• Injured pair return;Hockey

Olympic Games, starring Alain Delon and Gerard Depardieu.
The film has even made the unglamorous Nord Pas-de-Calais fashionable. Children are talking Ch'ti in playgrounds, calling each other "bilouth", a term of endearment that translates as "little willy". At Parisian dinner parties it is even acceptable to admire Boon's lowbrow effort. Francois Fillon, the Prime Minister, was asked to explain the success. "It shows our need for local roots at a time of globalisation - and it is also due to Dany Boon's talent for comedy," he said.
This is where the numberplates come in. The Pas de Calais and le Nord have long been campaigning against a decision to remove from next year the numerals that denote the owner's departement. Parisians may not care about losing their 75, but northerners are proud of their 62 or 59. Ministers are now reconsidering the reform in the light of Ch'ti pride.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
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Features

Are you sure you're the person you think you are?;Comment;Opinion

Ian Angell

1,025 字

2008 年 3 月 7 日

The Times

T

19

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
* Potential horrors lurk behind the ID card project
The ID card project is still on track - more or less. Jacqui Smith is just the latest in a long line of Home Office ministers to sell us the benefits of ID cards, while casually informing us of the latest rise in costs or slippage in its implementation schedule. Ms Smith is also yet another Home Secretary who subscribes to the "pixie dust" school of technology: computation is a magic substance to be sprinkled over problems, that, hey presto, then vanish. Little wonder that Britain has an appalling record in government IT projects.
The ID project is one of the biggest computer systems envisaged - far more complex than the failing NHS system. And it's another disaster waiting to happen. Still the politicians naively claim there will be no problems: it will be totally secure because of biometrics. Apparently iris scans, fingerprints, face-recognition software will all work perfectly, be amazingly cheap to implement - and all foolproof. It must be true, as they've been told this by those selling the technology. Baroness Anelay of St Johns, with a group of parliamentarians, was once given a demonstration of a facial recognition system. It failed; indeed the system subsequently crashed, twice. The reason? The baroness was told her face was "too bland".
The only property that all systems have in common is that they fail. And the bigger the system - 60 million entries on a compulsory ID card database - the greater the opportunity of failure. Systems are much like any life form: they degrade over time, they entropy. In the case of databases, the pick up errors and then build data error upon error. The DVLA in Swansea in 2006, for instance, admitted that a third of entries contained at least one error, and that the proportion was getting worse.
We've all had encounters with computer systems that get it wrong. Barclays once refused one of my transactions because they said I was accessing an account owned by a teenage girl named Ian Angell, who lived at my address and was a professor at LSE. I still had to take a morning off work to explain that a 14-year-old couldn't own an account that, according to their own records, had been open for 35 years.
And however scrupulous the managers might be, errors leak and take on a life of their own. They are sampled by other databases, known as "farming": errors, even when corrected in the original database, live on elsewhere.
But the ID project will be different, we are told. According to the rhetoric, an ID card, one central point of reference, will be so much more efficient and beneficial than you having to prove your identity daily, by producing driving licences, gas bills and so on. Its proponents fail to see that if any of these documents is erroneous, then we don't use the one with, say, a mistake in the address to prove our identity. With the ID card, we won't have the choice. Even if the card is not compulsory, all financial systems will converge on it, and anyone without a card faces great cost and inconvenience. Just like Oyster cards on the London Underground, you're not forced, but it's so much more expensive and tiresome without one.
However, the ID card itself isn't the real problem: it's the ID register. There, each entry will eventually take on a legal status. In time, all other proofs of identity will refer back to the one entry. If the register is wrong - and remember fallible human hands will at some stage have to handle your personal information - then all other databases will be wrong too. Given the propensity of officialdom to trust the details on their computer screen, rather than the person in front of them, you will have to conform to your entry in the register - or become a non-person.
In effect, your identity won't reside in the living flesh and blood of you, but in the database. You will be separated from your identity; you will no longer own it. All your property and money will de facto belong to the database entry. You only have access to your property with the permission of the database. Paradoxically, you only agreed to register to protect yourself from "identity theft", and instead you find yourself victim of the ultimate identity theft - the total loss of control over your identity.
Errors won't just happen by accident. It's possible to imagine that workers on the ID database will be corrupted, threatened or blackmailed into creating perfectly legal ID cards for international terrorists and criminals. Then the ID card, far from eliminating problems, will be a one-stop shop for identity fraud; foreign terrorists, illegal immigrants will be waived past all immigration checks.
At a recent Ditchley Park conference on combating organised crime, a persistent warning from the law enforcement authorities was that criminal gangs had placed "sleepers" in financial sector companies, and they were just waiting for the one big hit. The perpetrators of 80 per cent of all computer security lapses are not hackers, but employees. Cryptographic systems don't help if the criminal has been given the keys to the kingdom. Why should the ID centre be immune, especially when there will be nearly 300 government departments logging in. Furthermore, the register will be the No 1 target for every hacker on the planet: the Olympic Games of hacking.
So why is the Goverment so keen to force ID cards on us? Is it because ministers are control freaks who, having read 1984, only saw it as a wishlist. John Lennon may have been right: "Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs." More likely, ministers have been dazzled by the myth of the perfectibility of computers.
Ian Angell is Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
文件 T000000020080307e4370005y

