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Armed men have killed five campaigners working for a female candidate in next month's parliamentary election in Afghanistan.

Last Thursday, up to 10 campaign workers for the outspoken female candidate Fawzia Gilani went missing in Herat's Adraskan district. Officials originally said it was not known if they had been abducted by the Taliban or political rivals, although a spokesman for the Islamist militants later said the Taliban had seized them.

Five of those taken later turned up unharmed. The district chief of Adraskan said the bullet-riddled bodies of the other five were found on a hillside. The Taliban could not be reached for comment.

The UN said two weeks ago that three candidates had been killed, and that widespread intimidation of female candidates and other instances of election violence had been observed. The election is being seen as a key test of stability in Afghanistan, where violence is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

Poor security, particularly in Taliban strongholds in the south and east, already looms as the biggest challenge to the ballot. On Saturday, unidentified gunmen killed candidate Haji Abdul Manan as he walked from his home to a mosque in western Herat province. The Taliban later claimed the attack.

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The school closed a decade ago and the beautiful, if dangerously crumbling, church shut its doors in January, but this tiny village in one of the most unpopulated and forgotten corners of Spain is making a brave attempt to stave off a slow death.

With just 109 inhabitants and an average age of 53, the village has already shrunk to a sixth of the size it reached at the height of its glory more than half a century ago. A third of those who remain are over 65.

"We'll probably all die here," said 76-year-old Victor López, as he sat with his friends on the bench they occupy daily in the village square. "Our own children all emigrated and there are only a handful of young people now. My generation grew everything from cotton to corn, but no one wants to work the land any more."

As in many villages in this harsh, dusty corner of Teruel province, the fight for survival requires special measures. In an attempt to attract new inhabitants, Castelnou is now offering cheap houses, free land, an exemption from municipal taxes, and even a municipal babysitter to those families who wish to settle and bring children who might give the village a future.

This week, around 400 people travelled from all corners of Spain with their families to see what the village, tucked into a rocky hillside and surrounded by abandoned olive groves, had to offer. As the streets teemed with children for the first time in decades, elderly neighbours recalled fondly how it had been in their own youth.

"We need the young here. They bring joy," said pensioner Sara Galicia.

It was a meeting of the needy and the desperate. As a makeshift car park beside the ancient stone bridge across the thin trickle of the River Martín filled up with cars from around Spain, family after family told the same story – of the struggle to find work and raise a family in a country where one in five people are jobless.

"I used to work installing aluminium windows but now there is no construction and I've been out of work for two years," said Argentinian immigrant Rafael González, who arrived in Spain six years ago.

Rafael and his wife, Andrea, brought their daughter Valentina on the two-hour drive from Terrassa, an industrial suburb of Barcelona hit hard by unemployment. Their determination to find a better future would, they said, overcome the difficulties of living in a place with some of the most extreme weather in Spain.

"The village is nice," said Valentina, seven, as the thermometer soared above 100F (38C). "But all the things in the playground were so hot that I couldn't touch them."

"We fry in the summer," admitted López. "And the winter is freezing. Then everyone stays indoors – like snails in their shells."

The "children's caravan" – which was greeted with a playground of bouncy castles and a free paella lunch for 500 people – was the idea of mayor José Miguel Esteruelas. Where other Spanish villages threatened with extinction have brought caravans of single women to meet the local farmers, Mayor Esteruelas decided to bring in children.

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Artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth, some of the world's leading scientists report today.

But a major academic assessment of future global food supplies, led by John Beddington, the UK government chief scientist, suggests that even with new technologies such as genetic modification and nanotechnology, hundreds of millions of people may still go hungry owing to a combination of climate change, water shortages and increasing food consumption.

In a set of 21 papers published by the Royal Society, the scientists from many disciplines and countries say that little more land is available for food production, but add that the challenge of increasing global food supplies by as much as 70% in the next 40 years is not insurmountable.

Although more than one in seven people do not have enough protein and energy in their diet today, many of the papers are optimistic.

A team of scientists at Rothamsted, the UK's largest agricultural research centre, suggests that extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption.

"Plant breeders will probably be able to increase yields considerably in the CO2 enriched environments of the future … There is a large gap between achievable yields and those delivered ... but if this is closed then there is good prospect that crop production will increase by about 50% or more by 2050 without extra land", says the paper by Dr Keith Jaggard et al.

