prisons set up for CIA rendition programme” was written by Ian Cobain, for The Guardian on Thursday 27th October 2011 20.05 UTC

The Lithuanian government is facing legal action in the European court of human rights over secret prisons that the CIA established in the country as part of its worldwide “extraordinary rendition” programme.

It becomes the third European government to face proceedings as a result of its support for the agency’s operations, Macedonia and Poland having already been accused of breaches of the European convention on human rights.

The Lithuanian parliament has acknowledged that the CIA established two prisons with the help of the country’s own security service, the SSD. One was at a riding school in a village 12 miles north of the capital, Vilnius, while the second is thought to have been at a guest house in Vlinius. The parliamentary report failed, however, to establish whether any prisoners had been held at the sites.

Lawyers representing the militant known as Abu Zubaydah say he was detained in Lithuania, and they began court proceedings in Strasbourg on Thursday. They allege that the Lithuanian government is guilty of multiple breaches of the European convention on human rights, first by allowing the CIA to fly Abu Zubaydah to the country and detain him in one of the secret prisons, and then by failing to investigate the matter itself.

The International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, a London-based organisation bringing the proceedings along with Abu Zubaydah’s US lawyers, said the case highlighted the level of European co-operation in the systematic use of illegal detention and torture after 9/11.

Helen Duffy, special counsel at the organisation, said: “While this was clearly led by the CIA, it would not have been possible without the co-operation of the European authorities. We need to find out what happened to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Crofton Black, a researcher with the legal charity Reprieve, which has mounted its own inquiries into the CIA’s Lithuanian operations, said: “Lithuania’s investigations have so far been manifestly insufficient in scope and rigour.”

There was no immediate response from the Lithuanian government.

The first details of the CIA’s secret Lithuanian connection emerged in 2009 in the US, where the media quoted former agency staff as saying that the government in Vilnius had granted permission for the establishment of the prisons in an attempt to bolster relations with Washington. One told ABC News that neither the agency nor the Bush administration offered the Lithuanian government anything in return, adding: “We didn’t have to. They were happy to have our ear.”

The riding school is said to have been sold in March 2004 – a month before Lithuania joined Nato – to a now defunct company called Elite LLC registered in Delaware and Panama. According to the AFP news agency, the US embassy in Vilnius funded the purchase at a cost of 2m litas (£510,000).

English-speaking construction contractors are said to have embarked on redevelopment work, and local people who asked for work say they were turned away by English-speaking guards. ABC News reported that the CIA constructed a cell block inside the covered riding area of the school and converted the stables into accommodation for interrogators.

According to the documents submitted to the court at Strasbourg, the site was sold to the Lithuanian government in January 2007 and now houses an SSD training centre.

The US media reports led to an inquiry by the national security committee of the Lithuanian parliament, the siemas, which confirmed the existence of the prisons and the arrival of CIA aircraft. The committee’s report said: “Three occasions were established on which, according to the testimony of the SSD officers, they received the aircraft and escorted what was brought by them with the knowledge of the heads of the SSD.” Despite this, the committee concluded that there was no evidence that any detainees had been taken to either prison.

A criminal investigation was subsequently opened by the prosecutor general’s office but later abandoned, with prosecutors saying they were unable to unearth any evidence that either facility was used to interrogate or detain al-Qaida suspects.

The lawyers representing Abu Zubaydah say the Lithuanian authorities are ignoring evidence, including flight records, that they say show a number of the CIA’s detainees were taken to the country. Abu Zubaydah is said to have been flown from Morocco to Vilnius in February 2005, and to have spent about 12 months there before being moved to Afghanistan.

He had previously been held in Guantánamo Bay, possibly Poland, and Thailand, where he was waterboarded 83 times in one month, according to a US justice department memorandum. He is currently back at Guantánamo, where the authorities are refusing permission for his statement to be passed to the court in Strasbourg.

The Polish government is facing European court proceedings over its assistance for CIA rendition operations, while Macedonia is facing proceedings after the country’s intelligence agents seized a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, and handed him to the CIA to be flown to Afghanistan. He was released five months later after the agency realised they had the wrong el-Masri.