Sport

Captivated by thrill of watching fallen giants get up off the floor to ris e again;Comment;Opinion

Simon Barnes

1,225 字

2008 年 3 月 7 日

The Times

T

87

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
I have been looking forward to the fallibility of Roger Federer for a long time, ever since I first saw him reach perfection at Wimbledon six years ago. Please don't think I have anything against perfection, but when you have watched as much sport as I have, you look for something more.
Federer has won 12 grand-slam tournament titles, been No1 since February 2004 and dominated his sport with style, grace, elegance, venom, accuracy, tactical brilliance, glorious angles, extraordinary reactions and a forehand bafflingly described as "a liquid whip".
Many say that Federer is the greatest tennis player to pick up a racket. Most experts disagree only on the subject of how far he will outdistance the records of lesser players. But now, Federer is at crisis, and I am enthralled.
This is not because I wish bad things on him. This is not what Australians call Tall Poppy Syndrome: the ever-present need to cut exceptional people down to the same level as the rest of us. I am fascinated by giants, I have spent most of my professional life in pursuit of giants and I have learnt one or two things about giants as a result.
The core question is this: what does a giant do about fallibility? Federer, like many supreme performers, was able to add the liquid whip of invincibility to his armoury. He was able to beat people by reputation, by means of his serene certainty of victory. That is as good as a break start in each set.
But now that weapon has been taken from him. He lost in the semi-finals of the Australian Open this year, ending a run of ten consecutive grand-slam tournament finals. Then, still worse, he lost his next match, going out in the first round in the Barclays Dubai Championships this week to Andy Murray.
Federer can no longer rely on invincibility. He can no longer, and this is a still bigger blow, rely on mere excellence. Flawed performances have opened the door; now every player in the top ten is aware of his weaknesses and will seek to exploit them.
This could be the end, or perhaps not. Many sporting champions have been stripped of their invincibility and the physical talents that set them apart. Where do you go from there? Bjorn Borg, in a similar situation, chose to quit. He left tennis at the age of 26.
Pete Sampras won 13 grand-slam tournament titles before it all went wrong. But then he returned to Wimbledon - as champion, naturally - and lost in the fourth round to a promising upstart named Federer. The next year, he fell apart. He lost a second-round match at Wimbledon to the immortal George Bastl, in a tournament he had won seven times, at a place he was unbeatable. The sight of a great champion reading and re-reading a motivational letter from his wife was one of the most poignant images of the fallen champion in the history of sport.
But a few months later, Sampras summoned up one utterly glorious last hurrah. He won the US Open, beating Andre Agassi in the final, and it was a crystal clear, irrefutable demonstration of the principle that great champions can win great matches even when stripped of their best skills and cloak of invincibility. Great champions have something more than mere ability.
It happens in all sports. Let us turn to Sebastian Coe. That's right, Lord Coe, the smooth-tongued diplomat, the slim fellow with the suit, one of the most effective politicians in the history of British sport. I know his secret. The man is a berserker. He has a temper like Krakatoa, and it is built on an inner anger of molten rock. He has an aggression that makes Vinnie Jones look like the amateur he is.
I know this because I watched the 1,500metres final of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Four years previously, Coe won the 1,500metres in Moscow on sheer gazelle-like talent. It was the occasion when he gave his talent full rein, and it was glorious to behold.
After four years in which injury ate away at his performances and the widespread belief that we had seen the best of him niggled at his soul, he went into the Olympic 1,500metres final. In three and a bit laps, anger, aggression and resentment turned him into the Human Torch. Unable to control himself, he celebrated by roaring at the press box: "Who says I'm f***ing finished?" He stabbed his finger upwards so often and so hard that I feared he might do the sky an injury. He, too, found something more than talent.
It can happen in team games. Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee were the finest fast bowlers on the planet. Working in harness, they terrorised the batsmen of the world and changed the way cricket is played. As they got older, Thomson - perhaps the better, and certainly the more fearsome - was unable to adjust. But Lillee cut down his pace and expenditure of effort and became a bowler of brilliant intelligence. He had not only talent, but also the talent to adapt.
Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, the twin knights of rowing, were each required to find something more than talent: and both did so. Redgrave, famously unretiring for a tilt at a fifth gold medal, met setback after setback, including the onset of diabetes. He was no longer the dominant force in his sport, but by adapting from the pair to the four, by ceding much of the moral leadership to Pinsent, and, above all, by his own phenomenal desire, he forced out one last success.
Four years on, Pinsent was in a crew that fell apart, endured every kind of strife and finally, at the Olympic Games, seemed beaten ten strokes from the finish. That final outpouring of will from Pinsent was one of the most vivid passages of sport I have seen. When you take everything from a champion, this is what is left.
But let us have one more, and perhaps the greatest. What did Muhammad Ali do when he no longer had the agility, the aura of invincibility, the quickness of hand, the lightness of foot? What was his response when floating and stinging were beyond him? What did he do, when he faced one of the greatest punchers in boxing history, the unbeatable George Foreman?
That was the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight in Zaire in which Ali showed that he had courage, patience, the brilliance and the strength of will to beat Foreman with his rope-a-dope tactic. It was a night that proved, once again, that when you take everything away from a champion - the skills that made him great and the aura that allowed him to stay that way - you can still find something more.
I don't know exactly what it is, and nor does anybody else, but by God, I know it when I see it. It is nothing less than the quintessence of greatness, and I long to see it again. Perhaps at Wimbledon this summer.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
文件 T000000020080307e43700053

