She does not have to start from scratch, as she does over Kosovo.According to Michail Wladimiroff, another amicus curiae, there are crucial differences between this trial and Nuremberg, not the least of which is that this tribunal is set up under UN auspices. Another element is that “the Germans had a track record for documenting everything”. This week the prosecution case will be more a question of assembling “circumstantial evidence” from witnesses rather than pieces of paper.Can all this result in a fair trial? Professor Wladimiroff says he hopes that people conclude that it was fair But Mr Kay is not so upbeat “It remains to be seen,” he said.. Arnold Schwarzenegger charged back on to America’s screens this weekend with a film that not everyone wants to see because of the echoes with recent – all too real – events. He plays a fireman whose wife and son are killed when foreign terrorists blow up a Los Angeles office building, engulfing it in balls of fire. Some in the industry, which is preparing for the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, are now wishing out loud that the studio had consigned it to oblivion.Most enraged are New York firemen, who at the World Trade Centre endured an experience more fearful than anything the most fevered studio could imagine. It did not help that New York’s former mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, got top billing at the film’s Manhattan premiere on last week.Because most of its action involves Mr Schwarzenegger rampaging through the hills of Colombia, seeking revenge on the terrorist who wiped out his family, it has also enraged activists who point out that not all Colombians are killers.Nor are the critics stampeding to praise the film.

“Its preposterous contrivances and ludicrous implausibilities make it look like the very definition of puerile Hollywood superstar fantasy in the present real-world context,” smouldered Todd McCarthy, chief critic at Variety. He suggests that the British screenwriters, David and Peter Griffiths, could have written the script “when they were 12 years old”.Mr Giuliani’s appearance at the New York premiere was questioned because the studio said it was “in association with the Twin Towers Fund”. The ex-mayor founded the fund last year to help families of the firefighters who died. “It saddens us any time a tragedy is used to promote a movie,” complained Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers’ Association.The studio insisted last week that the film had received a positive response at test screenings It is now for the public to pass judgement..

The US has been accused of openly flouting the Geneva Conventions at an Afghan jail where scores of prisoners are at risk of dying from disease and malnutrition, just days after President Bush said Taliban fighters should be protected under international law. It is now hoping that humanitarian groups and charities will step in and improve the conditions at the jail, where 3,300 prisoners are squeezed together in grossly overcrowded, unsanitary cells, and where many have already died from disease.An inspection team from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) visited the prison recently and declared it “a quiet atrocity”. Their report portrayed an institution where there was no running water and little food or medicine. Up to 110 men were being held in cells designed for no more than 15.Until the middle of last month, the US helped to operate the prison along with General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the warlord who is now deputy defence minister in the interim Afghan administration. A number of the prisoners – most of whom were captured after the fall of the northern city of Kunduz – were taken to Kandahar or Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for further questioning.But despite the appalling conditions at the prison, the US says it is no longer having anything to do with it, even though it claims the right to return to interview other prisoners. Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of PHR, said: “The information is that the Pentagon is doing nothing for the conditions at the prison.

That is a decision that has been taken at four-star general level. They are not taking responsibility for that prison.” The group has argued that under the Geneva Conditions the US still has responsibility for conditions at the jail. A rafter meant for a palace, now a kitchen shelf in Portwrinkle.Though he was no climber, I can picture my father down there on the beach, in seventh heaven, a retractable measure in his hand, a pencil in his ear, perhaps sawing a plank over one knee, something he tried to teach me to do once, until my mother, hearing the saw cutting through cartilage, came running out and stopped him He didn’t mean me to have no legs. Rings pulled from the whitened fingers of society women, still fragrant but destined to cruise the oceans of the world no more. A tiara, no less, seen floating in a rockpool, at first mistaken for a jellyfish Wrecking is a form of social vengefulness, you see A way of seeing to it that what goes around, comes around. Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep the wind away. Out came the torches and the Wellington boots and off we’d all troop, prepared to climb down ropes thousands of feet into the raging blackness, disturbing the homes of screaming sea birds, swaying in the gale, howling, falling, breaking limbs, half drowning sometimes, in order to lay our hands on some punctured sack of sodden tea, or box of Christmas decorations fabricated in Taiwan and now smashed into a thousand pieces.