According to several media reports in the US, the CIA also operated a secret prison in the centre of Bucharest, raising speculation that Romania may also face proceedings in the European court.

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This article titled “Too many people were willing to believe lurid slurs about Amanda Knox” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Wednesday 5th October 2011 19.29 UTC

Many aspects of the Meredith Kercher case have never made sense. For a start, Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox had no motive for murdering Knox’s young English flatmate, unless you bought the outlandish idea that they had, for some reason, conspired with Rudy Guede (the only person still in prison for the crime) to force Kercher into a “sex game” that “went wrong”. An astonishing number of people around the world were keen to believe this scenario, although there is no evidence to support it. Some still are.

Even Guede, who claims the four of them had been together that night, makes no claims of “sex games”. He says he had been “making out” with Kercher, and came back from the loo to find that she had been killed. There is hard, grisly, forensic evidence refuting his ludicrous story. Yet nothing puts Sollecito and Knox in the room with him, apart from the newspaper reports that Guede would have seen during the fortnight that passed before his arrest in Germany.

Implicating Knox and Sollecito was surely a handy distraction for a guilty man. Guede’s possible motive for lying seems astonishingly clear.

But why dwell too long on that, when a far more singular story can be kept alive, if only a motive for Knox can be confected? Happily, a motive now appears to have emerged. Knox, some people seem to want to believe, killed her flatmate, and inveigled two other men into helping her out, in order that she would be arrested, convicted, spend four years in prison, become a cause célèbre, be released on appeal, and, as the Daily Mail so charmingly put it, start “a new life as a professional martyr to injustice”. Why not? The woman is capable of anything, after all. Or so the entire planet has been told.

There are many deeply troubling facets to this case. But an important one, surely, is the degree to which it exposes so many humans as only too happy to believe lurid and destructive slurs served up by a tabloid media culture that they all know – or should know – exists to make money from peddling damaging sensation, the more outrageous the better.

That same debauched editorial process will deliver the much-resented payday to Knox. The sum she receives will be a fraction of what will have been “earned” by others from building her up as a she-devil in the first place, and turning her into a scandalous household name. Yet, somehow, even though it is the media who are providing the filthy cash, while simultaneously stoking the outrage about it so that more people will consume the new stories they are desperate to run, this all just proves – in some foolish minds – that Knox herself has a terrible character, and is clearly somone who will stop at nothing.

The internet teems with those who are reluctant to part with their beloved tale of an unspeakably depraved creature disguised as a pretty US student. They are determined to cling to the idea that there is something twisted and cruel about her. No wonder. The demolition of this idea suggests there is something twisted and cruel about them, or at least that they have been markedly credulous and prurient. They therefore point to the crime for which Knox’s conviction still stands – her naming of Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, the man who owned the bar where she worked, as a suspect during her initial police interrogation.

Now, naming an innocent party in an attempt to get yourself out of trouble is certainly a dreadful act, one for which got Knox three years in jail. However, if I had discovered the body of my murdered flatmate, then been badgered for hours by hostile police insisting they could prove I had been there, and wanting to know who was this Lumumba whom I’d texted “See you later” – well, I’m not certain I would have resisted the temptation to confirm what they wished to hear, then retract it hours later. Yet the world is full of people, it seems, who are convinced of their own ability to be scrupulously honest under all circumstances, and who condemn others for not being so.

Also, it seems preferable to place all the blame for Lumumba’s wrongful arrest on Knox, once again, rather than on the people who actually made the wrongful arrest so quickly and so carelessly.

Weirdly, I have never come across anyone suggesting that Guede is a bit of a reprobate even for fleeing the scene of a murder he didn’t commit, as he claims, let alone pointing the finger at two innocent people who served eight years in prison between them, partly on the strength of his evidence. I have, however, come across suggestions that it is pretty typical that the poor, black man is in prison for murder, while the rich, white people are walking free. Yet, Guede was known to have broken, entered and robbed, very probably armed with a knife, on three recent occasions previously, and was the only person tied by hard evidence to the scene.

