In a unique experiment in democratic transparency, Barack Obama – a BlackBerry owner, and the first American president to use email while in office – has agreed to copy G2 in on his otherwise highly confidential electronic communications. Each week, we present a selection from recent days:

To: Tony Blair Subject: Re: Not to pester, but...!

Hi Tony. Yes, got my pre-ordered copy of A Journey! Busy week, what with ending the combat mission in Iraq and restarting the Middle East peace talks, but I've managed to take a look at the first few chapters. You say "it's hardly on the level of Dreams From My Father", but I think you are being unnecessarily harsh on yourself! After all, very few books are! You have a real skill for avoiding overcomplication and keeping things simple, and that can be very admirable sometimes. As for your re quest — yes, I'd be happy to provide a blurb for the paperback edition. How about "This book is a must-read for anyone interested in reading a memoir by Tony Blair"? Warmly as ever, Barack

To: Michelle Obama Subject: Blair book

Honey, sorry, just a quick favour. Are you in the residence? Looks like I'm actually going to have to READ some of the Blair book, now he's harassing me about it. I think it's propping up one leg of that wobbly Colonial-era dressing-table in the Lincoln Bedroom. Can you drop it by the Oval Office, and stick something else in its place? I just finished The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest — they're roughly similar. In thickness, I mean. Not excitement levels, I'm assuming. xxB

To: Hillary Clinton Subject: Re: Bill is going to be SO PISSED if I pull this off... hilarious.

Ha. Well, I certainly don't care if marital revenge is the motivation, just as long as you get an agreement on a two-state solution in time for the 2012 elections! BHO PS. Joe dropped by to say he had some "innovative" ideas for how get Netanyahu and Abbas to relax and get to know each other. Something about a road trip, a few nights at the Bellagio in Vegas, and some friend of his from Delaware called Joey, who "knows how to party like nobody else"? Anyway, I asked him to put it all in a memo and send it to you as a Powerpoint presentation, or a PDF file. Pretty sure he's got no clue how to do that, so you should be safe.

Mother of the child in image that went around the world tells of her family's struggle

It was an image that conveyed the human cost of the Pakistani floods – and the failure to deliver aid to those affected – more powerfully than any statistic: four young children lying on a filthy patchwork quilt, one of them sucking on an empty yellow bottle, all of them covered by flies.

The photograph by Associated Press's Mohammad Sajjad went around the world and featured in the Guardian's Eyewitness slot last week. The Guardian identified the child with the bottle as two-year-old Reza Khan and tracked him down to a makeshift camp at a roadside in Azakhel, some 19 miles from Peshawar, the capital of the insurgency-plagued province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan.

The camp is a hotchpotch of about two dozen tents donated by various aid organisations, but it is run by none. Its residents must fend for themselves, and rely on the charity of passersby. There are 19 families here, all of them Afghan refugees: people who were displaced once by conflict in their homeland have now been displaced again by the month-long deluge.

Reza's family is from Butkhak, near the Afghan capital, Kabul. His father fled the area as a young boy, some 30 years ago, to escape the cycle of foreign occupation and internecine battles plaguing his homeland.

When we found him, Reza was in a tent with his mother, Fatima, who, like most Afghans, has only one name, and six of his seven siblings, all huddled on a blue blanket extended over the muddy floor. He was still clutching the same bottle. It was still empty.

Fatima tried to calm the boy, who cries in a constant, low whimper, as well as his twin brother, Mahmoud. She covered three of her other children – she has eight, all under the age of nine – with a dirty mosquito net somebody in a passing car gave her, but it has several gaping holes. Her eldest child, a nine-year-old girl called Sayma, is mute and seems dissociated from her surroundings. Her green eyes stare blankly ahead, seemingly oblivious to her brothers' wails. Flies carpet the few blankets arranged on the floor, and swarm all over the children. There is precious little in the tent – one cooking pot, a few cushions and two or three items of children's clothing. The stench of human and animal waste is overwhelming in the hot, humid air. There is no sanitation, just shallow, open ditches of raw sewage that attract flies and mosquitoes.

"They have had nothing to eat today. I have no food," Fatima says as she tries to swat the flies away from her children with a bamboo fan. "He's crying with hunger," she says, pointing to Reza. "It's been a month since he had any milk."

