“This was an attempt to introduce aesthetics to the equation.”Mr Worsley’s design brief was only 10 words long: “Humour, mystery, fantasy, ecological, sustainable, independent, contextual, agricultural, invisible.” From that vague outline, the architect John Christophers, of Associated Architects in Birmingham, devised a plan to use a mixture of mud and straw, known as cob. It was built to order in 2001 for its current owner, Nicholas Worsley, a retired barrister. “Sustainable houses are usually very worthy – but very dull,” he said. Cobtun House might sound like something from the Third World, but it represents the height of ecological design. Overlooking the river Avon near Worcester, it combines modern principles of sustainable development with ancient techniques of mud construction.
Behind a primitive-looking outer wall of piled clay, the house has an airy modern interior with ceiling-high windows. It could be the most expensive mud pie of all time. A four-bedroom home made from clay, straw and recycled plastic bottles has gone on sale for an asking price of £745,000.

In the first definitive portrait of the nation’s consumption of pornography, The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that more than nine million men – almost 40 per cent of the male population – used pornographic websites last year, compared with an estimated two million in 2000.. “The coronation service is such that whoever takes the oaths actually takes oaths to defend the Christian faith,” he said.”If, by saying that, he meant that he wanted to uphold the freedom of people of every faith, then I have no quarrel with that. But you can’t defend every faith, because there are very serious differences among them.”In an interview earlier this week, the bishop – who was born a Muslim – called on fellow Anglicans to reassert Britain’s “Christian character” and resist the trend towards a “multi-faith mish-mash”.. Record numbers of men and women are downloading pornography from the internet, making Britain the fastest-growing market in the world for the booming £20bn adult website industry.

Extremist groups known to operate in this country include the following:The Animal Liberation Front: A militant group which is the hub for Britain’s animal rights activists. Ms Gardner believes that the stealing of Gladys Hammond’s remains from her grave in Staffordshire, has changed public opinion of animal rights activists. “It horrified people,” she said.THE TERROR GROUPSIn the UK, it is estimated that 2,500 animal rights activists are ready to take the law into their hands at any time, with a hardcore of 250 capable of carrying out major arson attacks. The family suffered death threats, paint attacks and – like the others – a bomb hoax The tide may be turning, however.

But the attacks kept coming.Mrs Chisholm was in the house with her daughter and another child when the extremists struck again. “It was horrendous.They had thrown paint over the guard’s car. They had thrown glass bottles filled with paint at the house, they had covered my daughter’s toys in thick, red emulsion paint The dogs were covered in it That was the end of me I slowly went to pieces. I was scared of everything.”Eventually, she was forced to leave the job she loved, working with deaf children. After nine months of continual harassment, the attacks began to ease off. But the family still receive silent phone calls and threatening letters.One weekend last month, Nicki Smith and her family were preparing for another spell in the firing line at their home a couple of hundred miles away from the Chisholms.

The society says it now welcomes applications for membership from carpetbaggers.So should you open an account? Well, while there’s no prospect of Kent Reliance staging the sort of demutualisation seen at societies such as Halifax in the Nineties (when members received windfalls worth thousands of pounds), there have already been three building society takeovers announced this year in which members have been promised smaller payouts.Just this week, for example, Newcastle said it would take over the Universal Building Society, the members of which will now get a few hundred pounds each if they back the merger.Kent Reliance says no deal is planned – but you never know, and £100 gets you membership rights.. And therein lie two major worries still to be dealt with.The first is that many employers will feel justified in reducing the pension benefits they offer to the minimum provided by the NPSS, in which case total pension savings will fall.Second, we still have to tackle the current lack of trust in pensions if we are to persuade people to save. Add in the typical pension likely to be produced by Lord Turner’s new National Pension Savings Scheme (NPSS) and you still won’t be much past the 40 per cent mark.Could you live on a pension worth just more than a third of the wages you were earning before retirement? The answer for most people is likely to be a pretty resounding no.In other words, you will have to make additional savings in order to be sure of a decent standard of living in retirement. The Government’s failure to offer all British citizens a basic state pension irrespective of the tax and national insurance they have paid is disappointing. But reducing the national insurance contributions required will help tackle the fact that less than half of all women qualify for the full basic state pension.So, can we say that we are now close to solving the pensions crisis? Here, unfortunately, the answer is less positive: we may be nearer to a solution, but serious challenges remain.Above all, even those who qualify for the full state pension will still only receive an income worth 30 per cent of the average wages earned by people just coming up to retirement. So persuading them to even consider reform has been an achievement in itself.Nor should we be too concerned that not every single recommendation made by the Pensions Commission has made its way into the White Paper.The fact that the link between earnings and pensions will not be restored until 2012, rather than 2010, is no disaster.

