Sean Smith's brutal film from the Helmand frontline shows the horrific chaos of war's stalemate. Warning: contains distressing images

Only 153 schools apply to become academies ? despite education secretary's claims that more than 1,000 had done so

Michael Gove, the education secretary, faced renewed attacks today when it emerged that only 153 schools had applied to become academies ? despite his claims that more than 1,000 had done so.

Gove had said that the scale of demand from schools to escape town hall control required the government to rush legislation through parliament before this week's summer recess.

It now seems likely that no new academies will be formed in time for the autumn term as a result of the scheme.

The shadow education secretary, Ed Balls, accused Gove of "railroading" the legislation through parliament, and demanded that he explain why he "misleadingly claimed that more than 1,000 schools had applied". Balls, a contender for the Labour leadership, added: "It seems to me that the real reason for the rush was to avoid proper scrutiny for a deeply flawed piece of legislation."

Gove is already under attack from MPs, teachers and councils for a bungled announcement over whether hundreds of schools' plans for new buildings would go ahead.

He was forced to apologise in the Commons earlier this month after his office ignored advice to check an error-strewn list of cancelled building projects before it was published. The list suggested that many school building programmes would go ahead that had in fact been cancelled.

In relation to the academies, the department issued a press release on 2 June quoting Gove as saying: "The response has been overwhelming. In just one week, over 1,100 schools have applied." He added: "Of these, 626 are outstanding schools, including over 250 primary schools, nearly 300 secondary schools (over half of all the outstanding secondary schools in the country) and over 50 special schools."

Outstanding schools are to be fast-tracked to academy status.

A fortnight ago, the Department for Education revealed a second list of 1,907 primary, secondary and special schools that had registered an interest in turning into academies. Gove has written to every school inviting them to apply.

The new, far lower, number of schools that have applied may largely stem from the fact that Gove misdescribed expressions of general interest in the scheme as an actual application.

The lower-than-expected demand also questions why he needed to use emergency parliamentary procedures to rush through legislation this week. The academies bill, which became law on Tuesday, allows hundreds more schools to opt out of local authority control and turn into academies. The bill was pushed through the Commons in less than three days.

Balls said the emergency procedures were unnecessary given that only 153 schools had applied. He said Gove "railroaded" the bill through "because he said hundreds of schools wanted to become academies ... and many wanted to open [as such] in September. Now barely 10% of that number have even applied for academy status and none of them will convert in September."

It may be too early to say whether the level of demand to become academy schools is truly much lower than Gove had envisaged, but it would be a serious blow to the government's whole public service reform programme if it emerges that his revolution does not have the support in schools that he claimed.

Supporters of the scheme argue that school governing bodies are going to need time to weigh up the advantages of academy status, as well as see how some of the new schools perform. But the preliminary figures suggest that Gove's reforms have not sparked an instant nationwide revolution.

During the parliamentary passage of his legislation, Gove agreed to allow greater local consultation than planned before a school could take academy status.

The list of 153 schools includes about 45 primary schools, at least 12 faith schools and more than 20 grammar schools.

Gove has said he hopes ? and expects ? that academies will be the norm among secondary schools by the end of a first term in government. He told the Today programme earlier this month that "hundreds of schools are anxious to take advantage of these proposals".

Teachers' leaders condemned the government tonight for acting too hastily over academies.

"Our education system is too important to be subject to acting in haste, but repenting at leisure," said Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

"We remain concerned that many of the schools which have applied won't have carried out any form of consultation. Democracy will not be well served if children, parents and staff first learn of their school's plans to become an academy from the media."

She added that it would be "interesting to see if the list of schools applying to become an academy is as accurate, or not" as the error-ridden list that informed schools whether their building projects were to be scrapped.

Academies, unlike other state schools, have total freedom over their budgets, the curriculum and the length of the school day and term. They can also decide teachers' pay. Their expansion is thought to be the biggest change to school structures since grammar and secondary moderns were encouraged to become comprehensives in the 1960s.

Under Labour, only failing schools were turned into academies. But the new government has said that schools rated outstanding will be allowed to quickly switch to academy status and have their applications pre-approved.

