Quake of magnitude 5.9 brought down buildings and was widely felt in cities including Bologna and Modena, reports say

At least three people have died in a strong earthquake that rocked northern Italy on Sunday morning.

The quake struck at 4am local time (2am GMT) and had a magnitude of 5.9. It was centred in the plains near Modena and felt throughout nearby regions.

One person working a night shift died in the collapse of a factory and two others were killed in another building. Rescue officials were checking reports that other people were buried under rubble.

Thousands of people rushed into the streets after the quake, felt in the major towns of Bologna, Modena, Ferrara, Rovigo, Verona and Mantua.

There has been serious damage to historic buildings and rural structures. Parts of a historic fortress in one town collapsed and rural factories fell down.

A series of strong aftershocks hit the area and local mayors ordered residents to stay out of their homes.

The quake was centered 22 miles (35km) north-north-west of Bologna at a relatively shallow depth of 6.3 miles (10km), the US Geological Survey said.

Italy's last major earthquake killed nearly 300 people in the central Italian city of L'Aquila in 2009 and had a magnitude of 6.3.

• Earthquakes
• Italy

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Senior policewoman will leave after London 2012 Olympics, Scotland Yard has announced

Sue Akers, who has been leading Scotland's Yard investigation into phone hacking, is to retire after the Olympics, the Met has confirmed.

The Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers has been on the force for 36 years. She is in charge of the three linked inquiries into phone hacking, illicit payments and computer hacking, and has been leading inquiries into the potential involvement of intelligence services in relation to detainees held abroad.

Deputy Commissioner Craig Mackey said Akers's extensive detective experience would be missed but her decision to step down would not be allowed to affect the progress of the investigations.

Akers, who joined the Met in 1976, took control of Operation Weeting – the Met's second inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal – in January 2011. Operations Elveden, which is focusing on inappropriate payments to police, and Tuleta, which is looking at allegations of computer hacking, run alongside.

The fresh investigation came after detectives were handed a new dossier of evidence hinting that suspicious activities at the News of the World went beyond "rogue reporter" Clive Goodman.

The now-defunct tabloid's royal editor was jailed along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire in 2007 after they admitted intercepting messages.

Mackey said: "Considerable resources have been dedicated to investigating phone-hacking and related offences and the officers on these operations will continue to follow all evidence of suspected criminality.

"The importance of the continuity of leadership will of course be taken into account when the future command structure for Operations Weeting, Elveden and Tuleta is considered."

Akers told the former Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson she had planned to retire after the Olympics even before the new phone-hacking investigation was launched, according to the Independent on Sunday. She is believed to be the longest-serving woman in the Met.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "Deputy Assistant Commissioner [DAC] Sue Akers is due to retire later this year after 36 years' service with the MPS.

"The DAC signalled her intention to retire this autumn when she took charge of investigations into phone-hacking and related corruption and computer crime."

Akers, the former Borough commander of Barnet, was awarded the Queens Police Medal in 2007.

• Sue Akers
• Phone hacking
• Metropolitan police
• Operation Elveden
• Operation Tuleta
• Operation Weeting

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Facebook founder and university sweetheart take vows at home hot on heels of social network's share market listing

The newly enriched Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has updated his status to "married". Zuckerberg and 27-year-old Priscilla Chan wed at a small ceremony at his home in Palo Alto, California, on Saturday, capping a week during which the social network he founded listed on the share market for more than $100bn.

Zuckerberg took his company public in one of the most anticipated moves in Wall Street history on Friday. Chan graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, on Monday, the same day Zuckerberg turned 28.

The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years.

A company spokeswoman said Zuckerberg designed the ring featuring "a very simple ruby" himself.

The ceremony took place in Zuckerberg's backyard before fewer than 100 guests, who all thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation.

Tens of thousands of people "liked" his status change, which was accompanied by a photo of the couple in wedding attire.

The 28-year-old multi-billionaire is also the chief executive of Facebook, which had an historic initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday.

• Mark Zuckerberg
• Facebook
• United States

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Chinese activist touches down at Newark a month after escape from house arrest and vows to continue fight for human rights

The blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has arrived to begin a new life in the United States while vowing to keep fighting against injustice in his homeland.

The moment was the final leg of a dramatic, month-long escape from house arrest in rural China that ended with him speaking to a throng of press in front New York University where he will become an academic.

"We should link our arms and continue to fight for the goodness in the world and continue to fight injustice … I hope everybody works for me to promote justice and fairness in China," Chen said through an interpreter.

Chen's speech attracted a small crowd of onlookers who cheered him and a few cars honked their horns. "Nothing is impossible as long as you put your heart to it. As we say in Chinese there is no small affair as long as you put your heart to it," he said.

His flight, United Airlines UA88, had departed for Newark almost two hours late from Beijing international airport as a thunderstorm rolled in – a suitably tempestuous climax to one of the most remarkable chapters of courage and injustice in recent Chinese history.

After beatings, imprisonment, injury, embassy refuge and diplomatic wrangling between the two superpowers Chen's departure has stirred a mixture of relief and dismay among activists in China, who are glad Chen is safe but worried that their cause could lose one of its most influential advocates.

New York University in Greenwich Village has said he will study as a fellow at its school of law. "For the past seven years I have never had a day's rest so I have come here for a bit of recuperation in body and in spirit," Chen said.

In April Chen escaped 19 months of extrajudicial house arrest in his rural home in Shandong province. He and his family had been beaten and harassed as Dongshigu village in Linyi was turned into a virtual prison manned by plainclothes guards and filled with security cameras.

This followed more than four years in prison on charges – denied by his lawyers – that he roused a crowd to disrupt traffic and damage property.

Earlier still he had been abducted from the streets of Beijing by Linyi officials when he tried to expose their illegal use of forced abortions and sterilisations to meet family planning goals.

Chen escaped in the night, stumbled across farm fields and met a supporter who drove him to Beijing, where he sought the protection of US diplomats.

After bilateral talks the two governments thrashed out a deal for him to stay in China with greater protection against the Linyi thugs. But this arrangement collapsed within hours as Chen heard that his lawyer, brother and nephew had been beaten while he was left alone in the Beijing hospital where he was being treated for colitis and a broken foot sustained during his escape.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who was visiting Beijing, intervened and helped to arrange permission for Chen, his wife and daughters to travel to the US to study.

His lawyer Liu Weiguo said it was unlikely he would be allowed to return any time soon. "The chance for him to come back is small. I fear the Chinese government won't allow him to come back. This kind of thing has precedents." Chen is said to be unhappy about leaving relatives behind in a village controlled by Linyi's notoriously violent local authorities. But Liu said he did not blame Chen.

"We should look at this from his perspective. He's mentally and physically exhausted now and has been tormented for so many years. For the Chinese rights movement he has done more than enough. We can't ask him to do any more. Now he needs time to rest."

The prominent human rights lawyer Teng Biao said he was happy for Chen and his family. "His safety and freedom are the priority. Whether this is a good thing for the rights movement is secondary now."

Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said Chen's departure was no cause for celebration as his family remained under pressure and there may be less incentive for the central government to investigate wrongdoing by the local authorities.

More importantly, Bequelin said, it raised questions about the wider environment for activists. "This is a reflection that there is no room for human rights defenders in China. We don't know if this will turn into a temporary stay or exile, but in either case it begs the questions why someone like Chen Guangcheng cannot freely operate in China. What is it that stops the authorities from tolerating or even embracing someone like Chen?"

The situation remains grim for those left behind. Dongshigu, where Chen's mother and other relatives remain, is still under lockdown. His brother has described being beaten for three days after the activist escaped and his nephew Chen Kegui is to be tried for attempted murder after fighting off intruders with a knife.

Independent lawyers have been denied permission to represent him. Several say they have been beaten, intimidated and told not to speak to foreign media.

• Chen Guangcheng
• China
• Asia Pacific
• United States
• Human rights

Jonathan WattsPaul Harris
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Fans defend singer's freedom of speech as Philippines protests threaten star's concerts

Christian groups in the Philippines have called for a ban on Lady Gaga's Manila concerts, alleging that her song Judas is an offensive mockery of Jesus Christ.