On this day, Reza's father, Aslam, was in a nearby hospital with his seven-year-old daughter, who has a skin infection caused by the unsanitary living conditions. Reza and several of his siblings also bear red spots, and appear malnourished. Their thin hair is coming out in clumps, their mother says. "We have been here for a month, a month!" Fatima says. "We are tired of these flies and of being without food. Before the waters came, my husband worked. We were poor before, but we had full stomachs."

The family of 10 used to live among the 23,000 residents of the Azakhel Afghan refugee camp, about 20 minutes' walk from their current roadside location. Aslam sold chickens for a living, travelling from door to door on a rickety bicycle, one of the family's prized possessions. He made about $2 a day.

Their mud-brick home was small, Fatima says, but it was enough for her. They lived among her husband's clan, about six families in all. "I had a kitchen, and there was a water tap close by," she says as her youngest child, one-year-old Ayad, tugs on her lilac dupatta, the scarf Pakistani women drape over their heads, arms and chest, pulling it away from her hair. She quickly readjusts the worn, holed fabric. "These clothes are all that we have now," she says, almost apologetically.

The loose mud bricks of their home were no match for the raging waters of the nearby swollen Kabul River. The floodwaters gushed into the house in the morning. She and her husband snatched several of the children in their arms, while extended family members helped bundle the others out of the house.

The clan of some 60 people walked toward the main road linking the town of Nowshera to Peshawar. They spent five days out in an open field, eating whatever scraps they could forage.

Aslam's older brother, Taykadar, set out on foot to find help, stopping at several of the dozen or so organized relief camps nearby. "They would ask us for our Pakistani identification cards in order to register us, but we are Afghans," he says. "And we are too many, that's the problem. We don't want to be split from each other. We've already lost our homes, we don't want to lose our families."

The men managed to obtain several tents from various organisations. Fatima's, for example, was donated by the Saudi government while others bear the logos of UNHCR. The Afghans say they have nothing to return to. Taykadar says they haven't received any help from a government he knows is overwhelmed by the destitution of its own people. The busy road that they have camped alongside is now their lifeline. Men, women and children rush out towards any car that appears to slow down alongside them. Hundreds of hands stretch out, hoping for food, water or clothing.

"We have to run after the food, it isn't given by some organisation in the tents," Fatima says bitterly. Her children eat once a day, usually in the evenings, thanks to charity organisations that provide iftar meals during Ramadan. But Ramadan ends this week. "I just want to say to the world, isn't there any way they can get us food?" she pleads. "Look," she says, pointing to the twins in her lap. "Please, our children are dying of hunger."

Ken Clarke wants to jail fewer people – this will be the first real test of the government's courage

As cabinet ministers return after the holidays, there are many dilemmas to be faced in front of George Osborne's star chamber. Perhaps one of the more interesting ones is that faced by Ken Clarke. He needs savings badly, and will have to consider prisons; and when he looks at the problems of reducing the number of inmates, we will get a clearer understanding of the priorities of the coalition.

In June Clarke spoke of his dismay at the near-doubling of the prison population in England and Wales in the 20 years between his time as home secretary in the 90s and his present appointment as lord chancellor. He said the prison-building programme proposed by the outgoing government was unaffordable and that he would be seeking reductions in prisoners to save costs, suggesting a reinvigoration of alternative, community-based punishments.

But will the coalition dare do this if it outrages the rightwing press? Shortly after Clarke's speech, prisons minister Crispin Blunt quoted Winston Churchill's declaration that a humane prison system was "one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country", and voiced his support for the probation service, for restorative justice, for education and for drug treatment. The next day, after a Daily Mail headline claiming that the taxpayer would be paying for "parties in prison", No 10 made clear its unease with these policy positions.

We know what works. Prison works for serious offenders. But there are far too many people on short sentences, who will come out unreformed (70% reoffend within a year), without new skills other than those they have been taught by fellow criminals, without drug therapy and without any state intervention to prevent them returning to the gangs and drug dealers with whom they previously associated.