Details of plot emerge in file among US military intelligence documents published by WikiLeaks website

It may be one of the more audacious terrorist plots to be hatched in Afghanistan, but it was certainly not the most original. The same al-Qaida masterminds behind 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington planned to commit a similar attack in the capital of the country that once harboured them, according to a file among US military intelligence documents published this week by the WikiLeaks website.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's second in command, is said to have given the order for a team of 22 to board one or more planes at Kabul airport, hijack the aircraft and steer them toward a number of "important objectives".

The targets were to include Hamid Karzai's presidential palace, Nato headquarters, the British and US embassies and the Ariana hotel ? the whole which the CIA rented and used as its station in Kabul.

The details of the plot have emerged as the leak of secret intelligence continues to create controversy in Kabul and Washington owing to the large number of references alleging that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), supported the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Karzai today told reporters that Islamabad was the source of the conflict in his country, and called on his western allies to "destroy" the Taliban's sanctuaries inside Pakistan. It was a striking return to the sort of anti-Pakistani rhetoric that he, who has sought better relations with Islamabad, has refrained from for many months.

Karzai also criticised the publication of files naming Afghan informers as "extremely irresponsible and shocking", echoing widespread fears that their lives are now at risk from Taliban reprisals. Several logs published by Wikileaks have been found to contain information about local intelligence sources including names, locations and even grid references. The three news organisations which published reports based on the Afghan war logs this week, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, took care not to publish any material that would identify informers or otherwise put troops at risk.

The report on the alleged hijack plot, recorded by intelligence officers on 23 March 2009, highlights the mixed quality of western intelligence, particularly the large number of "threat reports" fed to coalition forces each day ? there are almost 2,500 for Kabul alone in the five-year period covered by the logs.

On the one hand the airline plot report is detailed, naming a number of conspirators, including Afghan or Pakistani generals and a pilot from the Afghan national carrier, who were allegedly involved in providing the hijackers fake IDs and "facilitating anti-coalition training".

Whereas the 9/11 hijackers went to flight schools in Arizona and Florida, the Kabul plotters were due to receive flying lessons at a "private air club in Karachi". Apparently their ideological indoctrination had already begun as they attended a madrasa in Khukitan, in Pakistan's Swat valley.

All 22 were al-Qaida members and included Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and Uzbeks with fake Afghan IDs, the report claims. At an unspecified date they would enter Afghanistan and try to obtain Russian, Chinese and Iranian visas to allow them to fly to those countries.

"During the flight they will hijack the plane and conduct attacks in Kabul," said the report. Although it is categorised as a "C3", meaning the source is regarded as "fairly reliable" and the information is "possibly true", the report is imprecise, both referring to a single plane being hijacked and to a number of different "attacks" against various targets.

Iran's Fars news agency reported that an attempted hijack of an Ariana aircraft by a loan hijacker was foiled in May.

Even if the intelligence report referred to a serious plot it seems very unlikely to have succeeded.

A 9/11-style attack would be ruled out by the fact that only a couple of commercial flights take off from Kabul every hour, and there are no direct flights to China or Russia. Kabul airport is also an exceptionally difficult place from which to hijack planes, with some of the most stringent security procedures in the world.

It is normal for passengers to have their bags searched twice and to be frisked four times, with varying degrees of effectiveness, before they reach check-in ? there's another frisk and bag check before getting onto the plane.

Dominique Cottrez charged with multiple infanticide but husband is released over discovery of bodies in plastic bags

A French nursing assistant and mother of two has confessed to killing eight of her newborn babies, placing their bodies in hermetically sealed plastic bags and hiding them from her family over a 17-year period.

Investigators into what appears to be France's biggest infanticide case said Dominique Cottrez, from the north-eastern village of Villers-au-Tertre, had admitted deliberately suffocating the infants immediately after giving birth to them on her own.

She was charged today with murder. The 46-year-old faces life in prison for the killings, which are understood to have taken place between 1989 and 2006.

According to Eric Vaillant, prosecutor of the nearby city of Douai, Cottrez confessed "quickly" during questioning after the new owners of her late parents' home stumbled across the bones of two infants while digging in the garden on Saturday. She had, he said, then directed investigators to the remaining six corpses, found in the garage of the house she shared with her husband, Pierre-Marie Cottrez.

He was today freed as an "assisted witness" in the case despite efforts to have him charged for concealment of bodies and failing to report a crime.