Youths gathered at a rally outside the mayor's office, chanting "Stop the Lady Gaga concerts", while members of the Biblemode Youth Philippines group called her videos religiously offensive.

In the song, she calls herself a "holy fool" who is "still in love with Judas", singing: "Jesus is my virtue/And Judas is the demon I cling to." In the video, Gaga plays a biker chick riding behind a man wearing a crown of thorns, while longing for another biker with "Judas" emblazoned across his leather jacket.

The singer is due to play the 20,000-seat Mall of Asia tomorrow and on Tuesday, and James Imbong, a lawyer filing a petition to ban the concerts, said Christian groups would not accept a compromise as organisers in South Korea did when Seoul authorities agreed to forbid under-12s from attending instead of cancelling the concert.

"She has a song that suggests that she wants to have sex with Judas and performs it with a dance," Imbong told the news website PhilStar. "Of course, it would be accompanied by a costume that has pornographic elements."

Manila's mayor has issued a statement ordering Gaga not to "exhibit any nudity or lewd conduct which may be offensive to morals and good custom", with the stark reminder that the penal code in the primarily Roman Catholic country of 93 million can convict anyone up to six years for offending race or religion.

Tens of thousands of Gaga fans, from Seoul to Jakarta, are campaigning for the singer's right to freedom of expression, after numerous attempts by Christian and Muslim groups to ban shows during her Born This Way Ball Asia tour, calling her music, persona and style the "work of Satan", "dangerous to youth" and "spreading unhealthy sexual culture".

Indonesian activists called the cancellation of a gig in Jakarta a sign of the country's "Talibanisation" after authorities withdrew permission for her concert on 3 June, making her the first foreign artist to be banned despite selling out a 52,000-seat venue.

The 26-year-old has received an outpouring of support on Twitter, where she has 24 million followers, since the trouble over the tour began last month.

Indonesian human rights activist Andreas Harsono has said the concert ban represents "the Talibanisation [of] Indonesia", while sociologist Ida Ruwaida said it was up to the government to "facilitate different interests without allowing the cultural hegemony of one group over another".

Police denied the singer a concert permit amid claims from hardline Islamic groups that the suggestive nature of her show and lyrics would sabotage the country's moral codes of conduct. "During her concerts, Lady Gaga looks like a devil worshipper," said Suryadharma Ali, the religion affairs minister of the nation of 240 million people, mainly Muslims.

The ministry of tourism added that foreign performers should dress modestly on stage, and the government warned music promoters to consider cultural traditions when planning concerts. The hardline Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI) threatened to send 30,000 members to the airport to stop Lady Gaga from getting off her plane. It warned that if she tried to perform, Indonesia "should be prepared for chaos in Jakarta". It said: "We are ready to be thrown in jail and be killed – we will do anything to stop [the show]."

Human rights activists and academics have questioned the government's continued defence of Islamic militants' threats – which have resulted in calls to parliament to ban miniskirts, the banning of beauty pageants and Valentine's Day in some provinces, and the persecution of religious minorities.

Representatives of the country's tens of thousands of Gaga fans have argued that the government's defence of Indonesia's "moral fibre" is dubious given the nation's obsession with dangdut, a form of music known for its provocative dancing and scantily clad singers.

Fans have also questioned the government's worry over Lady Gaga's supposed promotion of homosexuality. "Nothing can stop me from meeting my queen," says Ali, a 26-year-old openly gay banker in Bandung, West Java, adding that the ban would have no impact on homosexuality in Indonesia, because it "will not make gay people turn straight".

The Gaga saga started in April in Seoul, the first stop on her 17-date tour. Calling Lady Gaga's music "the work of Satan", Christian groups held prayer meetings dedicated to banning the concert. Ju-Hyun, a prayer organiser, said the meetings were organised "so that homosexuality and pornography [would] not spread around the country".

Tickets sold to children were eventually refunded after the government rated the concert unsuitable and the Korean Association of Church Communication vowed to take "concerted action to stop young people from being infected with homosexuality and pornography".

It would be a dramatic turn of events if Lady Gaga ended up in jail in Manila this week, but, to quote the lady herself: "In the most biblical sense, I am beyond repentance."

• Lady Gaga
• Pop and rock
• Asia Pacific
• Philippines
• Indonesia

Kate Hodal
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Puglia politicians blame attack on mafia after gas cylinders connected to detonator left on wall outside school in Brindisi

A bomb that killed a teenage girl outside a school in Brindisi on Saturday has been blamed on the mafia by local politicians and condemned as one of Italy's most barbaric acts of violence.

Three gas cylinders connected to a detonator left on a low wall outside the school exploded at 7.50am, killing the 16-year-old and injuring up to 10 others, one seriously, as they arrived for lessons. The blast, which experts said was designed to kill, shattered windows in surrounding buildings and was heard across the southern Italian city.

Mainly attended by girls, the school is named after Francesca Morvillo Falcone, wife of anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone. Both were killed by a mafia bomb in Sicily on 23 May 1992, almost exactly 20 years ago, leading many to suspect a mafia role in the bombing, for which no one has yet claimed responsibility. An anti-mafia march was due to be held in Brindisi.

"You can understand the symbolism of this," said Cosimo Consales, the mayor of the Puglian port town. "This was an attack by organised criminals."

However, interior minister Anna Maria Cancellieri said the attack did not bear the hallmarks of a mafia attack, while Achille Serra, a former Italian police chief, said Italian mafia clans typically killed magistrates and police officers. Targeting schoolgirls, he said, was "unprecedented".

But an assessor with the region of Puglia, Nicola Fratoianni, pointed the finger at Puglia's mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita, which has grown in the shadow of more notorious Italian mafias such as Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the Naples Camorra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta.

Originally specialising in smuggling cigarettes from the Balkans, the Puglian mafia developed protection rackets in Puglia and built an arsenal of weapons thanks to ties with Balkan gangs during the 1990s, but was believed to have been weakened by a series of police operations.

• Italy
• Europe

Tom Kington
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As Antony Hegarty prepares to curate this year's Meltdown event in London, he talks about the artists who have had the greatest influence on his life and career – and why 'future feminism' will make the world a better place

When you arrange to meet Antony Hegarty, you don't have to worry about questions like "How will I recognise you?" The singer is in London visiting his parents' home near Kingston upon Thames, so we've agreed to get together at a place on the river. At 11 in the morning, I'm standing outside the designated cafe – which is closed – among the inevitable joggers and retired couples on their constitutional and toddlers feeding the swans, when Hegarty comes striding along the boardwalk. He is well over 6ft tall, his bulky frame dressed in indeterminate numbers of layers of black, his moon-pale face and soft features and smile partly covered by strands of long, straight black hair. As a younger man he used to walk the streets of New York wearing a sheer silk slip and military boots with the words "fuck off" inked on his forehead. He's lost the stare-rejecting attire, if not quite all of the sentiment.

In search of coffee we head to the nearby Rose theatre foyer, which is full of latte-loving young mothers encouraging their offspring to let off some steam. When he was invited to edit the Guardian's music website a couple of years ago, Hegarty suggested that what humanity urgently needed in order to survive was "a seismic shift toward the feminine in our empathetic systems of perceiving and interacting with the world". When he was making this claim I'm not sure that what he had in mind was the fecund yummy mummies of the royal borough of Kingston, but it seems appropriate anyhow, in the hour or so that follows, that his thoughts on the future feminisation of the planet should occasionally be threatened to be overwhelmed by women talking over voluble babies.

While he is in London, Hegarty is finalising some of his plans for the forthcoming Meltdown festival, which he is curating, down river at the Southbank Centre. He has been dividing his time of late between his home in New York and a base in Madrid (where he has been working on a theatre project with the cultish performance artist Marina Abramovic), but southern England, where he lived until the age of 10, remains a formative grid reference. Though he has been an important figure in the New York avant garde for 20 years, Hegarty grew up in Chichester, west Sussex. He is 41 now, but he is so curiously boyish in manner that you can well imagine him still as the awkward British chorister, developing a bit faster, and a bit more unconventionally than his fellow descants; he still looks both at home and not at home in these suburbs, a big man who has got used to projecting his inner hermaphrodite quite comfortably.