The Ministry of Justice has sponsored alternative schemes, such as the Intensive Alternative to Custody in Manchester, which specialise in young men who would otherwise go to prison for up to six months. I visited this programme in July for the thinktank Make Justice Work. These offenders are required to undertake training for employment and coaching for job interviews; their families are offered support; they are required to stay alcohol and drug-free; they must take part in visible community payback schemes; they are likely to be directly involved in restorative justice interventions with victims; and they are subject to curfew.

If they don't comply, they go back to court and then to prison. And some choose to do just that, because this is a much more demanding regime. But a lot of them don't, and go on to get qualifications and jobs – and they don't reoffend.

Similarly we should no longer be talking about pilots of restorative justice. We know that it reduces reoffending and that it is particularly effective with violent offences, and it is well known that improving prisoners' education, especially literacy, is a help. But all this requires money, though much lower levels of expenditure than prison.

So the first question is whether, amid the cuts, Clarke can fund the expansion of these alternative schemes. If the MoJ is unable to divert some of the savings into community sentences, education, drugs treatment and gang avoidance, the future will be bleak indeed for those involved in the criminal justice system.

But even if he could, the second question is whether the government will allow him. Such an investment would require political nerve of the sort for which Clarke is famous, but the government is not yet tested. Does it have the courage to face down the inevitable anger of the tabloids? Time will tell, but if Blunt's slapping-down is anything to go by, the signs are not encouraging.

Against medical advice, Max Stafford-Clark, still recovering from a stroke, is getting stuck into a new play – about New York and the IRA. Stuart Jeffries meets a theatre giant

On the morning of this interview, it took Max Stafford-Clark 16 minutes and 21 seconds to walk to work. It's perhaps half a mile from his flat through north London to the office of his theatre company, Out of Joint. "Ever since the stroke, I've timed the walk. A year ago it would have taken 17 minutes. My best time is 14 minutes five seconds." And the worst? "Forty-four minutes. That was just after the stroke. The doctor advised me not to do that, but I did."

It wasn't the only medical advice he ignored. Doctors also advise that if you've had a stroke, you don't make your partner your principal carer. But today, as he hobbles on sticks into the rehearsal room, Stafford-Clark is helped by his wife, the Irish playwright and actor Stella Feehily, whom he married 10 days before we meet. "Any advice doctors give you," he says, "they temper by saying, 'Every stroke is different.' David Hare told me that 40% of people who have a stroke become depressed. I decided not to go down that route."

Later, we sit over lunch in his office. Stafford-Clark, 69, has just finished giving notes to the cast of The Big Fellah, a fine new play by Richard Bean. It's the seventh play he has directed since his stroke in December 2006, and he's already plotting the eighth, An Evening With Dr Johnson, adapted from Boswell's life of the critic and his A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. "My output is back to the level it was – so in that sense, I have recovered. I'm directing as well as I ever have. I'm working as hard as I did before the stroke."

But not everything can be conquered by force of will, not even if your determination is as enviably steely as Stafford-Clark's. "Journalists want that story of a miraculous recovery, but that's not what's happened. There is no miraculous recovery. My left hand is pretty much useless, and the peripheral vision in my left eye is no good." As a result, he can't drive. There have been some improvements, though: his speech isn't as slurred as it was in the stroke's immediate aftermath, and the tears that previous interviewers noted no longer course incessantly down the left side of his face.

I tell him that a few years ago, I interviewed Alan Ayckbourn in his garden in Scarborough. It was a couple of years after the playwright had suffered a stroke. Ayckbourn's wife, Heather Stoney, told me proudly that it was the first time her husband had managed to climb down the spiral staircase to his garden. It's a story of recovery, but not a miraculous one: that step forward for Ayckbourn showed painfully clearly how the boundaries of his progress were circumscribed. He would never bound up and down those steps as he once did.

On hearing this, Stafford-Clark tells me a story. "Ian Dury, who I used to know well, was a lovely man except when he'd a few drinks – which was every night. One night at the bar of the Royal Court, he slapped the caliper on his leg and said, 'You know how often I think about this? Every fucking day. Every fucking day.' That's true, in a way, for me. I have very vivid dreams – of driving, rugby playing, and one where I throw away my sticks – like the end of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is, I'm afraid, not like that."

