World

Former England striker Trevor Brooking says Kevin Keegan faces a tough task reforming his side from one which produced one of the worst performances in living memory to championship contenders.

England’s performance at Wembley was one of the poorest I can remember.

I’d even go so far as to say that over the two legs Scotland were the better team.

But if you are looking at who might do better at Euro 2000 you’ve got to say it would be England.

Not in their current shape, though. Playing like this they will get beaten by most teams.

Kevin Keegan has been in an awkward position in that he came into the job in the middle of the qualification campaign and had no time to experiment.

Now he has six months to sort things out.

is a big test for him. He has got the motivational skills but he faces some tough tactical decisions.

He needs to find a formula to get the best out of his young talent. At the moment you are looking a group of individuals who are not playing as a team.

Keegan’s number one priority is to decide on a system that suits his players.

If he is going to persist playing 4-4-2 he needs at least two left-sided players. At the moment England are having problems finding just one.

It’s not a question of picking your best players and then swapping round systems to suit them. England won the World Cup in 1966 by picking a system, actually one without wingers, and sticking to it.

That might mean picking one or two players who on paper are not as talented as others.

Craig Brown made two changes to his side for the second leg – he brought in Neil McCann and Callum Davidson.

Both are natually left footed but neither are first choices for their clubs.

They may not be as talented as one or two others but they gave Scotland great width and shape.

With Graeme Le Saux injured, the only two left-sided players Keegan had were Steve Guppy and Steve Froggatt and I would have certainly played one of them at Wembley.

French actress Eva Green, who played love interest Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, won the Orange rising star award voted for by the British public.

“It’s a real honour because I’m French and it’s an English award. I have just moved here and have had the most amazing welcome,” she said.

Whitaker, who has also won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for The Last King of Scotland, said: “This means a lot because to be embraced by another shore is a special thing.

I try to think of myself as a citizen of the planet,” he added.

Greengrass’s United 93 depicts one of the 11 September 2001 plane hijackings.

Accepting his award, the film-maker said: “I firmly believe that cinema must deal with the way the world is and the dangers there are. We need it very much now.”

The Spanish-language dark fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth won three Baftas including the award for best foreign language film.

Former US reality TV show contestant Jennifer Hudson added the best supporting actress prize to her considerable collection for her performance in the musical Dreamgirls.

Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock’s script for The Last King of Scotland won the best adapted screenplay honour.

The award for special achievement by a British director in their first feature film went to Andrea Arnold for the Glasgow-set drama Red Road.

The best animated feature film Bafta was awarded to Happy Feet.

The recent rise in UK house prices is a “false dawn”, an economic forecasting group has warned.
The Ernst & Young Item Club says property values will not return to their 2007 peak for at least another five years.
However the latest figures from mortgage lenders show a continued revival in lending to house buyers.
The number of loans granted for house purchase in July this year was 19% higher than in July 2008.
It’s tempting to call the turn in the mortgage market at this point, and there is certainly concrete evidence that lending for house purchase is increasing,” said the CML’s economist Paul Samter.
“But there are still constraints affecting the lending industry’s capacity to fund increased lending, as well as less consumer motivation to remortgage for the time being.”
The CML said the number of new mortgages granted to house buyers stood at 56,000 in July, up by 24% from June and 19% higher than a year ago.
But the Item club argued that the increase in prices this year was largely due to an “acute shortage of available properties” and “a small number of cash-rich buyers”.
“The supply of these funds is limited, which means prices are likely to dip again in the first half of next year,” said the forecasters’s economist Hetal Mehta.

There have been signs that the UK economy is beginning to pick up, but jobless data tends to lag behind other measures.
The level of unemployment is now at its highest since May 1995.
Employment minister Jim Knight said that an OECD Employment Outlook – which recognised UK government efforts to help the unemployed – suggested the UK had lower than average rates of unemployment than the G7 and the EU.
“However, we know things will still be tough for some time and unemployment is likely to keep increasing, even once the economy starts growing again – that’s why it’s critical that we continue investing in people’s future and don’t just abandon them.”
Average earnings, including bonuses, increased by 1.7% in the three months to July, down from the previous month.