There are no votes in the issue, and, if the current problems are not tackled, the ramifications will not be felt until well after both the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have left politics. That we even have a White Paper represents huge progress on a year ago – for that alone, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell deserves huge credit. This time last year, it seemed inconceivable that ministers would be prepared to grasp the nettle of raising the state retirement age or, after years of refusing to countenance it, to accept the case for the restoration of the link between earnings and the basic state pension.
Lord Turner had to drag both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair kicking and screaming to the pensions reform table. In all of the arguments about the merits and failings of the White Paper on pensions reform, one truth should not be overlooked. “This is something that needs to be made easier for people to do for that reason alone.”.

However, most people only consult their files after they have been turned down for credit.”Monitoring your file is also an important weapon in the battle against identity theft,” Stamp added. “One in three people who consult their credit reference files say that they have found an error in the information held about them, so this is really crucial.”Under data-protection laws, everyone has a right to request details of their files from credit reference agencies, which lenders access when they are making decisions about applications for financial services such as loans. Currently, people have to check their files with several different agencies, including Equifax, Experian and CallCredit.
And consumers generally have to pay for each search – a £2 fee is typical – though individual agencies have started to make special offers or free trials.”This is something that should be free to consumers all the time,” said Barry Stamp, managing director of the new agency. The service will enable anyone in the UK to check the information that lenders hold about them through one online check. The Credit Reporting Agency, which has access to the files on individuals held by all of the UK’s major reference agencies, will offer the service locally from next week, and nationwide in August. A Cornwall-based credit- reference agency is to launch a free online service ( www.annualcreditreport.co.uk) available to anyone who wants to check their credit file. Longer term, however, there are going to be lots of new opportunities, especially in volatile emerging markets, for the younger generation.jd independent-investor .

The jury is still out on the current setback in share prices. My best guess is that we are probably in for a long and unrewarding summer, which may well become a cyclical bear market. The fact that stock markets still appear reasonably valued against historical benchmarks is neither here nor there.A dollar crisis would be ugly and cannot be discounted. Anyone with the bulk of their investing or house-owning life ahead of them has no real interest in permanently rising share and house prices – in fact the opposite.Different generations legitimately have different interests in (and different expectations) from markets, which is why the changing demographic profile of most Western countries will in time have an impact on future returns from shares and bonds.In the short term, however, we’ll all continue to worry when markets fall suddenly. How do young people gain from house prices rising to record levels every year? How do they benefit from stock markets at all-time valuation highs? They don’t. If you are investing for your retirement 20 years away, it may give you a warm feeling that your fund grows at 10 per cent a year for the first 10 years, but what matters much more is what the growth rate is in the second 10 years.In fact, the odds are that you will end up with more money if prices fall rather than rise in the fist 10 years, as your entry cost will be much lower, and the eventual returns, if you believe in reversion to the mean, that much higher.So, just as with the housing market, much depends on where you are in your personal investment cycle. Buy low, sell high is not a complex idea to understand.The longer your time horizon, the more important your entry price becomes.

