The beaver is a proud and noble animal

The Florida Board of Education officially upheld evolution yesterday. The board didn't quite mean to do that, of course. In a 4-3 vote, the Board accepted a proposed curriculum that replaced all references to evolution with the phrase “the scientific theory of evolution.” In so doing, the board inadvertently made evolution central to public school science education, and also, almost incidentally, mandated education on just what constitutes a “scientific theory.” Until now, Florida's schools weren't required to teach evolution. The old curriculum guidelines didn't even mention it by name.

The 4-3 vote was obtained by including a last-minute amendment to the standards. Suggested last Friday by religious conservatives and dubbed the “academic freedom proposal,” the amendment required that the curriculum's references to “evolution” be replaced by the “scientific theory of evolution.” The amendment's supporters called the language change a victory — and it is, though not in the way they imagine.

Not only will Florida's students learn about evolution; they'll also learn that the scientific definition of a theory is different from the everyday definition, referring not to wild-eyed speculation but to a vast body of observation and testing that confirms a hypothesis so strongly that it might as well be considered fact.

Castro once said: “If surviving assassination were an Olympic event, I'd win the gold medal.”

His bodyguard Fabian Escalante went back through his records and counted 638 attempts to kill the Cuban leader. Many of them were confirmed in CIA files which were declassified last year.

President Kennedy was said to have asked James Bond creator Ian Fleming for tips on how to wipe out Castro – and many of the attempts to kill or discredit him seem more appropriate to a bad Bond spoof than real life.

They included:

* The exploding cigar – a scheme to pack one of his favourite Cohiba Esplendidos with enough explosive to blow his head off after a couple of puffs.

* The poisoned cigar – another Cohiba laced with botulinum toxin, one of the deadliest natural substances in the world.

* The infected diving suit – Castro was a keen undersea explorer and CIA agents arranged for Cuban exiles to dust the inside of his suit with powder containing a deadly fungus.

* The exploding sea shells – packed with booby traps and plastic explosives, they were placed in one of Castro's favourite dive areas.

* The femme fatale – Marita Lorenz, one of Castro's many mistresses, was persuaded by the CIA to try to smuggle a jar of cold cream containing poison pills into his room. Castro rumbled the plot, thrust a pistol in her hand and told her to kill him face to face. Her nerve failed.

* The poison pen – a ballpoint containing a tiny, spring-loaded hypodermic syringe filled with poison. It was supposed to prick Castro and kill him when he picked up the pen to write.

* The mind-bending radio studio – not so much an assassination as an attempt to humiliate Castro by pumping an LSD-type gas into a studio during a live broadcast so that he would make a fool of himself on air.

* The beard-wilter – Castro was always proud of his bushy facial hair so the CIA planned to make his beard fall out, again causing him to be ridiculed. Bizarrely, the plot involved putting hair removal powder in his shoes.

Despite the ludicrousness of some of the operations against him (and his beard), Castro took the threats seriously. Delphin Fernandez, his former personal assistant, says he regularly had all his underwear burned after wearing it, so it could not be laundered with deadly chemicals.

Source: Daily Mail

Virtuoso's trip destroys priceless Stradivarius

David Garrett, 26, one of the nation's foremost young concert performers, had an accident that every world-class musician must dread: at the end of a concert at the Barbican he tripped and landed on his violin.

The instrument is a 290-year-old Stradivarius, so rare that it would be almost impossible to estimate its value. Certainly there are people who would have gladly paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for it, before its glamorous owner did a turn as Mr Bean.

Now he has a badly damaged violin that will be out of use for at least eight months, and may never sound the same again. He is also facing a repair bill.

The accident threatened to leave the musician without a suitable instrument to play tomorrow night, when he is due back at the Barbican to perform Bruch's Violin Concerto. But help has come from J&A Beare, the violin dealers of Marylebone, who have arranged to have another Stradivarius flown in from Milan to be loaned to Garrett. The instrument, made in 1718, will be accompanied by a three-man security team watching over Garrett's every step.

When he was just 14 years old, the German-born prodigy was the youngest ever artist to be signed up by Deutsche Grammophon. At the age of four his father gave him a violin, and by the age of eight, he had a management team and was playing solo with of the world's leading orchestras. Later, he moved to New York to study, supplementing his student grant by modelling.

“I was all packed up and ready to go when I slipped,” Garrett told the Evening Standard. “People said it was as if I'd trodden on a banana skin. I fell down a flight of steps and on to the case. When I opened it, the violin was in pieces. I couldn't speak and I couldn't get up. I didn't even know if I was hurt I didn't care. I've had that violin for eight years. It was like losing a friend.”

The violin, known by its sobriquet San Lorenzo, is one of about 600 surviving instruments made by Antonio Stradivari. In May 2006, the Hammer Stradivarius made in 1707 sold at Christie's in New York for a record for a musical instrument at auction, while the previous year the Royal Academy of Music bought the Viotti violin for

The nearest another musician has come to suffering a similar disaster was when Peter Stumpf, a performer from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, came home tired one evening in 2004 and absent-mindedly left his 1684 Stradivarius cello on his front doorstep. Video security footage showed a youth stealing it and struggling to escape on a bicycle, crashing into dustbins on his way.

It was found three days later by a nurse, who gave it to her boyfriend, a carpenter, who offered to turn it into a CD rack. It was returned only slightly damaged.

In 1999 the world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma left his 1733 Stradivarius cello in the boot of a New York taxi. A huge crowd gathered outside his hotel the next day to see it returned in a black police sedan.

Source: The Independent