The last time I met Stafford-Clark was in April 2004. He had come into the Guardian to guest-edit the arts pages. He sent me to Shrewsbury to find out if there was any cultural life there, and made me sit through an evening of Kate Adie's war-reporting reminiscences at the town's boys' school. I've nearly forgiven him for that assignment. Today he is frailer, certainly, but more compellingly acute in his judgments. Maybe this is because in 2004 he was dabbling as a journalist, while now he's on home turf – at the helm of the theatre company he co-founded in 1993, knocking a piece of new writing into dramatic shape, just as he has done for the best part of 40 years.

Lest we forget, Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart Stafford-Clark is one of British theatre's greatest postwar directors. He launched the careers of, among others, the director Danny Boyle (who thanked him in his Bafta awards acceptance speech for Slumdog Millionaire). He has been the leading catalyst of British theatre's new writing and new talent since the mid-1970s. At Joint Stock, the company he co-founded in 1974 with David Hare and David Aukin, his workshop methods nourished work by Hare, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill. As artistic director of London's Royal Court theatre from 1979 to 1993, he commissioned and directed an extraordinary bunch of plays – Churchill's Top Girls, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Terry Johnson's Insignificance and the great Howard Barker's Victory. As artistic director of Out of Joint for the best part of two decades, he has commissioned and directed, among others, Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom, David Hare's The Permanent Way and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

"It's been a great privilege to have lived and worked in a time when theatre has played a huge part in the debate about how society should conduct itself," he says. "In other countries, it's novels that do that. Here it's theatre that is the medium in which we explore the political and deal with parts of our society that wouldn't get addressed otherwise."

Many of these plays have dramatised conflicts across the Irish sea. Why? "Well, I am a Hibernophile. My wife is Irish." That's not his only Celtic credential. He studied at Trinity College Dublin in the 60s and went back to work at the Abbey Theatre. He'd like to take his latest production of Richard Bean's The Big Fellah to the Irish capital he loves, but that seems a remote possibility. "They think they've seen too much theatre to do with the IRA."

Bean's starting point for The Big Fellah came on a visit to New York after 9/11, when he saw firefighters with collection buckets trying to raise money for victims of the bombings of the Twin Towers. "He had this thought: four or five years before, they would have been collecting money to support the IRA." The play starts on St Patrick's Day, 1972. Twenty-six people have recently been killed by British soldiers in Derry, and, in New York, the eponymous Noraid bagman is filling buckets with cash from angry Irish-Americans to buy ArmaLite rifles for the struggle against British rule in Ulster. The next hour and a half take us over three decades in a drama filled with betrayal, with the realisation that a righteous struggle has become poisoned by the murder of innocents, and with difficult politics (an NYPD cop working for the Big Fellah refuses to see parallels between his struggle and that of the Muslim terrorists). It ends on the morning of 11 September 2001, with the Good Friday agreement in place and the bombs of another terror cell poised to change the world.

Let's change the killer's identity

"I thought it was a terrific play when I first read it," says Stafford-Clark, "much better than Richard's previous play." He's referring to the Brick Lane-set England People Very Nice, at the National Theatre, which caused something of a critical storm for what the Guardian's Michael Billington deemed its ethnic caricatures. "This is great because there's the steady release of information throughout the play, so you only gradually get the whole picture."

That steady release shows a dramatist working with great control – but The Big Fellah is also crammed with gags. "Well, that's because Richard was a standup comedian. I don't think he can write a play without jokes."

Even at this morning's run-through, a week before it starts its national tour, the play fizzes with humour and acute political observation. "I like being in the IRA," says one character near the end, "but if there's one thing I'd change it's all the killing." Stafford-Clark tells the actors he thought the performance was excellent, but he just wants to make a small change to the script – he wants to switch the identity of the killer in the play's penultimate scene. He calls Richard Bean to find out if that's OK. "He says he'll have a think about it," Stafford-Clark tells me. Is it usual to make such a radical change so late in rehearsal? "It's not that radical, at least not until the technical stuff bolts the script down."

Stafford-Clark is clearly in his element – working creatively hard to deadline, making a new play he admires work even better. He recalls that in January 2007, he returned to work too early after his stroke, directing Alistair Beaton's King of Hearts. "Again, it was against medical advice. And the play I was directing suffered because I wasn't able to concentrate as I needed to. But I so wanted to get back to this. What I really miss is the company of actors. They're the cobblers of truth who put it together for you. I don't want to be away from them for very long."