Individuals acted with heroism even if the technology did not always back them up.”The areas of concern that will be highlighted in the 7/7 report include:CommunicationsOfficials relied too heavily on communicating by mobile phone, the review committee is expected to say It will call for an alternative to mobiles in a crisis. Those involved in the attempt to save badly injured passengers displayed heroism “beyond the call of duty” but were let down by inadequate equipment, a lack of medical supplies and insufficient training for a terror attack, the 7/7 inquiry will conclude.One Whitehall source, who has seen a draft of the report, said: “If people had not gone far beyond what they were expected to do then it [the number of casualties] would have been an awful lot worse. The official inquiry into the response to the disaster has found that the recommendations made nearly two decades ago, after the King’s Cross fire, have not been acted on.
The three-volume report, which includes the harrowing testimonies of survivors, will make more than 50 proposals for improving the handling of major emergencies.The members of the 7 July review committee, who will present their findings to ministers on 5 June, are expected to warn that lives could be lost in future unless action is taken immediately.Fifty-two people died and many more were injured when Islamist extremists launched a series of suicide bomb attacks at Edgware Road, King’s Cross and Aldgate Tube stations and on a double-decker bus. A catalogue of communication failures undermined the “heroic” efforts of emergency crews, doctors and commuters to rescue victims injured in the London bombings. It also caused severe delays on the West Coast main line as police scoured the train for clues.A spokeswoman for British Transport Police said a suspect from Skelmersdale in west Lancashire was later arrested in the Kendal area.The attack follows a series of incidents that have raised concerns about the level of knife crime, and comes three days after the launch of a national knife amnesty and a month after British Transport Police announced they would use scanners to detect knives at stations.Officers are being given hand-held scanners as well as portable scanning arches as part of the national roll-out.. The man died after being stabbed in the chest following an argument with a fellow passenger on the 10.10 Virgin train from Glasgow to Paignton in Devon.
Although staff managed to lock the knifeman in a carriage after evacuating passengers, he kicked out a window when the train stopped at Oxenholme station in Cumbria and fled.The attack caused panic and confusion among the train’s 200 passengers, some of whom were treated for shock. Despite what Mr Cameron thinks, the choice of song was nothing to do with him, Yorke said..

Police last night arrested a 21-year-old man after a passenger was stabbed to death in front of horrified travellers on a train yesterday. But the left-leaning singer has responded by saying it did not happen. Listeners to this morning’s edition of Desert Island Discs will hear Mr Cameron talk of how Yorke played a song specially for him at a recent show after requesting the track beforehand. But the Tory leader David Cameron’s efforts to trumpet his chumminess with the star have backfired. The women, most of whom have not previously been involved in politics, are to be mentored by senior figures in the Conservative Party. They will reinforce Mr Cameron’s existing “A-list” of female candidates drawn up to fight target seats..

FIS invested in two franchise groups, DTT, a driving instruction business, and Myhome. But there was talk of a conflict of interest and O’Connell resigned.His departure stripped FIS of its franchise “king” The company relied upon him to produce the deals. It seems without his contacts, FIS feared it had nothing to offer. The idea was to take stakes in franchise operations, help develop them, and then bring them to the stock market Russell O’Connell, the man behind Myhome, was on the board. It is going into liquidation.Admittedly it is a voluntary winding up and the 59 shareholders can expect some return But I find its sudden death astonishing True, some compelling reasons are put forward.

Yet it is surprising that a company with an interesting programme and impressive backers should arrive on Ofex nine months ago, possibly spending £60,000 in the process, and is now planning liquidation at a cost of some £80,000.FIS was set up to invest in Britain’s booming franchise culture. Although an obscure little company, traded on the fringe Ofex share market, I have written about it on a number of occasions and even regarded it as a candidate for the No Pain, No Gain portfolio. One reason I refrained from recruiting FIS was the presence in the portfolio of another Ofex share – the highly successful Myhome International. I felt two Ofex constituents would, even for an exercise largely focused on smaller companies, represent too big an exposure to what is often a high-risk corner of the investment world, even if it can be hugely rewarding.
Still, this week Myhome cleared the way for FIS’s possible inclusion It is graduating to the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) The trouble is – FIS will soon be no more. I feel obliged to comment on the signalled departure of Franchise Investment Strategies. Its More Than retail brand is exceeding expectations, and all open parts of the business are profitable in spite of a challenging market There are rewards for buyers, if with a degree of risk..

But if there is money left once these arrangements have been made, the Miller and McFarlane cases will be relevant.Victoria Brandon, a matrimonial lawyer at Turner Parkinson, says a “significant number” of couples will be affected. “In the majority of divorces, there are not sufficient assets for these judgments to be relevant, but there are in many cases.”The courts remain reluctant to apportion blame when considering settlements. Previously, Ms Miller had argued that one reason she was entitled to a larger share of her husband’s assets was that he had committed adultery. “As a result, many recent cases have cited bad conduct of one party as a reason for increasing the award,” says Marc Saunderson, a partner in the family team at the solicitor Mills & Reeve. “This will cover a lot of ordinary people, not just the super-rich,” says Julia Whittle, of Punter Southall Financial Management. “It may affect many professional couples, as well as divorces concerning older people, or cases where businesses are involved.”The courts will first consider the finances needed to put couples in the positions entrenched in law before these cases – so that a spouse in a short marriage is no worse off, say, or that a maintenance settlement covers needs. It said the maintenance her husband, Kenneth McFarlane, should pay her should not be based only on her financial needs, as courts have previously assumed.