So it would appear to me that skin colour is among the less relevant of circumstantial defences. In fact, it would seem to me that any prejudice in this case has been directed against privileged white flesh. It is wrong to think ill of people simply because they are black and poor, of course. But deciding to turn the tables and think ill of people simply because they are rich and white is hardly a sound, sensible, or helpful remedy. That self-consciously topsy-turvy mindset, exploited by the media, has played a large part in this terrible saga.

All that remains of the case against Sollecito and Knox is their “atypical phone activity”. Sollecito’s phone was either turned off or simply inactive – it’s hard to tell which, from conflicting reports of translated evidence – from 8.42pm until 6.52am. Knox’s was off or unused after her text to Lumumba, until she called Kercher’s phone at 12.07. She called Kercher, she says, having returned from Sollecito’s flat to find the front door of her own house open, the place ransacked and Kercher’s door locked. Yet it is straightforward explanations such as these that have been discounted and disbelieved all along.

The people most appallingly served by this long and terrible farrago – and it is by no means over yet – have been the grieving Kercher family. They have been served up this tripe by the Italian criminal justice system, and by the world’s media. They believed in the guilt of Sollecito and Knox, painful as that belief was. Now, as they say, they are “back to square one”. A lot of people share blame for the mental torture this family have been through. Amanda Knox is not one of them.

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This article titled “Amanda Knox’s lawyers hit back at police and prosecutors” was written by John Hooper in Perugia, for The Guardian on Thursday 29th September 2011 19.16 UTC

The judges and jurors who will decide whether Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend stay in jail for much of the rest of their lives for the murder of Meredith Kercher were told on Thursday not to let sympathy for the victim’s family blur their judgment.

The lawyer for the Kercher family had repeatedly stressed this week the horror of the crime and the suffering of the victim’s relatives. But that was not the point, said Knox’s counsel, Carlo Dalla Vedova.

“Be respectful of the pain caused by the death of Meredith Kercher. But don’t make the mistake of keeping two innocent people in jail,” he declared. “Pain is not a legal argument.”

His appeal came on a day of legal theatrics in which Knox’s two lawyers trained on the prosecution case a relentless barrage of indignation tinged with ridicule.

Knox’s other counsel, Luciano Ghirga, a portly attorney with a showman’s touch, had his client stifling giggles as he poured scorn on a prosecution witness – a homeless man who had contradicted Knox’s alibi for the night of the killing.

Earlier, Ghirga appeared close to losing his temper as he accused the prosecution of irregularities in the conduct of the investigation and trial. Like Dalla Vedova, he repeatedly implied that the prosecutors and police ignored evidence that failed to support their theories.

He told the court that Knox was midway in age between his own two children and that her trial had caused him personal distress. He ridiculed the notion that Knox – “the best sort of guest this city could have” – would suddenly opt to take part in a vicious and bloody killing. As he ended the defence’s summing up, he twice extended a hand towards Knox and caressed the back of her head. She leant forward so that her hair fell in front of her face, hiding it from view.

Dalla Vedova, an immaculately groomed Rome lawyer, wholly different from Ghirga, also hit an emotional note when he asked rhetorically how many times he and other members of her legal team, had heard Knox say: “Why won’t they believe me?”

The Seattle student is appealing against a 26-year sentence for murder. Her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who is serving a 25-year sentence is also appealing. A decision is expected on Monday after both appellants have addressed the court.

They are accused of taking part with a third man, Rudy Guede, in what a lower court decided was a drug-fuelled sex game that ended in tragedy when Knox slashed Kercher’s throat while she was held by the two men. Guede, a small-time drug dealer, was convicted separately.

Dalla Vedova told the court his client had spent more than 1,000 days in prison because of “evidence that cannot stand up to other hypotheses”. During that time, she had been “crucified – impaled in the piazza” for a crime she never committed, he said.

On Monday, another lawyer at the appeal had branded the 24 year-old Knox an “enchanting witch”. It was the latest of many religious or occult images to be deployed in a case that has also been laden with sexual allusion.

The appellants argue Kercher was killed by Guede alone after the Ivory Coast-born drifter broke into the flat she shared with Knox.