• The Big Fellah is at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton, from tomorrow until Saturday. Box office: 01604 624811. Then touring. Details: outofjoint.co.uk

Unions argue that abusive behaviour and racism are widespread and wants shake-up of system in light of worsening safety record

Transocean, the American rig owner at the centre of BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill, has been accused of compromising safety in the North Sea by "bullying, harassment and intimidation" of its staff.

The allegations, in a damning report by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) seen by the Guardian, will deeply embarrass Transocean, which on Tuesday appears before a House of Commons investigation into the lessons to be learnt from the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The offshore and transport union, RMT, argues that abusive behaviour and racism towards an increasingly multinational workforce in the North Sea are widespread, and it wants a huge shake-up of the system in the light of a worsening safety record.

The allegations came as Thad Allen, the US official leading the Deepwater Horizon cleanup, said an important milestone had been reached with the replacement of the blowout preventer that failed to stop the flow of oil in the original accident. He said the original device had been hauled to the surface for investigators to determine what went wrong.

The HSE reported less than two weeks ago that the combined fatal and major injury rate had almost doubled, rising to 192 per 100,000 workers in 2009-10 from 106 12 months earlier. There was also a big increase in hydrocarbon releases, from 61 to 85 – raising the possibility of fires and explosions offshore, the kind of accident that triggered the Piper Alpha disaster, in which 167 UK workers died.

Transocean has so far managed to avoid the kind of acute scrutiny given to BP over the Macondo well, but the British oil company is expected to criticise the rig operator when it publishes its own internal investigation into what went wrong. The HSE "specialist inspection report" resulted from a visit to four rigs operated by Transocean Offshore (North Sea) Ltd, including the John Shaw and Sedco 711, in the summer and autumn of last year.

The HSE report says: "The company has not considered the human contribution to safety in a structured and systematic manner," and says the organisational culture is based on blame and intolerance.

Most damagingly, the report says instances of unacceptable behaviour by offshore management were raised with HSE inspectors by Transocean staff on more than one rig visited. These included bullying, aggression, harassment, humiliation and intimidation, and were "causing some individuals to exhibit symptoms of work-related stress, with potential safety implications", the HSE says.

Responding to the allegations in a statement, Transocean said: "The HSE report confirmed that Transocean has demonstrated a commitment to fostering an organisational culture based on trust and respect that improves our safety and performance records. Third-party assessments such as those conducted by HSE and Lloyd's Register are a key part of the company's philosophy of continuous review and improvement."

Jake Molloy, regional organiser for the RMT's offshore branch in Aberdeen, said he was extremely alarmed by the report, but not surprised. "I have dealt with three cases where workers were unfairly dismissed by Transocean and in each one I have been able to win compensation for them," he said. But he feared that Transocean was far from unique, and said the increase in accidents reported by the HSE still almost certainly underestimated the true position.

"I know from the phone calls I get in this office that other really serious incidents are not being reported because of widespread bullying and intimidation. I cannot follow up these cases because it would expose the guys to losing their jobs," he said.

Molloy said he was aware of rigs with 19 different nationalities on board speaking a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Italian and French. He feared that some staff did not have the language skills either to communicate well with each other or to understand safety instructions properly. It was not unusual for Filipinos and others to be racially abused.

The Guardian has spoken independently to foreign oil workers, who confirm they have faced bullying, intimidation and racism. One, who asked not to be named, said he recently witnessed offshore fires that he was told not to report as it could cause a fuss and endanger either his own job or those of his fellow crew members.

The Norwegian safety authorities have just published their own figures and expressed grave concern that the number of hydrocarbon "releases" from their rigs and platforms has gone up from 14 to 15 over the past 12 months.

The UK government announced in June it was increasing environmental inspections offshore but also boasted that "our safety and environmental regulatory regime is fit for purpose. It is already among the most robust in the world and the industry's record in the North Sea is strong."

Reports that library services will be cut have been met with orchestrated outcry. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport softened us up for the bad news by revealing that the "proportion of adults visiting a library" had decreased from 48.2% to 39.4% in the four years to 2010. What they didn't say was how many non-adult people had begun to use libraries and what kind of effect that might have been having on adults in search of a quiet read.

