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Muammar Gaddafi called for a mutual ceasefire and negotiations with Nato powers in a live speech on state TV early on Saturday, while Nato bombs struck a government complex in the Libyan capital.
The targeted compound included the state television building, which was not damaged. Gaddafi spoke from an undisclosed location.
In his rambling pre-dawn speech, the Libyan leader appeared subdued but defiant, repeatedly pausing as he flipped through handwritten notes.
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politic
What memory will live on? For those who lined the Mall, painting their faces red, white and blue, or who just stayed home watching on television — what will they remember? The kiss on the balcony will be the image replayed in perpetuity, just as it was when William's mother and father married 30 years ago — the difference being that this time they looked like a couple genuinely in love. Others will talk about the pageantry, a show no one lays on quite like the British. It's a fair bet that almost no one will remember the words. Even the eyes of the wedding couple wandered during the spoken bits.
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A British travel writer and novelist has been named among the 16 victims of a terrorist bomb explosion at a busy tourist cafe in Marrakech.
Peter Moss, 59, was at the Argana cafe in the popular Jamaa el-Fnaa square when a remote-controlled nail bomb was detonated at lunchtime.
A video released before the attack by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb reportedly claimed responsibility, with terrorism experts saying the group was one of several likely candidates.
Moss, a father-of-two, was a writer, broadcaster and comedian, who had earned praise for several screenplays and novels including The Singing Tree and The Age of Elephants.
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The penultimate space shuttle launch was postponed on Friday because of mechanical problems, dashing the hopes of the biggest crowd of spectators in years, including the mission commander's wife, Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt earlier this year.
Nasa hopes to try again to send space shuttle Endeavour on its final voyage on Monday.
President Barack Obama and his family visited Kennedy Space Centre anyway and met Giffords, who is recovering from a gunshot wound to the head and has been in Cape Canaveral since Wednesday to attend her husband's launch.
The White House said Obama saw Giffords for about 10 minutes before meeting the shuttle's crew.
Giffords has not been seen publicly since the assassination attempt on 8 January, and left her Houston rehabilitation hospital for the first time to travel to Florida. It was not immediately known whether she would stay for the next attempt, or return to Houston.
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It's early September and I wake up in a Brighton hotel, the sea crashing just outside. In a few hours, I will embark on what I have come here to do: have a series of five-minute-long instant-message exchanges with strangers. It may not sound like much, but the stakes for these quick chats are high. On the other side of the conversation will be a psychologist, a linguist, a broadcaster and a computer scientist. Together they will form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I've been asked to do: convince them that I'm human.
Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it's not clear how much that will help.
I'm participating as a human "confederate": one of four representatives of homo sapiens in the artificial intelligence community's most anticipated annual event – a meeting to confer the Loebner prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing test. The test is named after mathematician Alan Turing, famed second world war code-breaker and one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field's earliest questions: Can machines think?
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tech
From a certain perspective, Jesse Eisenberg's acting career resembles a darkly ironic cosmic joke, with Eisenberg as the victim. The story goes like this: you are a shy and awkward child, deeply uncomfortable in your skin. Then, one day, you discover acting, which you find "enormously comforting". Performing a prescribed role soothes your paralysing self-consciousness; hiding inside a character, you get the attention you crave, minus the deer-in-the-headlights panic of trying to "be yourself". Unsurprisingly, you prove particularly good at portraying fiercely intelligent but emotionally semi-detached geeks, angry at the self-assured world from which they, like you, feel excluded.
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artist
Few temptations could winkle me out of my own corner of England during a warm spring or hot summer. For one thing, the exquisite tyranny of the fruit and veg plot demands so much of my time (I give it willingly, of course). And for another, I happen to think there are few more beautiful places on earth.
Try me in January or February, though, and I'm not waving my union flag quite so enthusiastically. In fact, I'm easily lured away by the romantic notion of tropical heat. And tropical fruits (in the widest sense of the word). This winter, we spent some time in Sri Lanka doing a bit of diving, plenty of fishing and some very memorable eating.
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It was late summer 2005 and we were about to set out on an extended vacation with our two-year-old daughter, Ava. "Hey, you got a letter," said my husband Mike, tossing it to me like a Frisbee. It smelled faintly of vanilla, nice paper. I ripped it open and began to read the very precise, almost feminine cursive script.
Dear Elizabeth:
In October 1984 I harmed you. I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, in your eyes, my behaviour has affected you in its wake. Still, I stand prepared to hear from you about just how, and in what ways you've been affected; and to begin to set right the wrong I've done, in any way you see fit. Most sincerely yours, Will Beebe
In 1984, I arrived, like any other student, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. An only child, I was the first in my family to attend college. My parents were thrilled, although the university was far from our home town, a suburb of New York City. I had graduated top of my high school class and was prepared to make something great of myself. But those hopes and dreams were dashed about five weeks later.