Dalla Vedova began a point-by-point examination of the case against the American by looking at a statement, made to police after an all-night interrogation.

She had not been given any legal assistance and, at the time she was no more than a ragazzina, a young girl, with scant knowledge of Italian on her first trip abroad, he said. Knox had come to Italy less than a month before to study, along with Kercher, at Perugia’s university for foreigners. Much of the rest of the prosecution case, claimed her lawyer, was based on “conjecture”.

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This article titled “Putin’s populist speech hints at Kremlin return” was written by Miriam Elder in Moscow, for The Guardian on Friday 23rd September 2011 17.15 UTC

Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the government should be more responsive to people’s concerns, at a party congress that could indicate whether he plans to return to the Kremlin next year.

Addressing members of the ruling United Russia party, the prime minister avoided the tough talk for which he has become known, focusing instead on issues close to the country’s increasingly dissatisfied populace. He vowed wages would be raised to an average 24,000 roubles (£480) a month by the year’s end. He promised better education and a renewed focus on pensioners, and acknowledged the problems of corruption and excessive bureaucracy.

Putin also mentioned the work of the country’s struggling human rights community – but implied the government should take over. “There is a category of people who criticise me,” Putin said, saying they “belong to the so-called human rights defender category”.

“They are not many but they, as a rule, bring attention to those problems that seem to neither affect nor relate to people’s everyday life,” he said. “But without solving these problems, society will not develop, it won’t feel complete.” It was the government’s job, he said, to address those problems.

The two-day United Russia congress may provide hints as to who will become Russia’s next president, a post widely expected to be taken back by Putin, who is also the leader – though not a member – of the party. An announcement could come on Saturday, when both Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the current president, are due to address a rally of 10,000 people in the Luzhniki football stadium.

The recent increase in Putin’s publicity stunts – from riding a Harley Davidson to “discovering” ancient Greek urns while diving – is among the factors being taken as a sign he plans to return to the presidency.

The congress’s main task is to present a list of candidates for December’s parliamentary vote. The person chosen to head the list could be a sign of who the presidential candidate will be.

The overwhelming focus of Putin’s address, and his responses to questions from deputies, focused on economic issues, which rank at the top of voter concerns. The “most fundamental rights of citizens”, he said, were “salary, vacation, healthcare and education”.

Putin also took his traditional shots at the west, saying Russia’s justice system was “probably better” than that of the United States and disparaging the protests that have erupted in financially stricken parts of Europe.

In Russia, he said, “everything we do is done for the sake of the people – or, at least, that’s how it should be”.

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This article titled “Banks under new pressure as ‘rogue trader’ loses $2bn” was written by Jill Treanor, for The Guardian on Thursday 15th September 2011 20.20 UTC

Pressure to accelerate reform of the banking industry is mounting as a star trader at the UBS investment bank remained in police custody in London amid allegations that he was at the heart of a rogue trading incident that has cost the Swiss bank about $2bn (£1.2bn).

Kweku Adoboli, 31, faced a night of questioning by officers from City of London police after being arrested at 3.30am when his managers became suspicious about his trading activities and alerted police and financial regulators. Police said he was being held on suspicion of “fraud by abuse of position”.

Adoboli’s father, a retired United Nations employee from Ghana, told Reuters in Accra that his “Godfearing family” was “heartbroken because fraud is not our way of life”.

John Adoboli, who had worked in trouble spots around the world, said his son’s girlfriend had confirmed his arrest. Adoboli Sr said he was calling his son’s phone and he hoped he would “be granted bail soon so I can hear his side of the story”.

The Nottingham University graduate’s arrest coincided with the third anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and sparked a 10% fall in UBS’s shares as it warned it might make a third-quarter loss.

Days after the government pledged to endorse ringfencing ideas put forward by Sir John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking, senior political figures used the UBS incident as ammunition to encourage reform. Lord Oakeshott, the former Lib Dem Treasury spokesman in the Lords, said it exposed the “toxic banking risk” still in the system. Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister during the banking crisis, warned taxpayers were still on the hook should a UK bank fail.