Overseas news

Terracotta tourists safe after hostage siege

Jane MacArtney in Beijing

508 字

2008 年 3 月 6 日

The Times

T

36

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
Australians seized by Chinese 'bomber' on bus
Police marksman shoots him dead
A trip to see China's famed Terracotta Army took a terrifying turn for a group of Australian tourists when they were taken hostage by a man claiming to be carrying explosives.
The drama unfolded yesterday as the ten men and women, all travel agents on an education tour, visited the Drum and Bell Tower Square in the heart of the ancient city of Xi'an, near one of the last old low-rise districts that has escaped the developers' bulldozers.
A Chinese man boarded their bus and took the group hostage, telling their translator that he had explosives strapped to his body.
Police arrived and the man, identified as Xia Tao from the Yanliang district of the city, said he wanted to negotiate.
He allowed nine of the Australians to leave the bus but kept a 48-year-old woman from New South Wales and the Chinese translator as hostages. Fearing that the man could blow up the bus in the crowded city centre, police persuaded him to transfer with the hostages to a smaller vehicle. The police agreed to resume negotiations with the man once the smaller bus had been driven outside the city.
The man, whose demands apparently included a request to speak to the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, was then driven along the highway to the airport.
Reports differ about what happened next. Some say the negotiations broke down, others that a police marksman took aim when the vehicle stopped at a highway toll.
What is certain is that the hostage-taker was shot dead near the tollgate in an operation overseen by the city's boss, the powerful Communist Party Secretary of Xi'an.
The Australian woman and her Chinese companion were unharmed.
Janaline Oh, the spokeswoman at the Australian Embassy in Beijing, said: "The Australian Government is pleased that the hostages are now safe." The Australians later flew to Shanghai, where they received consular assistance.
It was not known if the group visited what must be a highlight of any trip to China: the Terracotta Army - more than 8,000 life-size figures of warriors dating back to about 200BC that are buried around the grave of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, in the countryside outside Xi'an.
The taking of hostages, especially foreigners, is rare in China. Last year police in Shanghai shot dead a knife-wielding man who took a four-year-old girl hostage in a fast-food outlet.
The latest incident involving foreign tourists in a city that is one of the most popular destinations for visitors to China must have jolted security authorities preparing for the Olympic Games in Beijing in August.
Security will be tightened around Beijing and at entry points to China during the Games and a security zone will be set up around the capital's airport to prevent aircraft from being shot down.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
文件 T000000020080306e43600050