Hegarty's spoken voice, a warm conspiratorial whisper, only occasionally hints at the uniquely powerful and vulnerable sound that he is capable of making on stage and in recordings. When the range of that soul-charged tenor first fully unfolded with his band Antony and the Johnsons in 2005, you had the sense of it coming out of nowhere, emerging, as the title of his breakthrough Mercury prize-winning album I Am a Bird Now suggested, as if from another, more aery, species entirely.

Hegarty himself doesn't quite see it that way. The creation of his androgynous persona, and the discovery of the possibilities of his voice, was a mix-and-match of influence and experiment conducted over many years. Meltdown works best when the curator approaches it as a kind of musical autobiography, and certainly that is Hegarty's intention this year. His first forays into art were collages and cut-ups of magazines, which he still makes and exhibits from time to time, cultural references spliced together to form vivid and unsettling wholes. He takes the approach into other areas of his life, too, he suggests. "I like arranging all my friends as constellations, and I do love the process of curation, so this is perfect for me." To prove the point he sets his smartphone on his knee and starts scrolling excitedly through the acts he has lined up.

First up in an eclectic list – "mainly ecstatic female voices with a few queens thrown in" – is Marc Almond, whom Hegarty has persuaded to appear in his Marc and the Mambas incarnation, the side project of his Soft Cell years. Almond has become a friend, but in his teens Hegarty was the obsessive fan. "Marc pretty much singlehandedly determined my future as a musician and the style of music I would pursue," he recalls. "I was about 13 when I heard him. I was living in America, a suburb in California and getting those records by land mail was really hard work. You would hear rumours about records in magazines which themselves were pretty hard to get hold of. But for all those reasons Marc and the Mambas were really important to me. I lived on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. And those records arriving through the door were really my lifeline."

Hegarty moved out to California in 1981. The family were following his father's work as an engineer; they had gone first to Amsterdam, before ending up on the west coast of the US. Hegarty is not keen on public psychoanalysis and pretty wary of sharing even the facts of his life, preferring mystery, but he hints that the abrupt shift across the Atlantic was not an especially happy one for him. In Chichester he had enjoyed singing with the choir but that opportunity was not available to him at school in the US, where singing was considered "effeminate" and "shameful" among the boys. As he reached puberty and his ambiguous gender identity became more defined, he suggests he wasn't bullied so much as left to his own devices. His reaction was, he has said elsewhere, to confront his identity head on: 'I started wearing more makeup. That's the honest truth. I started probably about 12… 13."

As he applied his eyeliner, Marc Almond made him feel as though he was not alone. Previously his only musical crush, inevitably, had been on Kate Bush. But he looked on Almond as something like a cross between a role model and a guardian angel. "I always felt he had kind of left a trail of breadcrumbs for me, to follow him into music," he says. "You know I would collect quotes and references that he mentioned in interviews, pore over them. He laid out the land for me. And I really learned to sing listening to him singing. Him and Nina Simone. As Nina would say in the studio, 'Don't put nothing in unless you really feel it. Let's do it again from the top please.'"

Hegarty likes his singers to embody different kinds of courage, "people who deliver a vision of the world they totally believe in". In his live performances he is a master of that kind of conviction: his most recent show, at Radio City Music Hall in New York, a staging of his latest album Swanlights, saw him bathed in the green glow of lasers, accompanied by a 60-piece orchestra while keening rapturously about a vision of "being dead, underwater and filled with crystals of light". It was described in the New York Times as an evening of "wonderment" with "cries from the heart, crashing like waves".

Hegarty has always been drawn to voices that self-consciously channel female mythic power. His South Bank lineup will include not only the return to a mainstream stage of the ethereal Scots vocals of Liz Fraser, once of the Cocteau Twins, but also the "Edith Piaf of Turkey", Selda Ba˘gcan, who took up the people's cause against the generals of Istanbul armed only with a guitar, and Buffy Sainte Marie, who invigorated electronic and folk music with Native American wisdom in the 1960s and 70s.

Hegarty's father used to play tapes of Sainte-Marie in his car, and those songs retain an eerie nostalgia for Hegarty himself. "Little Wheel Spin and Spin was so haunting and so frightening to me as a child," he says. "Buffy was very clear about what she saw as the crisis and very keen to spit it out, almost like a witch. I like singing that is not far short of a hex. Nina Simone did the same thing around race and the civil rights movement. All of that taught me how you can participate in culture as an artist."

In his own engagement with that "crisis", he defines it as "a crisis of spiritual issues, but also a practical crisis of ecology". Hegarty is an avid reader of the Guardian's environment pages and our conversation is salted with quotes from articles he has recently clipped. ("They said last month in the US it was 8.7 degrees hotter than it should have been… Every taxi driver knows something weird is happening with the weather. And everyone is waiting in vain for the institutions that are supposed to have our best interests at heart to come up with some solution…")

Some of the lyrics on his last two albums suggest a kind of transcendent Wordsworthian relationship with the natural world. I wonder if this was established in Hegarty as a child.

"Well," he says, "I think it was but in just in a very typical south of England way. I was raised walking around on the South Downs at weekends on my father's shoulders. And with a sense that nature was for ever. The critical shift that has happened in our lifetimes is the idea that we are actually undermining that whole belief. Can you imagine the burden on the psyche of our species that has involved? How can we possibly process that without massive global summits on what we should be doing? Instead we are being divided and conquered by this terrorism scaremongering and half the world, including most of America, is tied up in patriarchal religions that believes apocalypse is the climax of what we are waiting for."

Once he is into his stride on this theme, there is no stopping him. Hegarty was an ardent Christopher Hitchens fan, slayer of "sky god religions that destroy our connection with the natural world and promote the idea that paradise lies elsewhere". As a transgender person – and he has no wish to define the "meat and potatoes" of his sexuality any more precisely – he sees himself as having a small headstart on most of the rest of civilisation in his intimate understanding of the need for feminine power structures to restore imbalances created by "patriarchal religion, patriarchal economies and patriachal government". In this way he has moved from the deeply personal emotional conflicts and epiphanies of his earlier songs to what he sees as a more political message. In this vision the drag queens and trannies that he came of age among in New York are not only defiantly transgressive but also prophetic.

"There was another article I was reading in the Guardian," he says, with a grin, "about a year ago that declared there was no fundamental difference between men and women. I mean, are you off your rocker? The whole problem is this difference between men and women and our lack of self-knowledge about it. Our bodies are like computers with two different operating systems. One is called testosterone, one is called oestrogen. The same body, different software. And within the transgender community you see this very clearly. You watch people take oestrogen or testosterone and you see them change not just physically, but their whole way of thinking, their whole approach."

Has he ever experimented with that process himself?

"No, but I have seen it very intimately, and the changes are not subtle, they are fundamental…" Hegarty has perhaps always been aware that he has the capacity to shift between these two operating systems, to try them both on for size and communicate in his highly allusive way how it feels. "The future," he declares in his stagey whisper, "is bringing more understanding of how we make the decisions we make on a biological level, and then to step back from that and see what is going on. We need more oestrogen-based thinking, basically."

If Marc Almond helped him to understand this calling, it was watching the film Mondo New York, about the lives of Manhattan performance artists, when he was 17, that allowed Hegarty to see where he had to go to be himself. One star of that film, Joey Arias, "is my New York hero really," he says. "In the film I saw this queen dressed as Billie Holiday, singing in the voice of Billie Holiday A Hard Day's Night by the Beatles. It was like seeing a black swan made out of razor blades or something. So elusive, so threatening, so androgynous, so sexual. I was still living in California, but I knew I had to go and see Joey."