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When my husband John died from double pneumonia at the age of 54, I was relieved. It felt like a paving slab had been lifted from my head. We'd been married for 30 years, and for the last 10 of those, I hadn't been outside our five-bedroom house in Northampton.
I left school at 15, which most people did in those days, and got a job as a waitress, which I loved. The cafe was next door to a cinema where John worked as a projectionist. I knew from the moment we met he was terribly insecure. He had ginger hair, walked with a limp and had been badly bullied as a child. But I hoped my love would change him. We got married when I was 19, and a year later I gave birth to our first baby. By 28, I was a mother of six.
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Facebook has removed dozens of profiles from its site, causing an outcry from campaigners trying to organise anti-austerity protests this weekend.
The deactivated pages include UK Uncut, and pages created by students during last December's university occupations.
A list posted on the Stop Facebook Purge group says Chesterfield Stop the Cuts, Tower Hamlet Greens, London Student Assembly, Southwark SoS and Bristol Uncut sites are no longer functioning.
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Forget republicanism – the closest Britain got to a revolution is people pushing down barricades and rushing to the palace
Whether it was history repeating itself as history, or farce repeating itself as farce, depends entirely on your point of view. The marriage of His Royal Highness Prince William to Catherine Middleton was washed down by that cocktail of fevered excitement and irate lack of interest that constitutes public opinion these days – so consider it a day when the country split into two, with each side accusing the other of madness. Much like a standard marital row, in fact.
But along with binge-drinking and misplaced self-regard, royal occasions are something at which Britain is undeniably world class, and anyone still poised for a republic is advised to put down their knitting needles.
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artist
Considering the huge guest list, the crowds, and the massed ranks of cameras, the royal wedding proved an intimate affair
Miss Catherine Middleton of Bucklebury, Berkshire went into Westminster Abbey at 11am and came out an hour and a quarter later, holding the hand of the second in line to the throne as Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge – she will not be known as Princess Catherine. At the moment of their wedding, the Queen bestowed a title on her husband, Prince William of Wales. In fact, there were three titles so that none of her realms felt left out: he also became Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus.
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artist
Anti-terrorist officers from several countries comb site for clues to who was behind remote control device
Anti-terrorist experts from several countries have been sifting through the wreckage of the Marrakech cafe where 15 people died on Thursday, as officials said a remote control bomb caused the blast.
A video released before the attack by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, with terrorism experts saying the group was one of several likely candidates.
While police from both Morocco and Spain could be seen working at the wrecked cafe in Jamaa el-Fnaa Square, friends and family of the victims gathered at the city's Ibn Tofail hospital.
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• 24 killed in Deraa after thousands take to streets
• UN approves inquiry into government violence
• UN approves inquiry into government violence
Thousands of Syrians defied their government's bloody attempts to suppress protests, braving gunfire from security forces to demonstrate in Damascus and across the country.
Initial reports said at least 24 people had been shot dead, most of them in the opposition stronghold of Deraa, where villagers tried to break through the security cordon to relieve its besieged population.
Further deaths were reported in Latakia and Homs after the security forces opened fire on demonstrators. There was news of protests in 50 towns and villages including Hama, Aleppo, the coastal cities of Latakia and Banias, Deir Ezzor in the east, and Qamishli in the north-east. Unrest was also reported from the Syria-Jordan border, which is straddled by the Haurani tribes.
Despite the government crackdown, the demonstrations – many starting as Friday worshippers left mosques – appeared to be at least as big as last week. Even more significantly, activists said, the protests spread closer into the centre of Damascus.
Demonstrators in the neighbourhoods of Barzeh, Midan, Bab Srejeh and Hajr al-Aswad faced security forces backed up by soldiers for the first time. Two witnesses in Midan told the Guardian that a crowd of 4,000 protesters who came out of Zain al-Abideen and Hassan mosques were dispersed by tear gas and security forces with batons. "I counted 17 buses of security," said one who asked not to be named.
Another said tear gas and sound bombs were used and the street to the main hospital was closed. He said shabiha [gangs connected to the ruling family] were terrorising the neighbourhood well after the demonstration was dispersed.
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politic
Esther Addley discovers that sharp elbows are the weapons of choice for position-protecting royalists
One doesn't choose to spend the night on the pavement, wrapped in a union flag and wearing a Burger King cardboard crown, for the quality of the rest, and so the huddled forms stretched out on the Mall were in no position to complain about the impromptu bursts of God Save the Queen, some time before 5am.
What does matter a great deal, however, is the view. And so any attempt to step over an occupied sleeping bag and into a prime spot was policed ferociously by the early arrivals on behalf of their neighbours.