Most of the discussion assumed that lending books was what libraries are for. This is so much not the case; some of the finest libraries in the world chain their books to their reading desks. The public lending library is a recent invention, a response to the spread of literacy to the working classes who had neither money to buy books nor space to store them. A library or bibliotheque (the word is derived from the Greek for bookshelf) is first and foremost a place to keep texts, whether written on papyrus, vellum or paper. It is, secondarily, a place to read them. The Royal Library of Alexandria had, besides bookshelves, a loggia, where readers could walk to uncramp their stiffened limbs, and a cafeteria, as well as an acquisitions and cataloguing department, and most university libraries today follow a similar plan.

Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, has implored us to think of libraries as a cluster of services rather than as buildings, which is fair enough, but libraries are also houses for books and documents; as such they are some of the most beautiful built spaces on earth. The original Bodleian is now much too small to serve the needs of Oxford University, but any suggestion that it should be sold off to finance hi-tech library services within the university would be resisted angrily by all those people who have ever passed through the Schools Quadrangle. There are more comfortable places to read than Duke Humfrey's Library, but none more atmospheric or thrilling. When I give my bag to the concierge and trot up the stone stairs, I get the same feeling as a football fan heading for the turnstiles.

Bodley is very special, but so is any building that was built to store books and manuscripts, whether monastic or princely or academic or corporate. It may be dark and inconvenient, but it is as much a creature of its own historic moment as Venice's Biblioteca Marciana, which was built to a design of Sansovino in the mid-16th century. The Marciana was built to house the precious collection of Cardinal Bessarion; the illuminated manuscripts, the beautifully printed books and the building together make an integrated artefact. To be sure, methods of cataloguing and conservation should be modernised, but to remove its books and its walnut bookcases and gut the building would be as barbaric an act as burning the library of Alexandria.

When Hackney council opened a new central library, it was decided that the John Passmore Edwards Free Library in Hoxton was redundant. The beautiful Grade II-listed arts and crafts building designed by HT Hare was gutted, the upper floors turned into flats, the lower into a studio theatre. The library with its books, monument to a moment in British history and to a valiant attempt to redeem one of the most disadvantaged areas in London, was obliterated. Even before the proposed cuts, 200 libraries in Britain have already been closed, and their buildings demolished or converted to other uses. When any library is destroyed, a climactic era in the life of its community is blotted out of memory.

Your local library may not have been designed by Sansovino or HT Hare, but it still warrants preservation as a place to store, conserve and consult materials relating to its place in history. The people who need to see what can be found nowhere else will find their way to it, without its being shifted to the shopping mall. Family historians are a whole new group of people who have had to discover how to use libraries, and librarians have responded to their demands, not as all-singing, all-dancing social entrepreneurs, but as librarians.

As the era of the book draws to a close, we must keep our libraries and their contents together as cultural entities in themselves. Libraries should not be expected to spend money on multiple hardback copies of Stieg Larsson and Danielle Steel to lend to a populace who could buy the paperback for less than the price of a packet of fags. The core job of a local library is to acquire and conserve letters, diaries, books (especially books with marginalia by local celebrities), plans, minutes, parish records, maps, local newspapers and pamphlets, posters and photographs. In an overcrowded, muzak-infested, video-saturated world, a reading room is an oasis, to which we may all repair, even if it is only to read a newspaper. As such it shouldn't be filled with noisy children.

Libraries shouldn't be expected to take over the function of schools. Schools on the other hand could take some of the pressure off libraries. The best place to put your lending services, language courses and computer literacy classes is not in pubs or supermarkets, but in the massively under-utilised buildings of our schools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two Danish space enthusiasts failed in their first attempt to launch a privately built rocket. Peter Madsen and Kristian von Bengtson had hoped to send the nine-metre-long rocket 18.6 miles into the sky from a barge near the island of Bornholm. Their spokeswoman, Sophie Dalgaard, said a fuse problem had prevented the launch, but that they would try again. They have permission to launch the 1.6-tonne prototype from a military test zone until 13 September as part of the €50,000 (£41,770) Danish project. It is the first step towards their dream of flying to the edge of space, 62 miles above sea level.