UBS, which had been fighting to restore its reputation after it became one of the biggest continental European casualties of the 2008 banking crisis, alerted City of London police at 1am on Thursday after it uncovering alleged “unauthorised trading” in the late afternoon and embarked on a wide-ranging internal investigation.

City of London police arrested Adoboli at the sprawling UBS office complex near Liverpool Street in central London, where around 6,000 people are employed. “The man was taken to a City of London police station for questioning and he remains in custody while officers are continuing to investigate this matter,” police said.

The allegations facing Adoboli follow a series of rogue trading incidents in the financial markets. Nick Leeson is perhaps the highest profile after he was jailed in Singapore for bringing down Barings Bank in 1995 but there have been many others, including Yasuo “Mr Copper” Hamanaka and Jérôme Kerviel, a trader at Société Générale, whom the French authorities sentenced to three years in prison last year after he ran up losses of €4.9bn. Kerviel is appealing against the sentence.

Adoboli now risks entering that list if charges are brought against him. The bank would not confirm his position at the bank but his entry on LinkedIn, the social networking site, described him as director of exchange traded funds (ETF) and delta one trading at UBS.

This operation, in the equities division on the third floor of the UBS head office, was known internally as a profitable – and risk free – area of business. But it is understood that the trading desk was largely silent on Thursday

Staff were said to be stunned as Adoboli and his colleagues were regarded as “stars” by their colleagues and top management.ETFs are complex financial instruments that comprise a basket of investments intended to mimic a market’s movements. They have become an area into which firms have expanded since the subprime mortgage crisis. Traders on so-called delta one desks try to make huge profits on tiny differences between prices.

The Financial Services Authority, the City regulator, is understood to have been alerted in the early hours and Swiss regulators were watching the situation closely.

The Serious Fraud Office may also become involved after it said it was “seeking discussions” with the bank, the City of London police and the FSA about how to proceed if fraud needed to be investigated. The SFO had already issued a warning about the “inherent dangers” of ETFs because of their complexity.

UBS is expected to reveal more details on Friday about the allegations facing Adoboli but the City was rife with speculation that he had been caught out by the sudden move by the Swiss National Bank last week to lower the rate of exchange of the Swiss franc.

On 6 September, the Swiss National Bank warned that it would no longer allow one Swiss franc to be worth more than €0.83 – equivalent to SFr1.20 to the euro. “The Swiss currency moved by 8% straight away which is a huge move for foreign exchange markets.

Probably a good guess as to where the loss came from, but at the moment we do not know,” said Louise Cooper, analyst at BGC Partners.

Amid concerns about the health of Europe’s banking system, Oakeshott told a debate on the Vickers reforms in the Lords that “this reminds us how much toxic banking risk remains in the system, and how urgent radical reform is”.

He added: “The problem is that big investment banks are full of rogue traders: it is what they do.”

Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister at the time of the banking crisis, told the Guardian: “Until this government does something – either Vickers or Vickers ‘plus’ – the taxpayers remain on the hook.”

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This article titled “Russia refuses more Syria sanctions” was written by Ian Black, for The Guardian on Monday 12th September 2011 19.44 UTC

Russia has rebuffed western attempts to increase the pressure on the Syrian regime, led by Bashar al-Assad, as new United Nations figures show at least 2,600 people have been killed since anti-government protests erupted in March.

President Dmitry Medvedev said after talks with David Cameron that additional pressure was “absolutely not needed” because existing UN and European Union sanctions were squeezing the regime.

Britain, the US and France have been pushing for tougher action by the UN but have met opposition from Russia and China, veto-wielding permanent members of the security council, and others.

The latest UN casualty figures – 400 more than previously given – were announced on Monday by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, who called the situation “dire” and again complained that Syria had refused access for a UN humanitarian assessment team.

Syria has banned almost all journalists from entering the country but new images have emerged of killings, injuries and funerals of victims.

One clip, [WARNING: Contains explicit images] posted by the Local Co-ordination Committees, appeared to show the final moments of a 14-year-old boy, Izzat al-Babidi, reportedly shot in the head during a demonstration in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Monday morning.

Other pictures showed hundreds of people attending the funeral of another boy, Subhi Salam, who was fatally wounded by a sniper during protests last Friday.