Several studies suggest farmers will be up against environmental limits by 2050, as industry and consumers compete for water. One group of US scientists suggests that feeding the 3 billion extra people could require twice as much water by then. This, says Professor Kenneth Strzepek of the University of Colorado, could mean an 18% reduction in worldwide water availability for food growing by 2050.

"The combined effect of these increasing demands can be dramatic in key hotspots [like] northern Africa, India, China and parts of Europe and the western US," he says.

Many low-tech ways are considered to effectively increase yields, such as reducing the 30-40% food waste that occurs both in rich and poor countries. If developing countries had better storage facilities and supermarkets and consumers in rich countries bought only what they needed, there would be far more food available.

But novel ways to increase food production will also be needed, say the scientists. Conventional animal breeding should be able to meet much of the anticipated doubling of demand for dairy and meat products in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but this may not be enough.

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If you thought Tiger Woods had experienced a difficult nine months, try stepping into the designer shoes of his ex-wife Elin Nordegren, who has broken her long and dignified silence on the scandal that claimed her marriage to inform the world: "I have gone through hell."

Ms Nordegren, whose divorce was finalised on Monday, said she had experienced "shock, anger and ultimately grief" over the revelation of her former husband's serial infidelity, adding that the stress of the situation gave her insomnia and weight loss, and caused her hair to fall out.

"The word 'betrayal' isn't strong enough," she said.

"I've been through hell. It's hard to think you have this life and then all of a sudden – was it a lie? I have been through the stages of disbelief and shock, to anger and ultimately grief over the loss of the family I so badly wanted for my children."

In the first public statement she has made since late November, when Woods crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant outside the Florida home where they lived with their two children, Ms Nordegren said she'd had no idea of her husband's extra curricular activities before the scandal first broke.

"I'm so embarrassed that I never suspected. For the last three-and-a-half years, when all this was going on, I was home a lot more with pregnancies, then the children and school. I felt stupid as more things were revealed. How could I not have known anything? I felt embarrassed for having been so deceived. I felt betrayed by many people around me."

The former Mrs Woods vehemently denied reports that she had pursued her errant husband from the house, perhaps brandishing a golf club, after getting wind of his relationship with Rachel Uchitel, a nightclub hostess who was the first in a string of mistresses to be publicly identified.

"There was never any violence inside or outside our home," she said. "The speculation that I would have used a golf club to hit him is just truly ridiculous. Tiger left the house that night, and after a while when he didn't return, I got worried and decided to look for him. That's when I found him in the car. I did everything I could to get him out of the locked car. To think anything else is absolutely wrong."

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Fancy fostering a wide-mouth frog? think you can handle a fire-bellied newt? Or maybe you just want to cuddle up with a glis glis? let Jamie Buckley be your guide...

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On a cold, stormy night in August 1985, I spent my first hour in the city of Edinburgh and resolved that it should be my last. The legendary festival Fringe that I had been persuaded to visit was nowhere to be seen, not here in an overpriced hotel room (what, then, did I know of the perennial joys of renting flats?), where no fewer than three friends had failed to appear, as promised, to show me around (what, then, did I know of the infinite flexibility of festival "arrangements"?), and where a snotty receptionist had just told me, no, no trains back to London tonight, before nodding me over the road to somewhere called the Assembly Rooms where I might pass the time (what, then, did I know of serendipity?).

Huffing, I stropped out and walked into – this is no exaggeration – my life. Like some bizarre surprise party, there were friends from school, university, ex-colleagues, past lovers and not one was surprised to see me. Later I would learn that nobody ever is; and nobody says hello or goodbye. You are either in the moment or you're not. So I grabbed an overflowing ashtray, a wobbly chair and... moved in. I live there still.

For Fringe veterans, the Assembly Rooms – 30 years old this summer – is the heart of their festival. It started in 1981 for no better reason than the desperation of a young director, William Burdett-Coutts, who needed a venue for his new play; he approached the council, who lent him the maze of civic chambers on condition that he took the whole lot, filled it and ran it. Thus it kicked off with, among others, the magical Ivor Cutler and his Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol II.

