The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, are among those to have imposed a ban on the gadgets, claiming concerns over the safety of their artwork as well as visitors.

“Selfie sticks are restricted out of concern about damaging the art or people in more enclosed spaces,” Julie Jaskol, the assistant director of media relations at Getty, told Mashable .

“Like tripods and monopods, the use of selfie sticks is prohibited at the Hirshhorn to preserve the safety of the artwork and the visitors who come to enjoy it,” Kelly Carnes, a Hirshhorn Museum spokesperson, told the Washington Post .

Other major US museums that have adopted the policy include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (both in Washington DC) and its Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, as well as the Dallas Museum of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is also considering the ban.

While museums fear damage to exhibits, other venues - including Premier League football grounds - have banned the devices to discourage deliberate outbreaks of violence.

Tottenham Hotspur was the first team to ban selfie sticks from their White Hart Lane stadium; Arsenal followed suit soon after.

“It was viewed that the selfie sticks can be used as an offence weapon,” Elaine Sigrist of the Arsenal Football Club told Mashable.

Anything that “ could be used as a weapon or could compromise public safety” is outlawed from the Emirates Stadium, added a spokesperson for the club.

Last year, South Korea banned the sale of unlicensed selfie-sticks, claiming the signals emitted by the blue tooth equipped devices could pose a disruption to other equipment using the same radio frequency. Any offenders will face a $27,000 fine or up to three years in prison.

The selfie has become a global phenomenon in recent years, with everyone from celebrities and tourists to photobombing animals striking poses at their own camera lens.

A recent survey of Instagram posts that include mentions of tourist attractions and the world ‘selfie’ revealed the Eiffel Tower in Paris to be the most popular place to take a selfie .

On average, more than one million selfies are taken everyday, the research claimed, while 10,700 selfies were found to have been taken against the backdrop of the French landmark.

Others in the top five included Disney World in Florida, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, London’s Big Ben, and the Empire State Building in New York.

Last year, one of the world’s most daring selfies was taken by a Briton atop Rio de Janeiro’s 124ft-high Christ the Redeemer statue.

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NOW WATCH: This Flying Car Is Real And It Can Fly 430 Miles On A Full Tank

They say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

But when it comes to our attitude towards promiscuity, it turns out there is no such gender divide.

Both men and women fall into two groups, one more inclined to be promiscuous and the other more inclined to be faithful.

Whereas other species are either one or the other, both mating strategies appear to be used by humans.

The results, published in the journal Biology Letters, are from a joint study carried out by Professor Robin Dunbar of Oxford University's Department of Experimental Psychology and Professor John Manning of Northumbria University.

Previous physical comparisons between humans and other mammals suggest that humans are mid-way between being a faithful species and a promiscuous species.

However, the new study, titled 'Stay or Stray? Evidence for Alternative Mating Strategy Phenotypes in Both Men and Women' suggests that in fact there are two distinct sub-populations of humans: one that is more interested in short-term flings and another that prefers to form long-term commitments.

The researchers analysed the answers of 575 North American and British people about their attitudes and desires towards "non-committal" sex.

Some of the respondents were more likely to be promiscuous, and others more likely to value sexual fidelity. However, the divide was not along gender lines.

The study also looked at photocopies of the right hand from 1,314 British men and women and measured the length of the index (second) finger and the ring (fourth) finger.

The shorter the index finger in relation to the ring finger (the 2D:4D ratio), the higher the levels of testosterone that person is likely to have been exposed to while developing in the womb, and the greater their sexual promiscuity will be as an adult. This is true for both men and women.

One group had a ring finger which was much longer than the index finger, suggesting that they may be more promiscuous.

The other group had fingers which similar in length, meaning they are more likely to seek long-term relationships. Again, the split was not along gender lines.

"This research suggests that there may be two distinct types of individuals within each sex pursuing different mating strategies," Dr Wlodarski said.