Not long after he arrived in Arias's New York, Hegarty formed the Blacklips Performance Cult, a drag theatre troupe with whom he put on weekly shows at Mother, a club in the Meatpacking District frequented by drag punks and "gender mutants". The Blacklips performed a surreal burlesque during which Hegarty rehearsed his spellbinding laments, in a show that also occasionally involved throwing offal and buckets of blood at the audience. The Johnsons (the name a tribute to Marsha P Johnson, a transgender activist and leader in the Stonewall Riots, whose body was discovered in the Hudson river after a gay pride march in 1992) followed on from the Blacklips. The band was always a shifting group of collaborators for Hegarty's voice, and though the first Antony and the Johnsons album was released in 1998, it was not until 2003, when an EP called I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy (the cover of which shows Hegarty lying in supplication before a naked Japanese hermaphrodite) caught the attention of Hal Willner, the music director for Saturday Night Live, that he received any wider attention. Willner passed the record on to Lou Reed, who insisted: "When I heard Antony, I knew that I was in the presence of an angel." Reed invited Hegarty to join him as a backup vocalist on his Animal Serenade tour, and the pair have been friends and occasional collaborators ever since (Hegarty is hoping that Reed and his partner Laurie Anderson, of O Superman fame, will both return the compliment and appear at Meltdown).

If for any reason they don't make it, there will be no shortage of friends from Hegarty's meat-chucking Blacklips days. He has, he says, of late helped to form a sort of political group called the Future Feminist Foundation, which has meetings in New York from time to time. They have been working on a manifesto, but it's not the most organised of groups, so they haven't quite drafted all of it yet. The basics are pretty clear though. "It's not a group that thinks women should just crawl towards economic equality in the way we have been engaged in since the 60s," Hegarty says. "That can't be the climax of feminism. It's like gay rights, as if gay marriage is the end point, as if we just want to be included in these business-as-usual institutions. That's not the point of being queer, just as mitigated reproductive rights aren't the point of being a woman. We want to move this forward. Do something great… overturn all these failed male structures of thinking, all this aggression in decision-making…" he pauses in his impromptu stump speech to the mother's union of Kingston upon Thames to laugh a little. "Sorry if I sound nuts," he says.

The unofficial leader of the Future Feminist Foundation, or at least the woman that Hegarty "would follow anywhere", is Kembra Pfahler. She fronts a glam-punk band called the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. "Kembra," Hegarty says, with a certain amount of jealous awe, is "the most hardcore future feminist really."

How so?

"Well, for example she does this one performance piece called Wall of Vagina, which is like seven girls spray-painted different colours and naked and they just pile up on top of each other and open their legs wide and create this wall on stage or in a gallery, this wall of vaginas, and you may not pass through the wall."

That does sound quite a hard act to follow, I say.

Pfahler will be coming to London to perform for Meltdown, though regrettably not with her painted fellow travellers. "I've asked her to do a lecture, and then she will do a concert accompanied by Vaginal Creme Davis, the quintessential LA Afro-American drag punk…"

Of course. You get half a sense that Hegarty sees Meltdown as a delicious opportunity to close the circle of his life, to bring his New York extremes back home to the norms of his childhood in a spirit of mischief as well as political commitment. He has learned a lot, he says, from Marina Abramovic, the self-harming godmother of performance art, about the possibilities of theatre. He has asked Abramovic to do a lecture that will only be open to women, part of his current project of finding ways to have men "understand the sacred humility of recognising a woman's space". This is the first step in what he sees as the necessary transfer of power between the sexes in order to save the species. "Many men," he believes, with wild optimism, "will be hugely relieved by that shift."

There is not a vast amount of evidence for that assertion at the moment, I suggest. Where does he look for hope?

"Well," he says with a laugh, "they are letting us do this festival. It's a start!" With that battle cry he heads out into the streets of Kingston, a man with a mission, which in the short term involves buying a loaf of bread to go and feed the swans.

Antony's Meltdown, 1-12 August, is part of the Southbank Centre's Festival of the World with MasterCard; www.southbankcentre.co.uk/meltdown. The Observer is media partner

MUSICAL HEROES: Antony on some of his Meltdown highlights

MARC ALMOND

"The work that Marc did was totally off the mark. It was so ambitious. He is very well loved, and he is interesting, because he did it the wrong way round as it were. He went from mainstream pop into subculture. Usually things go the other way." 9 August

LIZ FRASER

"In my later teens I became intensely preoccupied with the work of Liz Fraser and the Cocteau Twins. Liz is the secret jewel of Britain. I would cry to those songs a lot, more than sing them. There is something so maternal in her voice. It's not just a melodic but a phonetic approach to singing which is totally intuitive, and which she invented herself. I get chills just thinking about it. She hasn't performed for a long time, so for her to sing is a centrepiece of the festival." 6 and 7 August

DIAMANDA GALÁS

"Diamanda is the other great singer in the group. Just her ferocity as a singer – no one does what she does. She is the Maria Callas of art music. Again that ecstatic range and extraordinary courage." 1 August

SELDA BAĞCAN

"Selda is like the Edith Piaf of Turkey, a tremendous political voice, a folk musician in the broadest sense. She has this tone in her voice that makes me cry my eyes out even though I don't understand the language, or really the tradition. I've probably listened to her more than anyone in the last two years." 2 August

LAURIE ANDERSON

"My mother listened to Laurie Anderson; one of the records we brought with us from WH Smith out to America was O Superman. My mum was a photographer – and Laurie is someone who names what she sees in bold language. She is also one of very few artists who will write about the future, which surprisingly few musicians do." 3 August

COCOROSIE

"CocoRosie are a very inspired band of young women from New York, part of our Future Feminist Foundation group. They honestly don't give a shit what anybody thinks about them. They taught me so much about magical space. And it is amazing to be taught by people who are younger than you." 4 August

BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE

"Buffy is on another frontier, for the way that she merged folk music and indigenous music with new technologies. She was using electronic instruments in the early 70s. She had a certain moral authority on the basis of her indigenous identity. A real spiritual clarity." 7 August

KEMBRA PFALER

"Kembra, from the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, is one of the most important artists in New York. She is a true pioneer of avant-garde urban theatre. She just creates these art movements, availabilism, which is all about working with what you have. She is going do a lecture, and then she will do a concert accompanied by Vaginal Creme Davis, the quintessential LA afro American drag punk." 10 August

JOEY ARIAS

"Joey is going to come and do his Strange Fruit. A whole night as Billie Holliday. It's the highest art punk has to offer. What Joey does is not female impersonation, it's as if he channels Billie. It's punk really in the way that Leigh Bowery was punk." 8 August

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

"Marina recently did this huge piece at Moma, New York where she sat in the gallery for 700 hours and people queued up to sit one to one and look at her. I have asked her to do a lecture only for women. She said she would never have suggested that of her own volition but she has agreed to do it. I think it is very important, very golden that men understand the sacred humility of recognising a woman's space." 5 August

• Antony and the Johnsons
• Meltdown festival
• Pop and rock
• Festivals
• Sexuality
• Gender

Tim Adams
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Chef Jamie Oliver and health experts have been left baffled by education secretary Michael Gove's decision

An exasperated Jamie Oliver has written to every MP demanding a U-turn over nutrition rules in schools after education secretary Michael Gove refused to act on a report that found nine out of 10 academies were selling junk food.

Announcing the move on his website, the TV chef, whose campaign for better food in state schools has lifted standards for millions of pupils, told voters that if their MPs did not act "you can safely assume that they don't care about the wellbeing of our children and the future of our country".

Oliver's move came as public health officials and doctors joined a growing number of education and food organisations in criticising the education secretary. In a move that astonished experts, Gove insisted that he would not apply the nutrition standards that cover all other state schools to academies and free schools – even after a report by the School Food Trust charity found last week that many were selling sub-standard products.

The investigations, initially requested by Gove, showed that 89 out of 100 academies surveyed were selling at least one of the snack foods high in sugar, salt or fat that have been banned in vending machines in other state schools.

Gove insists that academies, which enjoy greater freedom than other state schools, should be left to determine their own nutritional standards because they are run by responsible head teachers.

However, of the 100 academies questioned by the trust, 31 were found to be selling one type of banned fattening food, 33 were selling two and 15 were selling three. Also 82 of the academies sold sweetened fruit juices, which often contain only a small amount of juice and would therefore be banned in maintained schools. The national school food standards stipulate that such products must contain at least 50% fruit juice.