When I arrived, four years later, my first show was Rik Mayall, Andy de la Tour and Ben Elton – sharing an hour's slot, mind, each doing his best 20 minutes; none of this "I'm so gifted I can do an hour all by myself" nonsense then. (Memo to comedians: just because you can doesn't always mean you should.) By then the Assembly Rooms was well established, and, although there are now other excellent venues, the original Assembly Rooms remains the cut above. Welcome to my bias.

I'm not going to attempt to sum up 30 years of shows. Can't, won't, shouldn't; to pick out five is to overlook thousands and, besides, balance decrees you'd also have to mention the turkeys. (Well, of course there bloody have been.) Suffice to say, I've seen most of my best and some of my worst in this shabby-chic building that defies itself to produce them – you try a tense moment in an Edinburgh Suite play when there's a stomp moment on stage in the vast Music Hall above. Every room is morphed into theatre space regardless of aptitude; we used to joke they'd be performing in store cupboards and toilets soon, until two years ago, when the store cupboard happened. Then, last year, the toilets.

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Elvis probably wasn't referring to a British newspaper when uttering his famous quote, but any English footballers out there considering joining the ever-swelling "special injunction" club may just care to read it as if he was. "Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away."

Of course, their lawyers will be telling them differently, assuring them there is no way The Sun, the Daily Mail, the News of the World, or whichever media outlet is on their case, can break the gagging order, which is approved by a High Court judge. But Presley knew. They're caught in a trap. They can't walk out.

The problem for the love rats is the internet, that bible of the suspicious mind. If it wasn't for the worldwide web rising to its feet at about the same time as the £100,000-a-day barrister, their dirty deeds could be buried for good. Alas, not on this information highway, with all its feeder lanes and means of access. One whisper and it's out there, zooming into the bloodstream of the public consciousness. And when it does go viral, the "sins" will only seem that much worse.
In fact, there are good examples for the advisors of the two latest England internationals to seek salvation in Britain's unofficial privacy law to quote while telling their men to grin and bear it. They only have to look at the recent cases of John Terry and Colin Montgomerie to see how it can all backfire. In January, Terry had one of these "super-injunctions" lifted and then had to watch how his perceived treachery was cast in a yet more sinister light. It's one thing sleeping with your best mate's girl; it's another being accused by a judge of being more concerned with the effect the exposure would have on your finances. Terry wasn't merely viewed as disloyal; he was deemed utterly unrepentant to boot.

Montgomerie's scenario is different, but no less foreboding. The Ryder Cup captain's exploits, or otherwise, with an ex-girlfriend are still rumours; as is the timing of the alleged alliance. But as the story remains officially unwritten, so every piece of sordid speculation continues to be unofficially discussed.

The ridicule is the thing here and it's not just on the postings on the message boards. A note was left on his locker at The Open; jokes have been whispered on the practice putting greens; double entendres have filled the range. Very few know the detail, but, thanks to the court order, everyone believes they can hang the old devil. "You're all having great fun at my expense," so Monty told a hungry press corps in the United States two weeks ago.

And what an expense it must be with the legal might of Schillings fighting his corner. Regardless of the nature of what might, or might not, be suppressed, Monty must be questioning whether the legal expense is worth it. Innocent or guilty of unspecified acts that are certainly not crimes, his image now adorns each and every self-serving article on the burgeoning trend of the sports star to gag the press.

drive from  www.independent.co.uk

Just as officials in Washington ponder a partial easing of the ban on Americans travelling to Cuba at least for cultural, educational or research exchanges, the American Ballet Theatre has revealed that it is to perform in Havana this November for the first time in half a century.

The American company, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, is to be showcased at the cavernous Karl Marx Theatre in the Cuban capital as part of this year's edition of the biennial Havana International Ballet Festival.

The visit will hold deep significance, both for the American company and for Cuba. It was at the American Ballet Theatre that Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, a national treasure, began her career in 1940.

After briefly returning to Cuba, Ms Alonso rejoined the American Ballet Theatre in 1943 and soon after was elevated to principal dancer and was particularly acclaimed by American lovers of dance for her interpretation of Giselle.

In 1948 she went back home a second time and founded the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company.

On coming to power in 1959, Castro quickly gave her his backing, turning her company – and classical ballet generally – into the National Ballet of Cuba, a crown jewel of the cultural curriculum of his newly Marxist state.

It is quite possible that both Ms Alonso and Castro will be in the audience when the Americans perform their repertoire, which will include scenes from ballets including Fancy Free and Siete Sonatas on 3 and 4 November.

