The Ministry of Defence is now braced for a flood of compensation claims from volunteers used in

The Ministry of Defence is now braced for a flood of compensation claims from volunteers used in trials at its chemical weapons research centre.
The long-delayed “historical survey” of Porton Down finds that at least five sets of trials “may not have met the ethical standards required,” The Independent on Sunday has learnt. This could mean gathering the data or storing it on a temporary register, but not storing it on cards.The correspondence is reported to have been leaked by an official close to the Treasury.. Servicemen were deliberately subjected to lethal doses of poison in secret tests atPorton Down, an official report will admit this week. These will include data such as fingerprints or iris scans and the information could be checked against a national database.A voluntary scheme will operate from 2008, but a further Labour administration aims to make the cards compulsory for over-16s.An exchange of emails between the Identity and Passport Service, set up by the Home Office to introduce the cards, and the project director, David Foord, at the Office of Government Commerce, indicates the Government is “rethinking” the scheme. The scheme has been repeatedly cited as a cornerstone in the Government’s fight against terrorism, crime and illegal immigration.The Government has proposed that 50 million adults in the UK should carry the cards. In some of the correspondence officials express fears that the scheme could be “canned completely” and speak of a “botched operation” that will put the introduction back for a generation.
The emails suggest such serious difficulties in implementing the scheme that a smaller, “face-saving” version is the only way a 2008 target to phase in identity cards will be met, according to The Sunday Times. His professional integrity is under formal investigation, his personal morality has been questioned and his denials of wrongdoing lampooned.

Mr Prescott’s explanation that he was “curious” to see Philip Anschutz’s ranch after watching Westerns as a young man prompted gales of laughter across the country.. The Government’s planned ID card scheme may not be introduced fully for up to 20 years, according to leaked Whitehall memos from officials charged with making the project work. After his wild times with Tracey Temple, could the old bruiser’s career finally be heading west?

The revelation that he secretly stayed on the ranch of the US billionaire who bought the Millennium Dome ensured Mr Prescott had one of the roughest weeks in politics. MPs wondered whether he was telling his friends he was preparing to resign. Pale and unshaven, the Deputy Prime Minister was slumped next to his old friend and ally Peter Snape. When John Prescott arrived late for dinner with friends on Monday night, he looked like a Dodge City gambler on a losing streak.

It will probably backfire and a whole load more women will go off to Jamaica.”‘Sugar Mummies’ opens at the Royal Court, London SW1 on 5 August (020-7565 5000)No strings: ‘I wanted to do sex like a man’Lucy, a 23-year-old events organiser from London, visited St Lucia this year with a friendThe words “sex tourism” make me think of City boys who go to Thailand with their mates for seedy conquests to boast about It’s different for women. “I’m not saying anything about mixed race relationships, I’m talking about these specific kinds of sex-tourist relationships where women go out there specifically to have sex. If he did not, he would not be able to afford the antibiotics to cure it.In Sugar Mummies, Gupta deliberately allows herself one relationship that might just work. One 21-year-old migrant from Haiti who had been working in Sosua, told Sanchez Taylor that he even had to “snog” his tourist client despite a bad toothache and a swollen face. All the hotels, restaurants, cars and glass-bottomed boats in Negril are owned by Americans. The urban economy doesn’t even belong to the local people.Yet the women who sleep with the beach boys insist they are helping race relations They flatter themselves they have gone native.

“In my play there’s a scene where a white woman is taking about how she loves R&B and reggae and what she calls hip and hop,” says Gupta.It is the female tourist who books the flights and determines the length of time she will spend with their boyfriend, as well as making day-to-day decisions when they are together, such as when and where they eat. Female tourism boomed after Terry McMillan’s hit novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back was made into a Hollywood film. The novel, in which Stella, a divorced black woman in her forties, takes a holiday to Jamaica, where she meets and falls in love with Winston, a local man half her age – was a fictionalised account of McMillan’s own marriage to Jeremy Plummer, 23 years her junior. This year, McMillan, 53, filed for divorce, claiming that the marriage was based on a “fraud” because Plummer lied about his sexual orientation and married her only to gain US citizenship. He denies it.It is a nasty twist that the countries where this sort of tourism is most rife are ex-slave colonies Many are still dealing with the fallout of colonialism. Jamica’s most famous holiday romance has recently come crashing down.

“They confuse what is actually a financial transaction with real love. If you have low self-esteem, if you’ve not had much luck, if you’re older … you are likely to be more susceptible,” says Gupta.Some women even marry their boyfriends and take them home to the UK, although few relationships survive the cultural difference. But then he got a bit fast, so I suggested he move on to some younger women, And he said, ‘Me no want the kitten, me want the cat.’”The problem comes, she says, when the women start believing the men they have hooked up with are in love with them. I just want some fun and good sex.”"Female sex tourism is much more informal,” says Sanchez Taylor, a lecturer in sociology at Leeds University “It takes place in bars. There’s no way for women to go into a brothel and say, ‘I want a blow job.’”Women who feel rejected by men in the West for being fatter and older -you know, 35, but they look 40 – find that in Jamaica all this is reversed,” says Sanchez Taylor.”There’s a poetic lyricism to the gigolo’s chat-up lines,” agrees Gupta “You very quickly understand why the women are buying this On the first day, this baby aged 18 came to chat me up At first I thought, this will be good for my play. One 42 year-old English woman who travelled at least three times a year to Boca Chica in the Dominican Republic said: “I’m not na? I’ve been around the block I come for sex – of course the sun, but mostly the sex I’m not coming to live and set up house with a guy.