"We observed what appears to be a cluster of males and a cluster of females who are more inclined to 'stay', with a separate cluster of males and females being more inclined to 'stray', when it comes to sexual relationships."

Professor Dunbar added that the differences are "subtle" and "only visible when we look at large groups of people."

He said: "Human behaviour is influenced by many factors, such as the environment and life experience, and what happens in the womb might only have a modest effect on something as complex as sexual relationships."

This article was written by Camilla Turner from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: 20 weird psychological reasons someone might fall in love with you

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They call him the King of Love. Reclining on a purple velvet throne, inside his castle – a sixth-floor office in a grey tower block in central London – Karl Gregory is reeling off some of his favourite statistics. “517,000 relationships, 92,000 marriages and around a million babies,” he grins.

“We’ve been responsible for all those. Isn’t it incredible?” He whisks a print-out from a pile of papers on his desk and prods a blurry image in the middle. It’s a picture of a customer’s baby scan under the words: “all thanks to Match.com”.

At the British HQ of the world’s biggest dating agency, every day is Valentine’s Day. The lift doors ping open to reveal a wall plastered in photographs of happy couples – cliché upon cliché of wedding shots, beach scenes, even a pair strolling through a sunflower field.

In one corner is a cluster of Hallmark-red sofas; romantic slogans adorn a board above the photocopier. There are hearts everywhere – from the pendant on an employee’s necklace to the novelty fruit bowl.

Match.com is not only the most popular dating website on the planet; it’s the granddaddy of them all. This year, it celebrates its 20th anniversary – marking two decades since a little start-up suggested that Cupid’s arrow might strike through a screen.

Today, one in five new relationships and one in six marriages are estimated to begin online. The global online dating market is worth at least a billion dollars.

Match.com’s piece of this pie is huge. Its users are spread across 40 countries and exchange 415 million emails a year. It has a Google-like track record of gobbling up its competition: it purchased OkCupid in 2011, and also owns Tinder, a wildly popular mobile app founded in 2012.

“Try this experiment next time you’re out for dinner with a group of friends,” suggests Gregory, who is Match.com’s UK manager and European director. “Mention Match.com, and see how many say they met their partner on there, or encouraged a relative to go on it, or know someone who has.”

When Match.com launched in April 1995, there were only 25 million internet users worldwide, compared to 2.92 billion in 2015. Having web access at home – like owning a mobile phone - was considered quite exotic.

Match.com was a flare from the future. It promised a clever algorithm, which used character traits and interests to pair users with their perfect partner. Within six months, 100,000 people had registered.

At first, online dating occupied a seedy corner of the internet, ranking in people’s minds just above red light services. The first users of Match.com were a motley bunch: all of them tentative; some optimistic, others outright weirdos.

Bill and Freddie Straus, aged 76 and 72, fall into the first category. The couple from California are among the first in history to have gone on an online date – and, two decades later, have a long, happy marriage to show for it. “I had just broken up with somebody and I decided, aged 53, that maybe it was time to get married,” says Freddie. “It was very limited back then – most of the men on it were so old, they could have been my father. I was about ready to give up, and then Bill came along.”

Bill had been on seven dates by the time he got an email from Freddie. They messaged for a few days by fax and email before speaking on the phone, and then went on their first date to a Chinese restaurant in 1996. Freddie wasn’t technical enough to upload a picture, so Bill had no idea what she looked like - which was relatively common in the early days.

“It started off as sheer geek territory,” says Gregory. “It was 80 per cent guys, no profile pictures. Stigma was high.”

Jane Stuart barely told anyone when she set up a profile on the site in 2001. “Back then, there was a sense of 'Oh, you must be really desperate,’” she says.

“I was worried that people would think I couldn’t get a boyfriend normally. It was a bit creepy. Things were different, too – I didn’t have a laptop and certainly didn’t have internet on my phone, so I was logging on in my lunch break at work.”