The intelligence analyst suspected of illegally passing government secrets to the WikiLeaks website has been found competent to stand trial, the U.S. Army has said.
Spokesman Gary Tallman says a panel of experts completed its medical and mental evaluation of Bradley Manning on April 22, and had informed Army officials of the conclusion.
Tallman says no date has been set yet for the initial court hearing, and added that the evaluation board's findings "have no bearing on the guilt, innocence, or any potential defences of the accused."
Manning's case is under the jurisdiction of the Army's Military District of Washington.
The Army private is suspected of obtaining hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive documents while serving in Iraq and providing them to the website. He faces about two dozen charges, including aiding the enemy, that can bring the death penalty or life in prison.
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The Libyan civil war has briefly spilled into Tunisia as the west of the country saw heavy fighting on two fronts and Nato reported that Muammar Gaddafi's forces were laying anti-shipping mines in the sea off Misrata.
Loyalist troops made incursions over the border into Tunisia in a battle to retake a key crossing from rebel hands, drawing condemnation from Tunis.
Libyan soldiers were captured by Tunisian forces after firing indiscriminately in clashes that lasted about 90 minutes, according to reports. Witnesses said three Tunisians were injured.
New York festival honours Man and Boy but top awards go to Swedish and Israeli directors
A British film about the death of a suspected paedophile has won the award for best narrative short at the Tribeca film festival in New York.
Man and Boy, which was directed by David Leon and Marcus McSweeney, stars Eddie Marsan. It was inspired by the case of Scott Campbell, who fell to his death from a tower block in 2008 after trying to flee a mob who thought he had sexually assaulted a boy.
The jury said: "The jury liked this film's marriage of brilliant acting, superb technical prowess and provocative subject matter. It's a movie memorable for upending expectations."
There was another UK success at the festival when the British writer and director Jerry Rothwell won the best feature film prize in an online competition involving visitors to the Tribeca website.
His documentary film, Donor Unknown, is about JoEllen Marsh, a woman who was one of the first generation of children conceived through donor insemination and decided to embark on a quest find her biological father.
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The former work and pensions secretary describes Blue Labour as the most interesting element of debate within the party
James Purnell, the former work and pensions secretary, is to call on Labour to rethink its approach to welfare, relying less on cash transfers and instead offering guarantees of jobs and access to housing.He also proposes a revival of the contributory principle whereby a claimant's benefits are linked more closely to the amount they have put into the system. Describing "Blue Labour" as the most interesting element of the current debate within the party, he says it is central to understanding why the party lost so many voters – symbolised by Gillian Duffy, the Rochdale pensioner branded a bigot by Gordon Brown in the seminal moment of the 2010 general election. He is due to make his remarks at a speech in Australia on Saturday.
He claims that Blue Labour, a recent movement with the party launched by the social thinker and life peer Maurice Glasman, starts from the things that matter – "responsibility, love, loyalty, friendship, action and victory" – values that "used to be engraved upon Labour's heart".
"This roots politics back in people's lives and how they can pursue what they want. It's not that GDP or equality don't matter; just that they are not the right place to start." He argues that "Mrs Duffy and millions like her had good reason to be angry. It wasn't her gratitude problem. It was our ideological problem. "In the name of helping the poorest, we've thought too much about what people get out of society, and not enough about what they put in. Too much was to be solved from the centre."
Currently chairman of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Purnell approvingly quotes Duffy, saying: "There are too many people now who aren't vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable can't get to claim."
He claims many Labour voters were offended by the Labour government's conception of fairness: "They felt people were getting help who hadn't paid in. And they thought that people who needed protection weren't getting it. To convince them of the alternative, it is no good showing a graph demonstrating that Labour's tax and benefit changes benefited the poorest. It is an offence against relationships that had been committed – reciprocity and mutualism had broken down, and therefore trust has evaporated".
Setting out a vision of a new welfare state he says: "When people lost their job, they would want to get a proportion of their previous wages for a few months. If they hadn't found work, they would like to be guaranteed a job. That might sound fantastical, but it's what Germany and Britain did in the last recession. People would want a guarantee of housing, of a pension in retirement, of good parental leave and pay. That is the kind of welfare state that they would actually fight for, rather than treat with indifference."
He warns this kind of welfare state "might need to be funded out of the cash transfers and universal benefits they value much less and which are insufficient in times of need, but marginal when things are going well.
"Such a welfare state would explore how we can bring back the contributory principle – how what people get out relates better to what they put in. And it would say that people couldn't refuse to help themselves – that the job guarantee would also be a job requirement. If anyone turned it down, they would lose their benefits."
In his speech he seeks to draw a distinction between Labour and progressives, a phrase that appears to be a code for New Labour, a movement within which he was a central figure.