Features

They shot us, we beat them;Film;Screen

Monica Porter

656 字

2008 年 3 月 6 日

The Times

T

Times2 13

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
MONICA PORTER on the family memories stirred by a new film about Hungary, 1956
On a sunny day in October 1956, my father was standing in the square before the parliament building in Budapest, part of a huge crowd. Two days earlier the Hungarian revolution had exploded, as the nation struggled to throw off the shackles of Soviet-sponsored tyranny. Pro-democracy students had been arrested or killed and the Red Army was called in.
But the mood in the square was hopeful. Soviet soldiers had climbed out of their tanks into the autumn sunshine and were fraternising with the Hungarians around them. It seemed that the inconceivable might just happen, that freedom was within Hungary's grasp.
Then the massacre began. From the rooftops the AVO, the Hungarian secret police, opened fire with their machine-guns, killing dozens of people, including three Soviet soldiers. In retaliation the tanks began firing into the crowd and people fled in terror, my father among them. Soon the square was empty but for hundreds of bloody corpses.
The episode is graphically depicted in Children of Glory, a new film about the Hungarian uprising. Produced by Andrew Vajna from an original screenplay by Joe Eszterhas - two Hungarian-born Hollywood power merchants - the film has been given the polished Hollywood treatment, but its feel is no less authentic for that. The allHungarian cast is credible and the textures of 1950s Eastern bloc dilapidation, the muted colours of despair, are real enough.
In the film, as in my family history, the slaughter in the square marks a turning point. It is when the viewer senses that the rebellion is doomed; the Soviet Union has no intention of releasing its captive state. When my father returned home that day he told my mother we would have to leave our country. "What kind of future have we here?" he asked. And so we became part of the 200,000-strong refugee exodus to the West.
Since the communist takeover in 1948, Hungary had been in the grip of a totalitarian nightmare. It was particularly bad for my parents as neither had joined the Communist Party. My father, Peter Halasz, was a writer and journalist. After all the non-party publications were closed down he turned to script-writing at the state film studio. But his work fell short of the requirements of Marxism-Leninism, and he was sent to a residential school of political indoctrination for six months.
My mother, Vali Racz, had been a celebrated chanteuse, often called "the Hungarian Marlene Dietrich". But she was branded a "class enemy" and her career was effectively over. Small wonder that they decided to forge a new life for us.
As Children of Glory also shows, another battle between Hungary and the USSR was being fought at the same time, on the far side of the world. At the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne the water polo teams of the two countries were competing for gold and, in what came to be known as the "blood in the water" match, Hungary thrashed the Soviet Union 4-0. Spectators, waved the Hungarian flag with its hated Stalinist emblem cut out -just as the freedom-fighters had done.
At the film's core is the fictional love affair between one of the water-polo players and a student who inspires him to get involved in the uprising. It's a little formulaic, but for me they are symbols of the tragedy that befell my country: they symbolise the people who sacrificed their lives in a futile fight against dictatorship, and those compelled to relinquish their homeland.
The film also made me think of my son Nick, London born and bred. Having shunned cricket, football and rugby, he took up water polo. Pure coincidence? Maybe.
Children of Glory is released on March 14
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2008
文件 T000000020080306e4360000g

Sport

Brown supports attempt to stop Zimbabwe's tour;Cricket

Ashling O'Connor

432 字

2008 年 3 月 5 日

The Times

T

77

‚ń文

(c) 2008 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
Britain would back a ban on a tour next year by the Zimbabwe cricket team in protest at President Robert Mugabe's regime, but a blanket boycott of all athletes from the troubled African nation was ruled out yesterday.
Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is behind the ECB in its quest to cancel plans to play two five-day matches and three one-day internationals against Zimbabwe in Britain next summer, according to Downing Street sources. But, contrary to a BBC report, the Government is not considering banning all Zimbabwean sportsmen and women from competing in Britain in a bid to step up the pressure on Mugabe.
Such a radical move would have raised complicated issues regarding individuals of Zimbabwean nationality pursuing their profession in Britain but not representing their country. Examples cited were Cara Black, the tennis player, defending her Wimbledon doubles title this summer, Benjani Mwaruwari continuing to play for Manchester City and Nick Price, the golfer, competing at the Open Championship.
It would also have proved unworkable in 2012, when London hosts the