Born in 1920, Ms Alonso is almost blind but is still seen at occasional public events. Just as frail is Mr Castro who has given the country's reins to his brother, Raul. But the political backdrop is also not unimportant. Cuba recently released 52 political prisoners and put them on planes to Spain, a gesture that has brought some warming of relations with foreign capitals.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Tall, broad-shouldered with snow-white hair and a steady gaze, Morgan cuts an impressive figure. After a brush and a wash – Fairy liquid, a bucket of water and firm grip are required – it's showtime. Morgan, a 16-month-old Wiltshire Horn ram, is one of more than 50 native breeds that competed at the Singleton Rare Breeds Show at the Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex this year. The show celebrated its 25th anniversary in July and the event has never been stronger. Indeed, it's been a very good year for many of British farming's rarest breeds.

The Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST), founded in 1973, monitors our most vulnerable breeds across a number of categories, from Minority and At Risk to Vulnerable, Endangered and Critical, and publishes an annual watchlist. In this year's watchlist, several significant breeds, including the Middle White pig and the British White cattle, slid up a category or two. With animals in the Critical category numbering fewer than 100 breeding examples and Minority breeds fewer than 1,000, that can mean the difference between maintaining a viable population or simply curating a living museum.

It's tempting to see rare breeds as agriculture's misfits and eccentrics, overtaken by the more popular kids in class. In fact, they're more like supermodels: highly refined for their role and, in the case of dainty Berkshire pigs, Portland sheep with caramel-tipped legs and black-nosed British White cattle, really quite beautiful.

The Wiltshire Horn, explains Morgan's owner Michael Newall, is one of the RBST's success stories. The breed left the watchlist in 2006 and the reason for its renaissance comes down to one thing: money. While the other breeds were prized for their heavy fleeces, the Wiltshire has a hairy coat that doesn't need to be sheared. With British wool prices at rock bottom and travelling shearers charging up to £5 per animal, the Wiltshire suddenly becomes more interesting economically to smallholders.

Linda Rollason used to keep Wiltshires, before they were taken off the watchlist, and now breeds the Norfolk Horn, an At Risk breed with fewer than 1,500 breeding animals remaining: "The plight of the Norfolk is partly why the RBST was formed. Depending on who you talk to, they were down to about 10 ewes and two rams in the 1950s." It's a prime example of a breed too specialised for its own good. "The original Norfolk Horns were designed for the Norfolk Brecklands, which had shallow, sandy soil with little shade, making for hot, dry summers and cold, exposed winters. The breed has to take that. They have to be agile and walk long distances to find food, which is why they're a tall, rangy shape. And they'll eat anything."

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When the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese was racked with indecision on which wallpaper to buy last month, she posted some pictures on the social networking website Twitter and her many followers rushed to offer advice. "Selecting from all these great wallpapers is extreme torment for an indecisive Libra woman like me," she tweeted with an image attached.

Shortly afterwards she added another picture with the comment: "This velvet flocked wallpaper is killing me. Of course it's available in ANY colour combination."

Although when the advice came in she rather tetchily rebuffed it with the words: "I am indecisive until someone tries to choose for me. Then I am quick to decide."

Whether you would leave your interior design choices to a bunch of strangers or not, Von Teese is right about one thing; the choice of papers out there is now overwhelmingly huge. Wallpaper Direct alone has more than 5,000 designs online and, although you can filter by colour, design or style, that's an impossible choice if you just had a vague notion of perhaps papering a wall and hadn't really given it much more thought than that.

Melanie Adams, from Wallpaper Direct, has the following advice for Dita and anyone else who can't make their mind up.

"Patterns are bold and we are seeing that people definitely want colour back in their lives. There is a strong trend for brights to sit alongside the more familiar beige and, with the property market so slow, more homeowners are decorating their houses not with an eye to resale, but with a view to how they will enjoy living in them. It's much more about self-expression now," she says.

"The other really strong trend we are seeing is the idea of personalised wallpaper. There are various companies now that allow you to upload your own images and have them printed off as wallpaper to fit your wall exactly. You can choose your own holiday snaps or your children's faces, or favourite landscapes. The idea is that it's completely personal and unique to you."