He will now have to pay her £250,000 of his £750,000 annual incomeThough the sums of money at stake in these two cases are large, the judgments will act as precedents for divorcing couples with much more modest wealth. Previously, the divorce courts had ruled that with shorter marriages, spouses such as Ms Miller should be left no worse off than they would have been if the marriage had not taken place – but that they should not be entitled to a larger share of their partner’s wealth.In the McFarlane case, the House of Lords accepted Julia McFarlane’s argument that she should be compensated for the loss of earnings potential she had suffered when giving up her job to look after the children. he number of marriages ending in divorce may now be as high as one in two – good news for family law solicitors, particularly after two legal rulings this week that could pave the way for more bitter court battles between husbands and wives. The two cases were separate – they just happened to produce rulings on Wednesday – but both could have implications for millions of divorcing couples.
In the Miller case, the House of Lords upheld a previous judgment that Melissa Miller should receive a £5m divorce settlement from her husband, Alan Miller, who is thought to be worth more than £17m.The case is significant because the couple had been married for less than three years. Halifax research suggests 47,000 children have missed out on vouchers worth £16.5m because their parents have failed to apply for child benefit.Critics of the child trust fund scheme have pointed out that many parents who do receive the savings vouchers subsequently fail to open an account.The most recent figures from the Treasury suggest a third of the 2.3m parents sent savings vouchers so far have yet to cash them in. The Government automatically sets up default accounts for children on their first birthday if their parents have failed to do so, but this still means losing a year of returns.Brian Morris, head of savings policy at the Building Societies Association, said: “These accounts are a great way for parents to kickstart a savings habit for their child and those parents who have not yet found a home for their voucher should do so – the earlier you open a cash CTF, the more interest will be paid.”. So families that don’t register for the payment – worth £17.45 a week for the eldest child – will miss out.Ray Milne, managing director of Halifax Financial Services, said that while some parents felt they did not need child benefit, families should not miss out on child trust funds.”We understand that new parents have a lot on their minds but it is vital they take the time to think about their children’s financial future,” Milne said.

Sven Goran Eriksson, it seems, has his own faith He trusts in instinct.

Sven Goran Eriksson would never dispense of the one proven goalscorer he has elected to bring to Germany and Owen’s history is worthy of more time and respect, but Crouch’s search for recognition continued on the right path against Paraguay yesterday afternoon even if the best of his attributes ultimately brought out the worst in England as they looked to the skies with alarming regularity in their opening contest in Group B.. The culprit was sitting on the sidelines wearing a familiar bemused expression.. Peter Crouch passed his audition to discover if England have an attack to cope without Wayne Rooney against the lesser lights of this World Cup, although the same cannot be said of a patently unfit Michael Owen. What price the Newcastle forward, and not the previously maligned Crouch, standing down when the cherished England No 9 is deemed match fit and tremors are felt around Sir Alex Ferguson’s home in the south of France?

This is mischief making, of course. On occasions he was fabulous, at others he was short of possession and superfluous, but do not start blaming the England captain. For those suffering from jingoistic blindness, that would have been on the lines of “at others we were awful”.

Fittingly for the man whose time had arrived, Beckham summed up the team precisely. David Beckham looked hot and bothered and, frankly, he should have done. “We were good at times,” Golden Balls said in the immediate aftermath of England’s 1-0 win over Paraguay, but had the sense to curtail the obvious conclusion to the sentence. It is always worth remembering that the last time England progressed as far as the semi-final of a World Cup, their first game (a dreadful 1-1 draw with Ireland) had been greeted with red-top calls to ” bring them home”.. But a win is a win, and the country has been short enough of those in the past on days when all the hype and build-up finally gives way to some football. Stronger opposition would surely have been capable of finding an equaliser to the early own-goal forced by David Beckham’s superb free-kick.