Throughout her testimony to police, his wife maintained he was unaware not only of the killings but also of the pregnancies. "Mrs Cottrez told investigators he had known neither that his wife was pregnant nor that she had got rid of them directly afterwards," said Vaillant.

Dominique Cottrez appeared to have been fully conscious of what she was doing. According to her initial statement to police, "she was perfectly aware of all her pregnancies", said Vaillant.

If the psychological tests support this, it would seem unlikely that she had pregnancy denial, a condition in which the sufferer is unable to process the fact that she is expecting. Experts will now endeavour to determine her "degree of responsibility" for the killings, said Vaillant.

The findings in the two houses located about a mile apart have bestowed upon Villers-au-Tertre a sudden and unwanted notoriety. Before, residents joked that they lived in "a village of the dead" where little noteworthy ever happened.

Now local people are asking how could no one have noticed Cottrez's frequent pregnancies? And if they did know, why did keep their observations to themselves? Above all, if it is proved that Cottrez did what she says she did, then why?

Those who are keen for answers are her daughters Virginie and Emeline Cottrez, who tonight broke their silence, defending their mother and insisting they had no idea about the suspected infanticides. "We never noticed a thing. Yes, she had moments of tiredness but between her work as a nursing assistant and the housework she worked almost 24 hours a day," the women, 21 and 22 respectively, told the French newspapers La Voix du Nord.

"She never judged us; she accompanied us, supported us," they added, recounting how their mother had been at Emeline Cottrez's bedside when her first grandson was born. "It was she who held him, dressed him ? We both had tears in our eyes," said the eldest daughter.

Their mother had told police that previous traumatic childbirth experiences had put her off having any more children but that she "did not want to see a doctor to get contraception", said Vaillant.

As for why nobody else noticed the pregnancies, Patrick Mercier, the local mayor, said that although Cottrez had always been "pleasant" she was "rather introverted and was seen out a lot less than [her husband] in the community".

Her figure was also a factor, said police, claiming that it was easier for someone "of a heavy build" to hide a swollen belly than a slighter person. But officers nonetheless expressed bewilderment that Cottrez's daughters, to whom, said locals, she has been "a very good mother", her husband and her employers, a Douai-based home help agency, had noticed anything.

"I am just overwhelmed and I'm finding it impossible to understand," said a villager, who did not want to be named, adding: "Pierre-Marie ? is a mate of mine. We used to have a drink, talk about work ? He is very generous. He wears his heart on his sleeve."

Since Thursday, when news of the bodies sparked a media invasion from all corners of Europe, a spirit of solidarity has descended on the community. A belated Bastille Day celebration which had been planned for Saturday has been called off. "We will not celebrate without our friends," said Mercier.

But it could be a long time before Cottrez comes home. A police spokesman said investigators were not expecting to find any more bodies. "But there is still a lot of work to do," he added.

National Wildlife Federation says catalogue of oil industry accidents proves BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico is not a one-off

The oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a report published today.

None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.

"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."

In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.

Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.

In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas.

The coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said.

The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.

In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.

The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576.

"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries.

At times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes.

Four years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There was fire everywhere," the report quotes highway officials as saying. Four people were killed.

Among the causes for the poor safety record was the industry's relentless costcutting, despite record profits, said the report's authors, describing equipment failures, tank corrosion, and other signs of poor maintenance. The poor safety and environmental records were not restricted to the so-called Big Oil companies.

Enbridge Energy has had 400 separate spills between 2003 and 2008, spewing 1.3m gallons of crude into the environment, according to official records.

The Feb. 27 Chile earthquake lifted the ground by the coast by more than eight feet and sunk ground inland by more than three feet, a new study found.

A handful of protests were staged Thursday in Mexico against Arizona immigration law SB1070, and a Black Eyed Peas member this week joined other musicians such as Shakira and Kanye West in denouncing it.

Shirley Sherrod said Thursday that she 'will definitely sue' Andrew Breitbart over the video that falsely portrayed her as a racist. The lawsuit could be a landmark for the blogosphere.

Depending on credit cards for emergencies can land you deep into debt quickly. Putting just a little bit away each month instead could save you from financial crisis.

Research shows that many areas of today's oceans have conditions that parallel those of 250 million years ago, when 95 percent of marine species quickly died out.

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