One such company is 55Max, which started out offering to print your photos and images on to canvas and has expanded into cushions, garden art and bespoke blinds and wallpaper. Their paper costs from £45 a square metre (there is also a £30 set-up fee and an £85 charge for additional artwork requirements) and they will hang it for you. If you think an entire wall of your beloved, beaming children might be a bit much, one pop star, who sadly the company refuse to name, had her entire bathroom papered with images of herself.

So, from one of the newest companies offering the most contemporary of designs to one of the oldest. In 1860 Arthur Sanderson set up his business in Islington, north London, importing French wallpapers. He rapidly became known for his expensive, luxurious products and, in 1879, opened his first factory in Chiswick, west London. Today Sandersons, which is the oldest surviving English brand name in its field, is celebrating its anniversary by reissuing some of its earliest designs, which are proving extremely popular. These days you can also buy co-ordinating fabrics and paint as well as bedlinen and tableware, and in 2007-08 the company's revenues increased by 25 per cent, which against the background of the housing crash is astonishing.

David Walker, sales director of Sanderson and Zoffany, says: "People are getting braver. When I started working here in 1987, the most popular papers were small prints in several colours. It's much more about making a statement now, with bigger designs and more colours.

"Having said that, florals are always the most popular but there is a strong metallic trend at the moment and we have been amazed how contemporary and popular the Twenties designs have proved to be."

It might be the height of fashion now but wallpaper has been around for centuries. It first became fashionable in Renaissance Europe, where those who couldn't afford to hang tapestries on their walls turned instead to paper to decorate a room.

The earliest known fragment of European wallpaper that still exists was found on the beams of the Lodge of Christ's College in Cambridge and dates from 1509. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell all production of wallpaper was halted as it was regarded as too frivolous for the Puritans. But after Cromwell's death King Charles II was quick to reverse that proclamation, and by the mid-18th century England was the leading manufacturer in Europe.

Perhaps the most famous wallpaper story is the one about Napoleon in exile on St Helena. After the emperor's death, traces of arsenic were found in his hair, which gave rise to rumours that he had been murdered by poisoned wallpaper. This was not so fantastic as it might sound – back then the best way to obtain the colour green was with arsenic. Indeed Walker points to an early Sanderson's advertisement which trumpets: "guaranteed free from arsenic".

In 1980, a fragment of Napoleon's wallpaper came to light. It was indeed green and did, indeed, have traces of arsenic. A post-mortem examination found that Napoleon actually died from a perforated stomach ulcer that became cancerous, but there is no doubt that the arsenic, while not strong enough to have killed him, would certainly have made him sicker.

Walker himself is mad about wallpaper. "Every time a new range comes out I have to have it. I have a paper in every major room in the house, often in a bright pattern on one wall and co-ordinating plain colours on the other three," he says.

"My wife has finally learnt to trust me and she lets me get on with it now. I never get tired of wallpaper and the upside is that I'm pretty good at putting it on myself.

"The great thing is that if you are spending £40 a roll you can afford to redo it every few years, whereas previously people would leave it up for years and not change it."

This is a trend that Adams has also noticed. "The increasing number of paste-the-wall papers, which are easier to apply, has meant that not only are more people choosing paper but they are also changing it more often," she says:

"It's so easy that we are seeing people in their twenties and thirties changing wallpaper far more often as they consider a feature wall to be art. And, as they think of it in these terms, they are often happy to pay higher prices for it. We are selling many papers at over £100 a roll, which have beautiful effects such as crystals and flock."

If you are going to put your own wallpaper up, then Walker, after more than 20 years in the business, has the following advice: "You really have to strip off all the old paper first and then smooth the wall so that it is completely flat.

"You should absolutely use lining paper. It gives a better finish and there's no point spending money on beautiful paper if you're not going to put it up properly. Make sure you use the recommended paste and finally, take it from me, do not allow your spouse to help as this is guaranteed to end in major marital discord."

Now, admittedly this does make it sound easier than it is in practice, but if you're worried about air bubbles and going round the light switch, take comfort from some of the stories in Sanderson's complaints archive. One woman complained that her new wallpaper was making her bread mouldy. She was eventually persuaded that her damp house was the cause of the problem. Another woman fell in love with a sample of Suva, a classic tropical scene that has long been a Sanderson's best-seller, but when she returned home after the decorator had left she was horrified to discover that a large bird was integral to the pattern. She complained that the sample hadn't shown the bird, explaining that she was ornithophobic.

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