Pillay’s figure of 2,600 dead was immediately contradicted by a senior aide to Assad, Bouthaina Shaaban. “There are 700 casualties among the army and the police, and 700 among the rebels,” she said in Moscow. “We have a list [of the victims' names], and we can provide it.”

Shaaban’s visit was part of an attempt by Syria to stave off any danger that its Russian ally would abandon it. Medvedev appeared to show that he would stand firm, calling for a “well-balanced position between both parties to the conflict, the Syrian government and the rebels”. This was a far cry from the now firm western position that Assad has lost all legitimacy. Russia’s support brought a call from Syrian opposition activists for a “day of anger”.

Al-Arabiya TV quoted opposition sources as claiming that Syrian military aircraft had been flying low over the central city of Homs, where many have died in recent weeks. Syrian activists describe fighting in the nearby Rastan area between army defectors and loyalists, and an incipient “low-intensity civil war”, with Islamists smuggling in weapons from abroad.

The Saudi-owned channel also reported three clergymen from the Assad family’s Alawite sect in Homs as distancing themselves from the “atrocities” carried out by the regime. This week, opposition figures plan to unveil the final makeup of the Syrian National Council, a broad coalition of different anti-Assad groups.

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This article titled “Russian satellite missing within hours of takeoff” was written by Tom Parfitt in Moscow, for The Guardian on Thursday 18th August 2011 18.35 UTC

A Russian communications satellite, the biggest to be built in Europe, went missing hours after takeoff on Thursday.

The £146m satellite was sent into orbit by a Proton rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and disappeared just as flight controllers began to celebrate the launch.

If the Express-A4M satellite is irretrievable it will be a bruising failure for Russia; three navigational satellites for the Glonass global positioning system crashed into the Pacific, off Hawaii, shortly after blasting off in December.

Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the satellite’s Briz-M unit, the engine block responsible for positioning it correctly in high orbit, had fired correctly over four stages but contact was lost before the final firing.

The agency said it had established the location of the engine block but the whereabouts of the satellite remained unknown. “The radio systems are not detecting the satellite in its fixed orbit. There are no signals from the satellite,” a source told Interfax news agency.

The satellite weighed 5.8 tonnes and was fitted with 63 transponders and 10 antennae. It was designed to provide digital television, telephone and internet services across the former Soviet Union.

Space industry sources suggested Russia would turn to Norad, the US-Canadian aerospace defence command, and the Toulouse space centre in France for help in locating the satellite.

The incident is especially embarrassing for Roscosmos after Vladimir Popovkin, head of the agency, said on Wednesday that the organisation would be moving resources away from manned spaceflight.

Popovkin said the satellite launch represented “a change of priorities”. “For us the main thing is becoming the satisfaction of Russia’s demands for satellite information, including communications services and broadcasting.”

The agency said on Thursday it was setting up a commission to investigate the failed launch.

The satellite was jointly built by the Khrunichev centre in Moscow – named after a Soviet-era aviation minister, Mikhail Khrunichev – and Astrium, a Paris-based aerospace company. It was commissioned by the Russian ministry of communications.

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This article titled “Mikhail Gorbachev: I should have abandoned the Communist party earlier” was written by Jonathan Steele in Moscow, for The Guardian on Tuesday 16th August 2011 22.02 UTC

Politicians rarely admit mistakes, but Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev always was in a different class. So it is not surprising that, as he looked back on his six tumultuous years in power at the head of the Soviet Union, he was willing to count the errors he had made.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian he named at least five. They led not just to his own downfall 20 years ago; they also brought the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of an unregulated economic free-for-all that turned a few Russians into billionaires while plunging millions of people into poverty.

Gorbachev cuts a relaxed, even cheerful figure these days, but there are still the occasional twinges of bitterness, particularly when discussing his arch-rival Boris Yeltsin, or when he described the plotters who put him under house arrest in the Crimea during their abortive coup 20 years ago .

“They wanted to provoke me into a fight and even a shootout and that could have resulted in my death,” he said.

