Fletcher lamented yesterday that England pitches are neither conducive to producing spinners nor batsmen who can play them properly

Fletcher lamented yesterday that England pitches are neither conducive to producing spinners nor batsmen who can play them properly – a discovery that could have been slightly better timed than 1-0 down in a three- Test series in India.’We need good pitches in county cricket,’ Fletcher said, ‘and by that I don’t mean wickets that are merely good for batting Our game needs conditions that assist slow bowlers. A 50-year-old native of the Chechen republic in south Russia, Mr Khasbulatov is a pipe-smoking professor of economics who was virtually unknown before he entered parliament in 1990. According to whichever strand of Washington gossip you listen to, the First Lady is a) a lesbian or b) a nymphomaniac, these being the two smears that are traditionally aimed at successful women (although, strangely and uniquely, Margaret Thatcher escaped both, accused merely of the lesser sin of flirtation).The loose nature of the case against Hillary Clinton is illustrated by the fact that a recent American magazine article featured both the ‘Billary’ smear (that Bill and Hillary are a co-presidency) and the suggestion that they have separate beds and lives. Glyn Charles, on the one- tonner, GBE International, went steadily backwards and finished sixth.And Stuart Childerley, in the two- tonner, Provezza Source, went from challenging Italy’s Larouge for second place to second last and then last as he and tactician Chris Dickson misread some of the shifts in wind direction. Opposition parties, and the centrist and liberal wings of Mr Tudjman’s own ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), say that Croatia cannot realistically expect to regain the 30 per cent of Croatian territory lost to the Serbs in 1991 if Mr Tudjman is simultaneously scheming to partition Bosnia.Croatian commanders have warned that they will bolster their military presence in central Bosnia if the Muslims continue to capture land and expel Croatian civilians in a mirror image of Serbian expulsions of Muslims elsewhere in Bosnia. Almost unnoticed, the Department of the Environment has been quietly changing all the policy planning guidance notes – which determine the shape of future development – that were issued by Nicholas Ridley, introducing greater protection of the environment. In the short term, however, they faced an important decision on tactics for the European Parliament elections in June.

YOUR front-page report on the rise in tuberculosis in Siberia (‘Soviet fall fuels world TB crisis’, 8 May) underlines the lethal results of the breakdown of health services and of the poverty that results from hyperinflation. Bad debts have wiped out the cumulative returns for all but a handful.Not surprisingly, investment bankers are gaining more influence in bank boardrooms, raising fears on the part of some clearing bankers that if traditional lending becomes a loss leader, the resulting bad debts will come back to haunt the banks in a few years’ time.’If you get too close to the investment banking community, you could lose the expertise or even the will to maintain credit quality,’ says one banker. And the great thing is that she’s not a bit starry, so the first thing that happened was a real friendship began to develop.She began inviting me to join her for dinner regularly, and after a couple of weeks it dawned on me that I really liked her an awful lot and all the nervousness I had felt as a boy in these situations came back. His appeal, backed by his movement called ‘Combat for Values’, appears strongest among middle-class provincial Catholics, the nearest France has to a silent majority.A politician who has made his career, including a brief spell as junior culture minister in the ‘cohabitation’ government of 1986 to 1988, in the centre-right Union for French Democracy (UDF) of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, he is now out of step with his parliamentary colleagues and few expect him to remain allied to the UDF for long.With family links to the 19th- century writer the Comtesse de Segur, who wrote moral tales for childen which are still popular in the best bourgeois nurseries, his fief is the Vendee on the Atlantic coast south of Brittany.He wrote the script and set up a now regular summer sound and light show in the department, depicting the massacre of royalist Vendeen peasants by revolutionaries in the Terror of 1793. YOU’RE 10 years old. Jim Furness, a nuclear inspector whose department brought the prosecution, said: ‘We decided to prosecute to underline the seriousness with which we viewed the loss of defence-in-depth provisions we expected BNFL to have in place.’The court case follows an investigation by the NII into an incident in a building which stores containers of highly radioactive waste.

FOUR YEARS after the BBC killed off Dr Who, the Corporation is about to resurrect the intrepid Time Lord. One solution may be help from the proceeds of the national lottery, one-fifth of which is earmarked for sport.Sproat has even opened talks with the Ministry of Defence in the hope of persuading the services to allow the league code to be played At present it is discouraged in favour of union. ‘That’s done with, finished, we don’t talk about my life.’ The point of the book was ‘to make the process of dance more accessible. In 1992, the prospectus boasts, operating costs were cut by pounds 4.5m. The Rangers keeper repeated the feat 15 minutes later, blocking a Berkamp drive with a leg following Roy’s corner, but the respite was short-lived.Scotland cleared the ball only as far as Roy, by now lurking around the angle of the penalty area. Jimmy’s a very loyal friend and he knows how to keep a secret.There was a gap of eight years when we saw very little of each other because he was with the Berlin Phil-harmonic, but afterwards we picked up our friendship as though we’d seen each other yesterday. Whether it be a functionary in a tourist office, a touchingly high-flown village Councillor of Culture, an Islamic revivalist in Grenada or a disagreeable Galician monk, his characters are drawn without fear or favour, and add up to a grand gallery of Spanishness.

The history we have learnt, Hamilton-Paterson implies, cannot he dismissed as the news of merely one time or one place.. (‘And yet,’ they added, ‘how can we claim to want him to be free while we deprive him of being on the grass in the fresh breeze surrounded with the whispering of insects. Brought up in the Alpine foothills, he justifies the contradiction by saying: ‘For me hunting is a natural fact rather than a choice.’Gradually, his mind sorted, he began to exert his influence at Juve In 1993 his brilliance helped to land the Uefa Cup. A text is spelt out in low relief and covered with eggshell paint. She also welcomes the professional development school, as it is called, and describes her own training in the Sixties as inadequate.’But that was an easy time,’ she says.

So began a roll, a slow roll with some duff gambles and massive losses, but one which eventually led to homegrown projects – such as his first film My Left Foot, about the paraplegic author Christy Brown and Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa – spinning into Oscar- and Tonyland And so it goes on. Two separate surveys of financial strength published yesterday once again illustrate the extent of the damage the industry has suffered from falling investment returns, and the scale of the challenge it faces in the 1990s. Strikes in Dushanbe were banned and the activity of political parties suspended under the state of emergency regulations.. ‘If he rode for us as first claim I think he’d have to live in England,’ Stroud said. It will do little to change his image as a colonial governor.’The open government pressure group Charter 88 said the proposals would ‘do nothing to redress the democratic deficit in the government of Scotland’.