The trust, which was called in after Oliver and others raised concerns last year, concluded that the nutritional standards introduced in 2008 under the Labour government should now cover academies and free schools.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said that despite the report there was no prospect of a change of policy. In a statement the department said: "We trust teachers – the professionals on the frontline – to do what is best for their pupils. Many academies go over and above the minimum requirements and are offering their pupils high-quality, nutritional food."

However, Oliver, urging MPs to back a Commons early day motion from Tory MP Zac Goldsmith which says that academies should be covered by the rules, says in his letter that the government's approach threatens a "massive erosion of everything we have achieved".

"I passionately believe that this is taking a huge step in the wrong direction as far as taking care of our children and the future of this country is concerned," Oliver writes. "His (Gove's) decision means that the one million children attending academy schools no longer have any standards in place to protect the food they eat every day.

"I have written to all MPs asking them to sign Zac Goldsmith's early day motion. If your MP does not support this motion, then you can safely assume that they don't care about the wellbeing of our children and the future of our country."

There are 1,283 secondary academies in England – 40% of the total of 3,261 secondary schools – and a further 10% have applied for academy status. Gove is pressing for still more to convert.

Dr Janet Atherton, president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, which represents England's 150 directors of public health in the NHS, said: "The standards were brought in because catering standards in schools weren't as good as they needed to be. They have brought about dramatic improvements in children's nutrition and eating habits.

"They have been proven to be effective. You can see that in children's diets. Some academies are following the standards, but that's not across the board.

"I'm concerned that evidence shows that academies aren't doing what Mr Gove said should happen. It feels that it's moving back to before the standards came in, with confectionery and soft drinks available in schools. The standards should apply in all schools."

Rob Rees, chairman of the School Food Trust and a well-known chef, said: "We have clear evidence that shows standards work for schools when it comes to food and cooking. For the last three years the number of children eating lunches has increased and many children are enjoying the hard work of so many cooks across the country.

"I hope that all schools will value the evidence and realise the benefit good food brings to performance, behaviour and social cohesion."

Last month Gove told the education select committee that he saw no evidence of academies failing to comply with the standards. He said: "All the evidence seems to me to point in the other direction: that schools that have academy freedoms have improved the quality of food they offered children."

The Department of Health said it was a matter for Gove.

• School meals
• Jamie Oliver
• Michael Gove
• Zac Goldsmith
• Academies
• Health
• Education policy

Toby HelmDenis Campbell
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Refugee Council claims that many child asylum seekers are being classsified as adults, allowing them to be detained

A report by the Refugee Council to be published this week accuses the immigration service of continuing to detain child asylum seekers by wrongly classifying them as adults.

The report, Not a Minor Offence, has been welcomed by other groups working with refugees and asylum seekers who are growing increasingly concerned by the numbers of age dispute cases. Last year one child spent almost three months locked up before it was finally accepted that he was not an adult.

Evidence that children were being psychologically damaged by their experiences in the asylum system led the government to announce an end to the controversial practice of keeping under-18s in detention centres two years ago this weekend. Yet the practice is continuing and no one knows how many children have been illegally deported as adults.

Guessing someone's age is controversial, but the Refugee Council believes officials are not erring on the side of caution. In many cases agencies find out about a child whose age is disputed only when another detainee inside a centre reports their concerns about an unaccompanied child being locked up.

Faisal was only 15 when he arrived in the UK. Judged to be an adult, he spent several days in police cells and was left to sleep rough on the streets before finally spending a month in a detention centre.

Talking about his experience still causes him acute distress. "I was 15. I didn't have any documents but I know my age. I didn't understand why it was so important.

"The immigration officer was banging his fist on the table saying 'No, this is not your age'. By the end I was so tired and upset that I said OK, I will be whatever you want me to be. When I was first in the police cell I was crying because I couldn't believe it. They came and banged on the door and shouted at me. One policeman drew his finger across his throat. They would all say 'You're going back, we'll be sending you back' and point at me and laugh. At the detention centre they locked me in a room by myself. I didn't know anyone. I was very scared I was to be sent back to Afghanistan. I would rather die."

The number of unaccompanied child asylum seekers arriving in the UK is dropping – from 3,645 in 2007 to 1,277 in 2011 – but no one knows why.

Judith Dennis, advocacy officer at the Refugee Council and author of the report, admitted the detention of children on the grounds that their age was in question had not changed, but said that establishing someone's age was not easy. "It's a difficult task but we should be erring on the side of caution. The official guidelines for unaccompanied children state they should not be detained unless 'their physical appearance and/or demeanour very strongly indicates that they are significantly over 18'.

"That is clearly not what's happening. All children should be referred to a social worker so that a proper assessment can be made. It's not something you can decide in a few minutes, and I think it's quite worrying this is what seems to be happening in a lot of cases.

"Given that it's well established the harm the experience of being locked up can and has caused children, and that the government has accepted it's unacceptable to lock up children, why are we not taking this more seriously?"

Hashi Syedain, of the independent monitoring board at Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, said the problem was serious. "It bears repeating again and again – in 2012 the UK is locking up children in Harmondsworth in what is effectively an adult male prison. They can remain there for weeks on end because the system doesn't care enough to stop it happening.

"It is true that some young people who are over 18 claim to be younger in the hope of being allowed to stay in the UK, but this does not excuse the UK Border Agency's failure to prevent children from ending up in detention.

"Another year passes in which nothing changes and children continue to find themselves in detention. It is not good enough."

For Faisal, the intervention of Refugee Council workers meant he is at college and living in semi-independent hostel accommodation, but the trauma of his teenage years is far from over. When he turns 18 he may still be sent back to Afghanistan. "I try to study, but it's hard to think of the future," he said. "I feel very hopeless. I'm scared they will come for me and put me back in detention or deport me. I cannot go back to Afghanistan. If I had not left I would have been dead. If I go back, I will die."

• Immigration and asylum
• Children
• Human rights

Tracy McVeigh
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Shadow ministers urge leader to put pressure on Cameron by promising EU membership poll if Labour win general election

Ed Miliband is being urged by a growing number of shadow cabinet members and senior allies to promise a dramatic in-out referendum on Britain's future membership of the European Union if Labour wins the next general election.

Several figures in the party are pushing the Labour leader to make the pledge well before the next European elections in 2014 to outmanoeuvre David Cameron, who is under heavy pressure to commit the Tory party to a national vote on the issue. The Observer has been told that, after discussions with shadow cabinet members, Miliband is leaving the door open to a referendum – although he is keen to stress that the short-term focus and discussion must be on how to end the current euro crisis.

Allies of the Labour leader say pressure on him to make what would be a historic, high-risk pledge will increase following the appointment of Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham and Rainham, as Labour's policy chief.

Cruddas, a long-time opponent of the euro but otherwise pro-EU, is strongly in favour of an in-out referendum as a means of ending divisive arguments on Europe once and for all. Before his appointment, Cruddas told the People's Pledge campaign for a referendum that the issue was one of "democracy", and said a referendum pledge should be made "immediately, or as quickly as we can". Cruddas is understood to think that such a move would help define Miliband's leadership as bold and distinct from the New Labour years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

A ComRes opinion poll for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror showed how Europe is emerging as an issue that could be pivotal at the next election. The poll showed that 26% of Tories now say they will consider voting for the anti-EU Ukip compared to 11% of Labour supporters and 14% of Liberal Democrats. It also showed the extent of anti-EU hostility Labour would need to overcome if a referendum were held now, with 46% of voters saying they would vote to leave the EU compared with 30% who would vote to stay in.

If Labour did commit to a referendum, the party leadership would campaign vigorously in favour of a vote to stay in – a stance that would be supported by most Labour members.

A referendum would, however, leave the Tories divided, with the party leadership certain to campaign for a vote to remain in the EU, while many MPs and grassroots Conservatives would want to leave. One shadow cabinet member said: "We should have the confidence to say we think we can win this and get on with it. There are issues of timing, about when we make the decision and when one would be held. But it certainly is no longer heresy to talk about it."