Postal workers in London who are concerned about jobs and pay cuts will launch a strike on Saturday.
About 12,000 Communication Workers Union (CWU) members will return to work on Wednesday.
The union claimed Royal Mail had turned down the offer of talks, claiming that job losses and pay cuts were being considered in defiance of an agreement.
Royal Mail said it was the union who broke the agreement, adding they were preventing modernisation.
They have accused CWU of “refusing point blank” to discuss reforming the organisation.
But Martin Walsh, the CWU’s London representative, claimed the company was controlled by the government.
He said: “We are up for change but we are not prepared to let management or the government rubbish a great public service just so they can sell it.”
He also complained about comments made by Lord Mandelson, the business secretary who had accused the union of a “bury your head in the sand” attitude.
CWU’s last three day strike ended on 10 July.

But Mr Harper has always maintained he will not seek Mr Khadr’s return to Canada, and that position appeared to be unchanged after the release of the video.
Anne Howland, a spokeswoman for the Canadian foreign ministry, repeated a statement made by the prime minister last week, that the government believes Mr Khadr is in a legal process that must continue.
Mr Harper has said in the past that he has received assurances that Mr Khadr is being treated humanely, and maintained that the charges he faces are very serious. The government regards Mr Khadr’s trial as a judicial process, not a political one.
Canada is the only western country that has not demanded the return of its detainees from the controversial detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.
France and Britain are among the countries that have succeeded in having their nationals released following diplomatic pressure on US authorities.
The fact that Mr Khadr was only 15 at the time of his arrest has led some here to refer to him as a “child soldier”, including Bob Rae, the foreign affairs critic for the opposition Liberal party.
“He’s clearly not going to get a real trial. He’s going to get a military tribunal,” said Mr Rae. “I think that Omar Khadr has [to be] brought home and that whatever justice is to be faced, he should face it here.”

Telling his audience that he would not endanger American lives, Mr Obama said that nevertheless a new policy for this group, based in law, would need to be drawn up.
“We must have clear, defensible and lawful standards for those who fall into this category,” he said.
“We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.”
He praised the US network of maximum-security jails, from which no prisoner has ever escaped.
“We are treating these cases with the care and attention that the law requires and our security demands,” he stressed, describing the Bush-era approach as “poorly-planned, [and] haphazard”.
The existence of the prison camp itself, Mr Obama said, probably “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained”.
He conceded that following through on his pledge to close Guantanamo would be “difficult and complex”, but insisted it was possible

Alzheimer’s disease is linked to gradual formation of plaques made up of a particular protein in the brain.
These are called senile or amyloid plaques.
They are found close to nerve cells called neurons which are often swollen and distorted.
Scientists for the international pharmaceutical company Elan Pharma developed the vaccine, which is based on a toxic fragment of the main protein in the plaques.
The vaccine causes an immune response to the protein and seems to prevent the development of the plaques, and slow the deterioration of the nerve cells.
In tests, scientists used specially bred mice that carried a human gene, which meant they developed the plaques.
Some were given the vaccine and others were not.
Those who were given the vaccine retained the mental capacity to carry out tests such as finding their way around a maze, the report author Mike Hall told BBC News Online.
Those who were not vaccinated and developed the plaques were unable to successfully complete the memory tests.
Dr Hall said: “If you could vaccinate, you could find those people who are likely to get early onset Alzheimer’s, and hopefully prevent them getting the disease in the first place.”

blood test could help Alzheimer’s patients
An advance by US scientists may help produce a test which could one day diagnose Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage.
Their experiments in mice seem to be able to accurately detect the amount of a body protein called amyloid in the brain.
The protein has been strongly linked to the development of Alzheimer’s as it clumps together, and forms “plaques” in the organ, killing brain cells.
By the time symptoms of Alzheimer’s dementia appear, it is likely that the plaques have been forming in the brain for some time – perhaps years – undetected.
The study, published in the journal Science, was carried out by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis.
Some testers have measured the level of amyloid proteins in the blood, and tried to use this as a guide to the amyloid levels in the brain, but this has not proved particularly reliable.

Eminent heart surgeon Professor Magdi Yacoub also urged parents not to lose sight of the importance of drugs being produced from thymus glands.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he had not been shocked to hear that Alder Hey and a number of other hospitals had received cash following the donation of thymus glands.
But he pleaded with parents not to lose sight of the fact that the thymus gland helped create drugs to prevent transplant patients rejecting their organs.
“I know for sure that all doctors and surgeons, as well as hospitals are dedicated to getting patients better, and for that they need to know the mechanisms of the disease, have appropriate drugs and have the confidence of the patient.
“It is essential to talk to the parents, but also to have the means to help the patients and without having these drugs we are not going to be able to help patients,” he said.