An announcement could come today, though most observers believe tomorrow is more likely.Mittal wants investors to reject Arcelor’s plans to buy Russia’s Severstal, which recently entered the fray as a white knight.Elsewhere, Whitbread, which owns Premier Travel Inns and Costa Coffee, is set to update investors on trading at its annual general meeting on Tuesday. The only division expected to be in positive territory is Premier Travel, which is tipped to be up 5 per cent on a like-for-like basis.Last Friday the group set an end-of-June deadline for the sale of its pubs.While retailers and hospitality groups are expected to benefit greatly from the World Cup, not everyone will share in the spoils. For example, both MyTravel and First Choice Holidays are set to unveil their interim results, but the City will be most interested in how their summer sales are faring – generally the time when travel firms make most of their money.However, some believe that holiday operators will be hit as people choose to stay at home, and in front of their TVs, for the next month.First Choice is tipped to deliver an adjusted pre-tax loss of £80.8m for the first half.Among smaller caps, the property comapny Grainger Trust is expected to provide some insight into the strength of the residential market when it unveils its interim results on Tuesday. Investors will be looking for confirmation that modest growth in the market has continued.Fellow property groups Workspace and London Merchant will provide final results, although in this case their figures will reflect on the non-residential market.Workspace, which rents out office space to 4,000 small and medium-sized businesses, is expected to deliver an adjusted pre-tax profit of £14.7m – slightly up from the £14.5m delivered in the previous year.CALENDARTomorrow 12UK RESULTS: (final) Carclo, Hyder Consulting, IFX, Latchways, London Merchant, Workspace, (interim) CivicaTuesday 13UK RESULTS: (F) CML Microsystems, Oxford Instruments, Patientline, Ten Alps, William Ransom & Son; (I) ATH Resources, Pursuit Dynamics, First Choice Holidays, Grainger TrustWednesday 14UK RESULTS: (F) Accident Exchange, Celsis International, Ensor, London Asia CapitalThursday 15UK RESULTS: (F) Chamberlin & Hill, New Avesco, (I) MyTravel, OMGFriday 16UK RESULTS: None scheduled. The conventional way of backing up large quantities of computer data is to tape it, in much the same way you would have recorded music in days gone by.

Tapes costs a couple of pounds each, but the process is slow and they are vulnerable to damage. Backing up to a hard disk is now a popular alternative since it is quicker and recovering the data is much faster too. But disk systems do have their drawbacks, the most serious being that they are less portable than tapes. If an office is hit by a fire or flood and the server is damaged, it is highly likely the backup disks will be affected too.
Iomega’s REV, a miniature hard drive, aims to combine the portability and flexibility of tape with the speed and robustness of a disk-based system.A single REV drive, at 35 gigabytes, will not back up large servers. So Iomega has combined eight of the drives in its REV Loader 280.

This is a compact box that connects to a server or PC via a USB cable, and can automatically back up data to a total storage capacity of 280GB uncompressed, or 560GB with compression turned on.The REV Loader 280 works with most reasonably recent versions of both the desktop and server versions of Windows. It can be used either as a standalone unit that copies on to multiple REV disks, or as an automated backup system. Iomega supplies a basic version of Computer Associates’ ARCServe software to manage this.The REV Loader 280 can work in a number of ways. A network manager could set the machine up to back up a server to a different REV disk every day, for example, or use multiple disks to capture larger databases or other files.Some of the sophisticated features of ARCServe, like auto- mated backup and archiving of Microsoft Exchange email servers, aren’t included. For these, you’ll have to buy a more advanced version of the software.But for a lot of small firms, the supplied software will be good enough.

More from Alan Watkins.

After all, we – or, rather, the Labour benches – have become accustomed to governing with large majorities Mr Blair or Mr Brown will still be comfortably off. In 1955, the Churchill Government would have run its course: the decision was taken by the apparatchiks at Central Office to go while the going was good. There was nothing wrong with the reasoning except that Eden went off his head later on, though the position was remedied by Macmillan.It would be imprudent in the extreme if Mr Brown took any risks with his majority. Instead of playing fag-end of Mr Blair’s audience he would have what his supporters wanted, a fresh mandate. Eden went to the country within seven weeks of Churchill’s retirement in 1955 but was in office only until January 1957.There would be a temptation for Mr Brown to do likewise. James Callaghan had just over three years in Downing Street, while Anthony Eden had a year and nine months, and Alec Douglas-Home a year only. Even Dr John Reid will be persuaded to join the cheering throng before very long.The truth is that Mr Brown is beginning to look like an unlucky Prime Minister It is a matter almost wholly of longevity.