A spokesman for Miliband did not deny that the option was being considered, stressing merely that "our position is that we don't think this is what Europe needs at the moment".

Last week, in a sign that the Labour party is gradually preparing the ground for a referendum pledge, shadow chancellor Ed Balls said there could be a case in future, for calling a national vote when the current euro crisis was over and the shape of the new Europe was known. This followed similar comments from former cabinet minister and European commissioner Lord Mandelson.

On Thursday Peter Hain, a former Europe minister who stepped down from the shadow cabinet last week but who remains loyal to Miliband, said on BBC1's Question Time that he believed the British people would deserve a say when the time was right. "I think the way things are going people in Britain probably want to make up their minds about whether to stay in Europe or not," he said. "I don't think we should be frightened about giving people a vote."

Sources said that Hain would never have spoken out on the EU issue had he felt such remarks would have been unhelpful to Miliband, or significantly out of kilter with the Labour leader's own views.

Miliband is said to be genuinely undecided and cautious – not least because of the possibility that the country could vote to leave the EU. He is also being advised by some that the move could be seen as crudely opportunistic at a time of crisis in the EU.

Others say that it could put off Liberal Democrats who might otherwise come over to Labour.

Labour enthusiasts for a referendum stress, however, that it would not in any way amount to a watering down of Labour's commitment to the EU. On the contrary, it would be an opportunity to argue the positive case for membership during a national campaign – one that would also help the party build alliances with pro-EU elements of the business community.

While a minority of Labour MPs might want to leave the EU, highlighting divisions within Labour, they say a referendum would cause far deeper splits in the Tory party.

The People's Pledge, which draws support from all political parties, has announced it will hold more local referendums in three Greater Manchester constituencies, Withington, Cheadle and Hazel Grove, asking people if they want a national vote.

The seats, one in Manchester and two in Stockport, are all represented by Liberal Democrat MPs: John Leech, Mark Hunter and Andrew Stunnell, respectively. This follows its local referendum in Thurrock last month where 89.9% of people who voted backed a referendum.

Ian McKenzie, director of the People's Pledge, said: "The people of Thurrock set the pace last month by voting in huge numbers for a referendum. Voters in Manchester Withington, Cheadle and Hazel Grove now have the chance to quicken that pace towards a national referendum for the rest of us."

• Ed Miliband
• European Union
• Jon Cruddas
• Labour
• Conservatives
• Europe

Toby Helm
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US and France succeed in putting promotion of growth at top of communique despite Germany's resistance to stimulus package

Barack Obama and the other G8 leaders wrapped up their negotiations on the European crisis at Camp David on Saturday with a pledge to keep Greece in the eurozone and to promote growth.

The communique, which had the growth promise at the top, represents a victory for Obama and the new French president, François Hollande, over German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has resisted calls for a stimulus package.

But it may be shortlived. The communique was short in detail and Merkel could re-establish her dominance next week at an informal European meeting.

The eight leaders meeting at the US presidential retreat in Maryland issued a communique declaring in its opening paragraph: "Our imperative is to promote growth and jobs."

It added: "The global economic recovery shows signs of promise, but significant headwinds persist. Against this background, we commit to take all necessary steps to strengthen and reinvigorate our economies and combat financial stresses, recognising that the right measures are not the same for each of us."

The communique was issued after almost four hours devoted to the eurozone crisis, which could have a negative impact on the US economy and Obama's re-election chances in November.

Obama favours Europeans adopting a stimulus package similar to the one he instigated in the US in 2009, as does Hollande. They both also favour keeping the eurozone intact, including Greece, though this may in the end prove difficult.

The communique said: "We welcome the ongoing discussion in Europe on how to generate growth, while maintaining a firm commitment to implement fiscal consolidation to be assessed on a structural basis. We agree on the importance of a strong and cohesive eurozone for global stability and recovery, and we affirm our interest in Greece remaining in the eurozone while respecting its commitments."

After three years of facing European leaders committed to deficit reduction, Obama has a new ally in Hollande. Speaking at Camp David, Hollande said European leaders were trying to balance the competing aims of reining in their budgets while stimulating their economies: "As President Obama noted, we need to pursue these two goals simultaneously: budgetary solvency and maximum growth."

Obama and David Cameron clashed with Merkel on Saturday, demanding she drop her G8 resistance to setting out a clear path for Europe out of its crisis. Measures resisted by the Germans included a looser monetary policy for the European Central Bank that would enable quantitative easing similar to that deployed by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England.

• G8
• Greece
• Europe
• United States
• Barack Obama
• US foreign policy
• Eurozone crisis
• François Hollande
• Angela Merkel
• European Union
• European monetary union
• Economics
• European banks
• Financial crisis
• Euro

Ewen MacAskill
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Author of The God Delusion says providing free Bibles to state schools is justified by its impact on the English language

It sounds like one of the most unlikely alliances of recent years. Richard Dawkins, arch-atheist and scourge of the praying classes, has announced support for education secretary Michael Gove's plan to send free King James Bibles to every state school.

The proposal aims to help pupils learn about the Bible's impact "on our history, language, literature and democracy" and will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the authorised version's publication, Gove said earlier this year. Church leaders have approved, but the plan has fallen foul of most non-believers. An online Guardian poll showed an 82% opposition, while the National Secular Society said the £375,000 proposal wasted money and favoured Christianity in multi-faith state schools. Nevertheless, several rich Tory party donors agreed to back the plan and the first Bibles were sent out last week, to the derision of secularists – with the exception of their most prominent and pugnacious recruit: Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and critic of all things clerical.

As Dawkins reveals in today's Observer, support for the Bible plan is justified on the grounds of literary merit and he lists a range of biblical phrases which any cultivated English speaker will instantly recognise. These include "salt of the Earth", "through a glass darkly", and "no peace for the wicked". Dawkins states: "A native speaker of English who has not read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian."

Rapprochement would seem to be in the air – until Dawkins's thesis is studied more closely. While Gove believes the Bible is a guide to morality, Dawkins is sure it is not. "I have heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that without the Bible as a moral compass people would show no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself," he says.

In fact, its pages are riddled with the advocacy of murder, slavery and theft. Hence his support for Gove's plan: opening the Bible is the surest way to put young minds off its contents. From this perspective, the Dawkins-Gove alliance looks dead before it started.

• Richard Dawkins
• Michael Gove
• The Bible
• Religion
• Christianity
• Religion

Robin McKie
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Republicans hope campaign will woo fastest-growing demographic in the US away from Barack Obama

Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney has launched an aggressive campaign to woo Hispanic voters away from Barack Obama.

A Spanish-language version of a campaign ad will air this week in key states – the first political ad produced by the Romney campaign since his last Republican rival dropped out of the race.

The ad is called Día Uno, which means day one in English, and features Romney speaking a Spanish-language version of the "I approve this message" tagline that all American presidential candidate put on official TV ads. "Soy Mitt Romney y apruebo este mensaje," the former governor of Massachusetts says stiffly.

The move comes only days after the latest figures released by the US Census showed that for the first time there are more Hispanic and black and other minority babies being born in America than white ones.

Among US minority groups Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing, now making up more than 50 million people, which is one in six Americans. Romney's campaign is keen to make inroads into the demographic group, often stressing socially conservative issues such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage that chime with the Republicans' traditional white base as well as often devoutly Roman Catholic Hispanics.

There are also some senior Hispanic figures in the party. Marco Rubio is a junior senator in Florida of Cuban background. He is popular with the Tea Party base and often cited as an example that the Republican's conservative message can resonate with Hispanic groups.

In lists of Romney's possible vice-presidential picks, Rubio is frequently mentioned and seen as a way of attracting Hispanic voters. Another possible running mate would be Susana Martinez, the Republican governor of New Mexico. The party has also appointed Hispanic outreach directors in six battleground states. Romney himself even has personal links to Mexico as his father, George Romney, was born there.

But the task facing Romney is not going to be easy. In 2008 Obama won 67% of the Hispanic vote compared with Republican John McCain's 31%. A Pew Research poll found that Romney's position had weakened, with his support at 27% while Obama's remained steady at 67%. A Quinnipiac University poll found Romney's support even lower at 24%.