Asked to name the things he most regretted, he replied without hesitation: “The fact that I went on too long in trying to reform the Communist party.” He should have resigned in April 1991, he said, and formed a democratic party of reform since the Communists were putting the brakes on all the necessary changes.

This judgement will be of particular interest to historians since it is Gorbachev’s first public admission that he should have left the Communist party several months before the coup of August 1991. In the memoirs he published in 1995 he did not go so far.

By the spring of 1991 Gorbachev was caught between two powerful trends which were narrowing his room for manoeuvre. On one side conservatives and reactionaries in the party were trying to reverse his policies; on the other were progressives who wanted to establish a full multi-party system and take the country towards market reforms.

Things came to a head at a session of the Communist party’s central committee in April 1991. At a Communist party central committee meeting, several speakers called for the declaration of a state of emergency and the re-imposition of censorship. According to his memoirs, Gorbachev reacted sharply: “I’ve had enough of demagoguery. I am resigning.”

In his Guardian interview, he explained what happened in detail: “The Politburo [the top decision-making body within the central committee] went into a meeting and sat for three hours without me. I was told they criticised me and the discussion ran loose. Three hours later they invited me back and asked me to withdraw my resignation. During that time my supporters in the central committee had opened a list and more than a hundred people put their names behind the idea of creating a new party.”

When the central committee resumed its session, tempers had cooled, Gorbachev withdrew his resignation and no one wanted the issue put to a vote. (Even if he had resigned from the party, he would have remained Soviet president). In his memoirs, Gorbachev wrote: “Today I often wonder whether I should have insisted on resigning the post of general secretary. Such a decision might well have been preferable for me personally. But I felt I had no right to ‘abandon the party’.” The party had ruled Russia since 1917 and it was hard for anyone in Russia, particularly an official who had spent his entire career as a party functionary, to imagine it going out of power.

Today Gorbachev’s doubts have gone. “I now think I should have used that occasion to form a new party and should have insisted on resigning from the Communist party. It had become a brake on reforms even though it had launched them. But they all thought the reforms only needed to be cosmetic. They thought that painting the facade was enough, when actually there was still the same old mess inside the building.”

His second regret, he said, is that he did not start to reform the Soviet Union and give more power to its 15 republics at an earlier stage. By the time he began to think of creating a looser federation in early 1991 the three Baltic states had already declared independence. Blood had flowed in Lithuania and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus. Under its ambitious leader, Boris Yeltsin, Russia, the largest republic, was flexing its muscles and demanding more control over the Soviet budget. Some analysts say the whole Soviet system was unreformable and any change was bound to lead to an unstoppable process of increasingly dramatic transformation. It was inevitable, according to this analysis, that Gorbachev lost control.

In part because of his generous character, sunny personality, and happy home-life (until his wife Raisa Maximovna died of leukemia in 1999), Gorbachev remains an optimist. Loss has not embittered him or made him cynical. He argues that all the main Soviet problems were on the verge of resolution until the August 1991 coup wrenched the competing forces into a new dynamic.

The Communist party was due to draft a new programme in November 1991. Parliament had adopted an “anti-crisis plan” to accelerate economic reform. The 12 Soviet republics that remained after the Baltics left had accepted the text of a new treaty that would give them more political and economic autonomy while leaving defence and foreign affairs to the Soviet government. The treaty was to be signed on 20 August.

“Here I made a mistake. I went on holiday. I probably could have done without 10 days of vacation … I was all ready to fly to Moscow to sign the treaty,” he said. But on 18 August a group of people arrived uninvited. I picked up the phone to ask what kind of people they were and who had sent them, but there was no line. The phone had been cut off.”

Gorbachev was with his wife, daughter Irina and her family in a government villa at Foros on the shore of the Black Sea. The buildings were under guard for three days until the coup collapsed because of Yeltsin’s resistance, splits in the army, and internal disagreements among the group of around a dozen plotters who were all ministers or senior Communist party officials.

Gorbachev vigorously rejected theories that he had given a green light to the plot. “People claim falsely that Gorbachev still had communications and that he had organised everything. They say Gorbachev thought he would come out the winner, whatever happened. That’s nonsense, total nonsense”, he said. “These people wanted to unseat the leader and preserve the old system. That’s what they wanted. They demanded that I write a statement asking to be released from the duties of the presidency because of ill-health.”