Labour, he contends, believes "markets were inherently unstable and exploitative. That Labour's role was to protect people from this by using the state and unions to reduce exploitation in good times, and to prevent or mop up crashes in bad."
Progressives, he said, revised this argument into "markets are the best way of generating wealth and tax revenues. Labour's role is to use those revenues to help people fulfil their aspirations, mainly by controlling the state and improving public services."
He summarises: "Labour emphasised protection, progressives majored on aspiration. Labour emphasised how markets could hurt people. Progressives talked about how they normally worked.
He argues: "When it turned out that markets could go spectacularly wrong, we were left looking a bit bananas because we'd said that could never happen. And, however good our stimulus measures were, we couldn't get credit for mopping up the mess we had told people they'd be insane to fear. We had said to our voters that markets worked. So, when a huge crash in financial markets occurred, we had no way of explaining to them what had just happened."
But he claims the progressive offer made by New Labour was failing people like Duffy before the credit crunch. It "operated outside her conception of fairness, and was too managerial. It was done to her, and wasn't what she'd asked for in the first place".
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"He knocked off my fascinating!" cried Laura Martin, 55, in full evening dress complete with enormous jewelled brooch ("Fake – don't tell the Queen!") as she glared at a jogger disappearing towards the Hudson River, before stooping down to pick her fasincator off the sidewalk.
"It's a fascinate, Laura," said her friend, in a similarly implausible outfit for 6am. "Fascinate."
It wasn't so much a tale of two cities in New York as a tale of two sides of the street. On one side of Greenwich Avenue stores were decked with union flag bunting in preparation for the afternoon's street party. People took fashion cues from Me and My Girl and Four Weddings and a Funeral queued up outside Lyon restaurant hoping to get inside for the special wedding breakfast with screens set up to allow diners to judge Kate's dress while they ate fried bread. Any journalist with a British accent was immediately assumed to be a royal expert, even one from the soi-disant republican Guardian.
"We're not going to have to eat English food, right?" fretted one gentleman outside, topped and tailed. "I just wanna see the wedding."
Unfortunately for him they did, as it was fry-ups all round. But New Yorker Elizabeth Lang, 51, who was already inside and sporting a tiara, had reassuring words for him: "You know this isn't too bad – I was worried as I thought the English food would be a little dicey," she said as she carefully left her baked beans untouched.
"Who'd have thought, a French restaurant doing an English breakfast," marvelled Ben Mann in a morning suit as he leaned upon his cane, and one of the few Brits to be found.
"It's not the first time the British have invaded and saved France – 1939 and all that," smirked Sean Cavanagh-Dowsett, the British owner of the nearby English-themed restaurant and shop, Tea and Sympathy, in full pearly king regalia.
"It's our job to be English today," explained Mann.
"It's such a shame Diana isn't here," said Kevin de l'Aigle, an American sporting a union flag t-shirt and Kate'n'Wills badge while he, too, left his baked beans untouched. "But I'm sure she's here in spirit."
Actually Diana was there, and celebrating with great enthusiasm: Diana Zorek, age 5.
"I love the wedding! I love princesses!" she announced, and proved it by wearing a Disney princess outfit. But as "really pretty" as she thought Kate Middleton's wedding dress was, she hadn't usurped her favourite princess from the top spot: Ariel from the Little Mermaid.
The other side of the street may as well have been a different country. Almost directly opposite the postcard recreation of all things parodically English was a similarly cliched, if more accurate, image of New York: a gym. Young men in various lycra get-ups that would surely permit no ingestion of fried bread jogged on into Equinox gym for early morning workouts, headphones plugged firmly into their ears, blocking out the shrieks from across the street.
"No, I don't care about the wedding at all to be honest," said Matthew Reinhardt. "If it's on the TV screens inside I guess I'll watch it. Maybe it will help me run faster on the treadmill."
Back across the street there was no time for republican scepticism: Sean Cavanagh-Dowsett and his wife, Nicky Perry, were organising the afternoon's street party where fish and chips, cups of tea and someone from Squeeze who wasn't Jools Holland would be there, apparently representing some vision of Great Britain.
"To us Kate and William are the prince and princess on top of the cake, they're the happily ever after," said New Yorker Linda Siciliana in black tie garb, apparently unbothed by the Windsors' somewhat dubious marital record.
"I think this is such a great day," said Californian Diana Modica from beneath her Kate Middleton face mask. "How can anyone resist this?"
But by 7am someone was beginning to resist: Diana Zorek, who announced that she was "SO tired" after having risen so early in the morning.
Was she still feeling like a princess?
"Yes," she replied, falling asleep on her father Michael's shoulder, oblivious to the jogger running right past her. "Sleeping Beauty."