Those figures show that a socially conservative message, based on faith and traditional families, is not quite enough for Republicans to do well in Spanish-speaking America. "There is a faith-based small "c" conservatism that could make Hispanics into natural Republicans. But the problem for Republicans is that Hispanics are also liberal on issues such as social welfare and the role of government," said Professor Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside.

But an even bigger issue for the Romney campaign when it comes to wooing Hispanic supporters is immigration. During the nomination race Republican leaders jockeyed with each other to come up with the strictest plans for a border fence until Herman Cain even suggested building an electrified fence.

"There was some crazy stuff coming out," said Bowler. In eventually winning the contest, Romney tacked far to the right, opposing a law that would have allowed the children of illegal immigrants to go to college, praising a controversial Arizona law that many critics have said is racist, and urging illegal immigrants to "self-deport" from America before a planned crackdown on benefits they can claim.

None of those sentiments will have endeared him to Hispanic voters. Indeed they even infuriated Martinez, who criticised Romney in an interview with Newsweek. "Self-deport? What the heck does that mean?" she told the magazine. She went on to say Republicans needed to change their language and adopt more nuanced policies on the issue. "I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign. But now there's an opportunity for Governor Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why," she said.

It will not be easy. Any softening of Romney's hard line on immigration will see him anger his Tea Party base. However, many experts believe the long-term demographic trends of America mean the Republicans will have to work out a way of appealing to Hispanic voters eventually or potentially face a permanent exile from the White House.

"The Republican party is becoming older, whiter and more Protestant at a time when America is becoming younger, browner and less Protestant," said Bowler.

• Mitt Romney
• Republicans
• US elections 2012
• United States

Paul Harris
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Dr Robert Spitzer apologises for 'fatally flawed' study, published in 2001, which claimed gay people could be 'cured' if properly motivated

One of the most influential figures in modern psychiatry has apologised to America's gays for a scientific study which supported attempts to "cure" people of their homosexuality.

The survey, published in 2001, looked at "reparative therapy" and was hailed by religious and social conservatives in America as proof that gay people could successfully become straight if they were motivated to do so.

But Dr Robert Spitzer has now apologised in the same academic journal that published his original study, calling it "fatally flawed". "I believe I owe the gay community an apology," his letter said. "I also apologise to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works."

Spitzer's letter, which was leaked online before its publication in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, is sure to cause delight among gay civil rights groups and stir up anger among social conservatives, who have used the study to combat the acceptance of homosexuality as a normal part of human society.

Reparative therapy is popular among Christian conservative groups, which run clinics and therapy sessions at which people try to become heterosexual through counselling. Gay rights activists condemn such practices as motivated by religious faith, not science, and call them "pray away the gay" groups.

Spitzer's study looked at the experiences of 200 people undertaking the therapy, including subjects that had been provided by religious groups. He then asked each person the same set of questions, analysing their responses to the therapy and their feelings and sexual urges afterwards. He concluded that many of them reported feelings of changes in their sexual desires from homosexual to heterosexual.

Spitzer's stance was notorious, because in 1973 he had been instrumental in getting the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in its diagnostic manual: a move seen at the time as a major victory for gay rights.

His 2001 study caused a huge stir because many people felt that it was not rigorous enough for publication. The central criticism was that Spitzer had not paid enough attention to the fact that subjects might lie about their feelings or be engaged in self-deception.

For more than a decade Spitzer shrugged off the attacks and stood by his work, but he has now admitted that his critics were right. "I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject's reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject's accounts of change were valid," Spitzer wrote.

In an interview with the New York Times last week, Spitzer, who is 79 and suffers from Parkinson's disease, described how he had written his letter of recantation in the middle of the night after agonising over the study's impact.

He had also recently been visited by a gay magazine journalist, Gabriel Arana, who had described to him his own experience going through reparation therapy and how damaging it had been and how it had led to thoughts of suicide. "It's the only regret I have; the only professional one," Spitzer told the New York Times, which described him as being almost in tears as he talked about his decision to admit he was wrong.

"In the history of psychiatry I don't know that I've ever seen a scientist write a letter saying that the data were all there but were totally misinterpreted. Who admitted that and who apologised to his readers. That's something, don't you think?" Spitzer told the newspaper.

Gay rights group Truth Wins Out published the full text of the letter on its website and hailed the moment as a major step forward. "Spitzer's apology to the victims of 'pray away the gay' therapy … marks a watershed moment in the fight against the 'ex-gay' myth," the group said.

• Gay rights
• United States
• Sexuality
• Health

Paul Harris
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Arrests follow jailing of nine men over child sexual exploitation earlier this month

Two men have been arrested in connection with the continuing investigation into child sexual exploitation which led to the jailing of nine men in Rochdale earlier this month.

The arrests are the result of information given by one of the five girls who gave evidence at Liverpool crown court in the case of sexual abuse of children and young women in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

The court heard the girl was also abused from the age of 15 by four men who she knew only by their nicknames.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester police said: "Two men have been arrested in connection with an ongoing investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, which led to the jailing of nine men. Both men, aged 33, from the Rochdale area were arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and rape.

"They have now been released on bail pending further inquiries."

The inquiry is separate to a suspected second child grooming case in the town – pre-dating the Liverpool crown court case – which concerns one of 47 women questioned by police.

Nine men, aged between 24 and 38, who were arrested on suspicion of sexual activity with a child from 2005 are on bail pending further inquiries.

Earlier this month, eight men from the British Pakistani community and an Afghan received jail sentences of between four and 19 years. The judge said they treated their victims "as though they were worthless and beyond any respect".

The trial in Liverpool heard the five girls – aged between 13 and 15 – were given alcohol, food and money in return for sex and were sometimes subjected to violence. The offences happened in and around Rochdale in 2008 and 2009.

The men were convicted of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16 and other sexual offences including rape and trafficking for sexual exploitation.

• Rochdale child sex ring
• Crime

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Suicide bomber drove vehicle to army base and detonated explosives in city of Deir al Zor, according to opposition group

Nine people were killed and hundreds injured when a car bomb exploded in the Syrian city of Deir al Zor, Syrian state media has reported.

A suicide bomber drove a car to an army base and detonated an estimated 1,000kg of explosives, according to Sana news agency. Observers from the UN visited the scene of the explosion.

An opposition group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the blast was near military intelligence offices and was followed by heavy gunfire. The group said the bomb went off on a street where a military hospital and air force intelligence offices are also located.

Omar Abu Laila, spokesperson of the Free Syrian Army in Deir az-Zour accused the Syrian regime of organising the bombing.

There was no immediate independent verification of the accounts in a country where independent reporting has been restricted during the 14-month old uprising against president Bashar al-Assad.

The uprising, which began with mass protests Assad's forces sought to crush, features an armed insurgency, which the Syrian government describes as a "terrorist" network funded and directed from abroad.

Twin suicide bombers who struck near an intelligence outpost in Damascus on 10 May killed at least 55 people in one of the largest attacks to target government installations.

Syrian officials call those blasts proof of a terrorist campaign against the state, while Assad's opponents accuse him of staging the attacks to validate his claims and justify a bloody crackdown on largely peaceful dissidents. US analysts said some of the bombings appear similar to al-Qaida bombings carried out in Iraq in recent years.

Syria is five weeks into a peace plan sponsored by the UN and Arab League. The plan includes a UN monitoring mission intended to oversee a ceasefire, which is yet to take hold, aimed at paving the way for a political path out of bloodshed.

• Syria
• Global terrorism
• Middle East and North Africa

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Rarely used terrorism charges being brought after extensive MI5 and police operation results in week of arrests

Seven people are due to appear in courts across Northern Ireland on Saturday charged with terrorism or other crimes following an intelligence operation by the police and MI5 against alleged dissident republicans.

Two men and one woman will face charges of directing acts of terrorism. The trio will stand trial on legislation designed back in the 1990s to jail terrorist leaders like the top loyalist paramilitary Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair.

Adair served a prison sentence for directing acts of terrorism in a case based almost solely on the word of senior police officers and intelligence reports.