Congo riverboat: Survivor tells of escape from blaze on boat heavily loaded with passengers and drums of fuel

As many as 200 people are feared dead after a heavily loaded boat caught fire and capsized in southern Democratic Republic of Congo, a survivor said tonight.

Fabrice Muamba, who said he was on the boat when it caught fire last night on the Kasai river, said he thought only 15 people had been able to swim to safety.

Passengers began to jump overboard when the engine caught fire as the boat passed the village of Mbendayi, 45 miles from the town of Tshikapa, which is north of Congo's border with Angola.

Muamba said the boat was also carrying many drums of fuel on its journey through Kasai Occidental province.

Local official François Madila said police arrested two of the vessel's crew and are investigating. Madila said the sailors had not said how many people were aboard and that the passenger list appeared to have disappeared in the fire.

The boats that ply Congo's rivers are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity, with little regard for safety. The industry is not well regulated.

The incident is the deadliest of several boating incidents reported this year in Congo.

In July, officials said at least 80 died when a boat ferrying about 200 passengers to Kinshasa, Congo's capital, capsized after hitting a rock.

In May, dozens died when an overloaded canoe capsized on a river in eastern Congo. And last November, at least 90 died after a logging boat sank on a lake. The timber-carrying vessel was not supposed to be carrying passengers.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a vast country of jungles and huge rivers in central Africa with little more than 300 miles of paved road. Many people prefer to take boats even if they cannot swim.

Five days after the US's operations in Iraq officially ended, American troops helped fight off an attack on a military base

US troops helped repel an attack by heavily armed militants on a military headquarters in Baghdad yesterday, five days after the US formally ended combat operations in Iraq. Twelve people were killed, none American. A US military spokesman said the Americans helped subdue the attack while Iraqi army soldiers located two militants who had entered the compound. Lt Col Eric Bloom also said the Iraqi military asked for support from helicopters, drones and explosives experts. The Iraqi military often asks for aerial support and explosives expertise, but not help from American troops.

Aid workers fear thousands of Roma will be left homeless

Plans by Rome city officials to demolish up to 200 illegal Gypsy camps this week have raised fears by aid workers that thousands of Roma, including women and small children, will be forced on to the streets.

In the wake of France's controversial repatriation of Romanian Gypsies last month, Italian police backed by bulldozers will raze rudimentary camps in Rome built beneath flyovers and in wasteland, often by Romanian migrants.

Rome's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, has cited the recent death of a Romanian child during a fire in one of the camps as an incentive for their demolition. "These are the terrible risks and dramas of the illegal camps that have existed in Rome for too long," he said.

Sveva Belviso, Alemanno's social policy assessor, said fewer than 1,000 people people were due to be evicted. "We will offer assistance to the young, old and sick," she said.

But the Red Cross warned that many more faced sleeping rough and losing their possessions.

"The number is in fact likely to be over 1,000 and with the city's financial straits and overflowing accommodation I wonder where they will put up and feed these people," said Mario Squicciarini. "What is worse is that when the bulldozers go in they often do not give you time to get your possessions out."

Puscia, 30, a Romanian mother who has lived at an illegal camp on Via Magliano Vecchia for two years, said she would lose her job as a school cook if her home was knocked down.

"Including my two kids, there are 100 children at this camp who go to school, so people here are really anxious," she said.

"If they demolish the camp I would be ashamed to live like a rat and would probably go back to Romania," she added.

Rome is launching its crackdown as it prepares 12 new and refurbished official camps on the outskirts of the city which officials claim will host 6,000 of the 7,000 Gypsies now living in Rome. About 2,500 of those are of Bosnian origin, 2,000 Romanian and only around 500 Italian, said Belviso.

"Twenty per cent of the adults have records for crimes like drug dealing, possession of arms, rape and armed robbery and we are pushing for their expulsion," she said.

Italian interior minister Roberto Maroni has said he is also pushing the EU for permission to expel any law-abiding EU citizens, including Gypsies, who do not have work or accommodation and who are claiming benefit.

He has backed France's crackdown on Gypsies, stating that Nicolas Sarkozy was "doing nothing more than copying Italy".

Alemanno, a former neo-fascist, has said voluntary repatriation for Gypsies had been tried "and has not solved the problem." Gypsies leaving France were now settling in camps in Rome, he said last week.