Raisa Maximovna kept a diary during their house arrest. In it she reported that Gorbachev warned the guards he would take “extreme measures” if his links to the outside world were not restored.

This was all bluff, Gorbachev told me. “That was part of my manoeuvring … I just wanted to put pressure on them but I wanted to avoid provoking them … My extreme measure was diplomatic and political. I was able to outplay them. If there hadn’t been movement in Moscow, my position would have been left hanging in the air. But here in Moscow people were protesting. They were led by Yeltsin and this is why we have to give him due credit and hand it to Yeltsin. He did the right thing”.

As one of the Guardian’s correspondents in Moscow during the coup, I reminded Gorbachev that Yeltsin’s call for a general strike went unheeded and many Russians were in despair, feeling the coup would succeed. The older generation remembered how hardline colleagues had easily removed Khrushchev and brought the era of de-Stalinisation to an end in 1964. I asked Gorbachev what would have happened if the plotters had arrested Yeltsin as well as Gorbachev at the beginning. Could they have won?

The former Soviet leader said hypothetical questions were of little value. The balance of forces was such that the coup was doomed whatever the plotters did. The coup plotters were in confusion because of his resistance and refusal to resign the presidency. He also pointed out that special forces mutinied when ordered to storm the White House where Yeltsin was surrounded by thousands of supporters.

Gorbachev listed several achievements he was most proud of, starting with one word: “Perestroika.”

Meaning restructuring, perestroika was the programme of reforming the Soviet Union’s political and economic system that Gorbachev set in motion soon after he came to power in March 1985. But it also involved the restructuring of international relations based on nuclear disarmament, the rejection of forcible intervention abroad and a recognition that even superpowers lived in an interdependent world. No country was an island or should act unilaterally.

The new Soviet policy of non-intervention allowed the eastern European states to produce internal regime change by peaceful means. “What we were able to achieve within the country and in the international arena was of enormous importance. It predetermined the course of events in ending the cold war, moving toward a new world order and, in spite of everything, producing gradual movement away from a totalitarian state to a democracy.”

Gorbachev has never reconciled himself to Yeltsin’s nine years in power which he sees as a time of chaos. Nor to Yeltsin’s pact with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to declare the Soviet Union dead in December 1991. He should have got Yeltsin out of the way several years before he became a direct rival. “I was probably too liberal and democratic as regards Yeltsin. I should have sent him as ambassador to Great Britain or maybe a former British colony,” he said.

He praises Putin for initially restoring stability until about 2006. Even though he used some authoritarian methods, that was acceptable in Gorbachev’s view. “But then came the moment when I saw him changing the election system, abolishing elections for governors of Russia’s regions and getting rid of the single-member constituencies. I counted 20 changes that I couldn’t support,” he added.

As the hour-long interview neared its end, I asked the former Soviet president about change in China, the world’s largest Communist state. Gorbachev takes the long view of history but is sure reform there is inevitable. Any suggestion that he should have followed China by starting with economic rather than political reform is wrong, he says.

“In the Soviet Union nothing would have happened if we had done that. The people were cut out, totally isolated from decision-making. Our country was at a different stage of development from China and for us to solve problems we had to involve people.”

“Do you think the Chinese will be able to avoid the same hard choices at some point in time? There will be a moment when they will have to decide on political change and they are already nearing that point.”

In March this year, Gorbachev celebrated his 80th birthday in London at a gala evening in the Royal Albert Hall, hosted by Kevin Spacey and Sharon Stone. An eccentric array of singers performed for him, including Shirley Bassey, Paul Anka, Melanie C as well as the German rock band the Scorpions, who were the second western group to play in the Soviet Union.

But the highlight was a performance on a large screen of Gorbachev singing a Russian love song. The audience was stunned by the clarity as well as the passion of his voice. I told him I didn’t know he could sing so beautifully, and had this hidden talent.

He laughed. ” If necessary I’ll become a pop singer,” he said. “Raisa liked it when I sang.”

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