A 47-year-old man from Lurgan, County Armagh, and a Tyrone man aged 46 alongside a woman aged 37 will appear at Lisburn magistrates court on the rarely used charge.

They will be joined in court by two men from Lurgan and two men from Tyrone, all of whom have been charged with various offences including conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions.

The arrests following a major anti-terrorist operation led by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and MI5 against the Real IRA and Continuity IRA over the last week.

• Northern Ireland
• UK security and terrorism

Henry McDonald
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Blind activist at centre of diplomatic storm says he and family expect to fly out once Chinese officials bring them passports

Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese activist whose escape from a rural village set off a diplomatic tussle between Beijing and Washington, says he is at an airport waiting to leave for the United States.

Chen told the Associated Press that he had left hospital and was at the Beijing airport. He was expecting to leave for the US later on Saturday.

He said his wife and two children are with him but they did not yet have their passports. Also with him were hospital and border control staff.

Chen escaped illegal house arrest in his rural town last month and sought the protection of US diplomats. He had been awaiting permission to travel to the US to study.

The US state department has said US visas for Chen, his wife and children are ready for them to travel to America.

The departure of Chen and his family would mark the removal of a sticking point in already difficult U.S.-China relations that have been marred by China's handling of human rights. The U.S. embassy was not immediately available for comment.

Chen told Reuters by telephone: "I'm at the airport now. I've already left the hospital. But there are many things that are still unclear.

"Yes, I might be heading for a flight to the United States, but I haven't been told, and I haven't received our passports, so I'm not sure yet. We're waiting to find out what's happening."

The development came about three weeks after Chen arrived at the Chaoyang hospital from the US embassy, where he had taken refuge after a dramatic escape from 19 months under house arrest in his home village.

In 2006 Chen was sentenced to more than four years in jail on charges – vehemently denied by his wife and lawyers – that he whipped up a crowd that disrupted traffic and damaged property.

He was formally released in 2010 but remained under strict house arrest in his home village in north-eastern Shandong province, which officials turned into a fortress of walls, security cameras and guards in plain clothes who kept Chen isolated.

The village of Dongshigu, where Chen's mother and other relatives remain, is still under lockdown.

The US embassy had earlier thought it had stuck a deal to allow Chen to stay in China without retribution, but that fell apart as Chen grew worried about his family's safety. He changed his mind about staying in China and asked to travel to the United States.

Human rights are a major factor in relations between China and the United States, even though the US needs China's help on issues such as Iran, North Korea, Sudan and the fragile global economy.

• Chen Guangcheng
• China
• US foreign policy
• Human rights
• Protest

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Marco Antonio Avila Garcia's body dumped in plastic bag in latest killing of a journalist amid deadly drug wars

The tortured body of a Mexican police reporter has been found on the side of a road in the northern state of Sonora on Friday. A day earlier he had been kidnapped by gunmen while waiting at a car wash.

Marco Antonio Avila Garcia's body was found inside a black plastic bag near the city of Empalme, about 68 miles south of Ciudad Obregon where he was abducted, said Sonora state prosecutors' spokesman Jose Larrinaga.

Larrinaga said police found a message signed by a cartel but would not reveal its content.

The 39-year-old reporter often wrote about organised crime for the sister newspapers Diario Sonora de la Tarde and El Regional of Ciudad Obregon, said Larrinaga.

Two weeks ago police found the mutilated bodies of three photojournalists inside plastic bags dumped in a canal in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. Last week gunmen opened fire on the offices of the El Manana newspaper in the border city of Nuevo Laredo.

Avila had been snatched and forced into a pick-up truck on Thursday by three masked gunmen as he waited for a company car to be washed in Ciudad Obregon. The reporter was married and had three small children.

Mexico has become one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists amid a government offensive against drug cartels and rivalry among crime gangs.

Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights has said 81 journalists were killed between 2000 and 2012, while another 14 have disappeared.

The commission said on Friday it had opened an investigation into the death of Rene Orta Salgado, a journalist who had quit working for El Sol de Cuernavaca newspaper in the resort city of Cuernavaca in January. Police found Orta's body inside his car's trunk last Sunday; he had apparently been strangled.

Separately, the Mexican army said it had detained eight suspected members of the Gulf cartel and seized drugs, guns and hand grenades during investigations into the 13 May discovery of 49 mutilated bodies on a highway in northern Mexico.

Mexico's defense department said the suspects were caught on Thursday.

But the department has not said whether the eight suspects were directly involved in those killings.
The department said ib Friday that a total of 44 people had been detained and 140 guns and about four tons of marijuana seized during the investigations.

Authorities had previously suggested the rival Zetas cartel was responsible for the killings.

• Mexico
• Journalist safety
• Drugs trade
• Americas

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Canadian province's government accused of 'murdering the right to demonstrate' in response to months of turmoil

Quebec's provincial government has passed an emergency law restricting demonstrations and shutting some universities as the government seeks to end three months of protests against tuition fee increases. Outraged students reacted by calling it an act of war.

Among the provisions of the law, which passed 68-48 on Friday, is a requirement that police be informed eight hours before a protest and told the route of any demonstration that includes 50 or more people.

Hours after the vote thousands of protesters marched in downtown Montreal to condemn the legislation, which students and supporters say limits their ability to demonstrate their disapproval of the fee hikes. "They pulled the plug instead of trying to develop something constructive through talks, " said participant Felix Siry, 22. "I think this will just make things worse."

Police officers in riot gear and others on horseback watched as the loud and energetic crowd made its way downtown, chanting: "No special law will break us!"

Molotov cocktails were thrown causing police to declare the demonstration illegal. Police used pepper spray and one man was arrested. Some people threw objects at a small group of helmeted police who were forced to retreat but charged back firing teargas.

The crowd was much larger than the hundreds who gathered on Thursday night as the government introduced the bill to quell the most sustained student protests in Canadian history. On Wednesday protesters smashed windows and more than 120 people were arrested. Both police and protesters were injured.

The city of Montreal passed its own ordinance banning protesters wearing masks during demonstrations, levying fines between $500 and $3,000. The city said demonstrators would have to provide details of their itineraries beforehand. Rights groups have protested that it is a restriction on their democratic right to demonstrate.

Officials have said they believe protesters wearing masks have been causing the most trouble. A similar bylaw was under consideration in Quebec City.

"Our cities can no longer become targets," said the Montreal mayor, Gerald Tremblay. "It's time to reclaim our streets, our neighborhoods, our cities."

The Quebec premier, Jean Charest, said the provincial legislation would not roll back the tuition hikes of $254 per year over seven years. Rather, it would temporarily halt the spring semester at schools paralysed by walkouts and bring forward the summer holidays. Classes would resume earlier in August.

The law imposes harsh fines on protesters who block students from attending classes – from $1,000 to $5,000 for a student, $7,000 to $35,000 for a student leader and between $25,000 and $125,000 for unions or student federations if someone is prevented from entering an educational institution.

The Quebec Bar Association said it had serious concerns about fundamental freedoms being abridged and the scale of the restraints was unjustified.

Pauline Marois, leader of the opposition Parti Quebecois, said it was "one of the darkest days of Quebec democracy" and demanded Charest hold elections because of the unpopularity of the law.

Student leaders reacted angrily. Martine Desjardins blamed the government for "letting the conflict deteriorate" and said it was seeking to "drown the conflict in the tribunals". Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois called the law the "murder of the right to demonstrate". He said his group would challenge the law before the courts and called on protesters to take part in a march in great numbers next Tuesday, which will mark the 100th day of protests.

The education minister, Michelle Courchesne, said before the vote that despite the legislation talks would go on and an agreement could still be reached with the students. "Even if there is a special legislation tonight, tomorrow, there can still be an agreement after the law," she said.

She said the law did not prevent students protesting and she remained open to dialogue with them.

The conflict has caused considerable social upheaval in the French-speaking province known for having more contentious protests than elsewhere in Canada and traditionally the country's the lowest tuition rates.

The US consulate in Montreal has warned visitors and US expatriates to be careful because of the demonstrations.

• Canada
• Protest
• Human rights

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