The Union Flag was supplanted in the 1990s by the red cross on a white ground, so emphasising the qualities of English nationalism, the British National Party and general disobligingness Mr Brown is paying tribute to England too. Mr Blair has been doing something similar on government buildings, though he lacks quite the personal touch.The St George’s Cross used to be flown on obscure English parish churches, but Wilson’s (not to mention Sir Alf Ramsey’s) brave lads used to be supported solidly by the Union Jack. For my part, I cling to the truth that, once a PR man, always a PR man.I see that Mr Cameron has taken to flying the St George’s flag from his bicycle for the duration of the World Cup or, at any rate, for its preliminary stages. He has also proposed that the deputy leader should go down the aisle afterwards with Mr Brown, with Mr Straw as the blushing bride; or better, perhaps, as the pretty bridesmaid.How can one put this? But are they, possibly, too old for this kind of performance? Instead, Mr David Cameron has been handed the bridal bouquet. But since ancient times there has been an apostolic succession of deputy leaders, in the post-war period all elected, and of greater or lesser degrees of ineffectiveness.Mr Straw has never lost his gift for stating the obvious That is one of his great political strengths Mr Straw has advanced the year by 12 months That is the only substantial modification. There has been a whole string of arbitrarily appointed Tory deputy PMs. The explanation seems to lie in what Samuel Johnson once described as “ignorance, madam, pure ignorance”.There have been only two Labour Deputy PMs, Herbert Morrison and John Prescott, with C R Attlee as Winston Churchill’s deputy in the Coalition government.

But arguably it’s been the most important year of her life. Diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2005, the 38-year-old singer immediately issued a press statement and cancelled her Showgirl tour.

We’ve had dance Kylie, electro-clash Kylie, retro Kylie, even indie Kylie, but the way she’s handled her illness and treatment has been her most remarkable incarnation yet. Not only has she showed real dignity, she has refused to be turned into a triumph over tragedy story.
After a partial mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the prognosis looks good. She is recording a new album and is tipped to headline at next year’s Glastonbury Festival, but there is no talk of miracle cures; rather she insists she is taking “baby steps”.Nor is she about to rush up the aisle with her boyfriend of four years, film star Oliver Martinez. “I don’t have that sense of urgency,” she told an Australian newspaper last week, in her first interview since her illness.

As for the gruesome fascination with her fertility, she says, “Yes, I feel broody – it’s only natural. If and when it happens, then great.”As a pop star, Minogue’s media exposure was strictly controlled. Glamorous photos were churned out but the singer rarely spoke to the press. Half- woman, half-cartoon, she was never a spokesperson for any cause “What does Kylie actually think?” we wondered. That emptiness was also her enigma.All the more commendable then, that faced with a brush with mortality, she has handled it so brilliantly. Few stars go public about cancer – especially one whose sexuality is so key to her image – but from the moment she was diagnosed, Minogue has been totally open.Throughout her treatment, and mindful of her influence on other women, she has refused to endorse quack cures. Minogue has insisted that medical science should be at the heart, not just of her own treatment, but of that of any cancer sufferers who look to her as a role model.In the past Minogue’s freakishly perfect body (5ft 1in, with the world’s most famous bottom) has been used as a stick to beat normal women She has always been “other”.

But now for the first time, she’s made herself part of the female constituency. “I think of all of my past images,” she said last week, “and none of them are like me. I’m just like any girl and I have the same anxieties and issues.”Although Kylie has always embraced the market (“I think to a degree it’s fair to say that you’re a manufactured product”), her capacity for reinvention is staggering. There have been many cutting-edge collaborators, including the photographers Stephane Sedanoui, Wolfgang Tillmans and Pierre and Gilles, and the designer John Galliano, who described her as a “blend of Lolita and Barbarella”.Kylie Ann Minogue was born in Melbourne in 1968 to an Australian father and Welsh mother. A twisted ankle suffered in the World Team Cup at Dusseldorf and exacerbated at Roland Garros may prove a barrier to Roddick’s movement and ambitions, however.Injuries sustained in Paris by Mario Ancic and Novak Djokovic have meant their withdrawal, but a Stella debut for Ivan Ljubicic, hero of Croatia’s Davis Cup triumph last December and a Roland Garros semi-finalist, will help redress those absences, as will the presence of Lleyton Hewitt, twice a Stella champion, James Blake, the New Yorker with a British mother, Fernando Gonzalez, the sixth-seeded Chilean with the ferocious forehand, who should play Greg Rusedski in the second round, France’s Sebastien Grosjean and his exciting 20-year-old compatriot, Gael Monfils.For Murray, the draw is encouraging.