Then, Jane, a 28-year-old travel saleswoman from Twickenham, west London, came across Andreas Palikiras, an olive-skinned marketing manager from Corfu. Fourteen years later, the pair are married, with twin four-year-old daughters, and, rather aptly, their own Greek wedding business. “It’s amazing to have been a pioneer of something that is now so normal,” she says.

Though early users were taking a gamble by signing up to the site, the real leap of faith in Match.com’s history took place on December 27, 1992.

Eric Klien, a Las Vegas-based entrepreneur, had spent six months pondering the dilemma of dating. “Traditional methods of courting and flirting are risky generally,” he wrote at the time. “Not only are they risky, but they are ineffective.” So he created a 170-point questionnaire, covering users’ horoscopes, their preferred mode of transport, taste in music, cleanliness, condition of their hair and how often they participated in dangerous sports.

He called it the “Electronic Matchmaker” and uploaded to his private internet database (called a “usenet”) just after Christmas 1992. It was free to fill in and provided users with a report informing them how many of the men/women on his system matched their responses. It was the birth of online dating as we know it.

Klien, a somewhat eccentric philanthropist whose interests include cryogenics and the Lifeboat Foundation (an NGO dedicated to the preservation of human life in the event of global disaster), now lives in Reno, Nevada. He has never spoken about the “Matchmaker”, and when I track him down he is brusque and to-the-point.

“In person, it is uncomfortable to ask a lot of questions up front,” he says. Giving your preferences to a faceless machine, on the other hand, is far less awkward. “And a person only has to answer the questions once and then they will be applied to all future matches.”

In 1993, Klien sold his questionnaire and the domain name Match.com so he could focus on a new mission. It was called the Atlantis Project and it aimed to build an independent city called Oceania in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

Match.com’s buyer was Gary Kremen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur frustrated by the amount of money he was spending on 1-900 dating hotlines. He purchased Match.com for $2,500 (£1,650) and launched it as a dating service on the open internet in 1995. In his first TV interview, Kremen wore a tie-dyed shirt and sat on a beanbag. “Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ,” he pronounced.

Kremen himself found a girlfriend online, but sadly lost her to another man she met on Match.com – a painful lesson, but at least he knew the site worked. His term at the helm didn’t last, however: in 1998, he argued with his board and the company was sold. Its current owner, the American media company InterActiveCorp (IAC), bought it in 1999 for $50 million (£33 million).

Officially called “Synapse”, but known by insiders as the “magic sauce”, the Match.com algorithm is based on a streamlined version of Klien’s original matchmaker (the questions on hair condition have gone). It takes into account a user’s stated preferences – age, profession and so on – as well as their actions on the site. So, if a woman says she doesn’t want to date anyone under 6ft, but looks at profiles of men who are 5’8” or 5’10”, Match.com “knows” that she is open to them. The results of the algorithm’s sums are shown in users’ “daily six”: a series of previously-unseen, tailored profiles that are sent to your inbox each day.

Yet philosophers have spent centuries studying love, and concluded that it defies logic – so what hope has a computerised algorithm of matching us with a mate? In 2012, a major study, led by Prof Eli Finkel of the department of Social Psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois found that “to date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works.”

Others agree. Prof Jerry Mendelsohn, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells me that he “knows of no replicated, refereed study by a disinterested researcher that demonstrates an effective algorithm for finding love.”

But Match.com insists that love is not its aim. “In the early stages, we used to promise the highest level of love, and we’ve moved on from that,” explains Gregory. “Now, it’s all about going on dates and broadening your horizons.” Dr Marina Adshade, author of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love, believes that if “that’s the true purpose… they are like a good friend who forces you to try on clothes that you would never have picked up.”

Match.com’s biggest user-group is aged 25-44 (56 per cent of all subscribers), while its fastest-growing demographic is the over-55s. There are marginally more men than women on the site. The most common professions among men are engineers, finance and retail; among women it’s secretaries, doctors and teachers. There are men looking for men, women looking for women, serious daters, those looking for flings and others simply seeking friends.

Prospective daters spend hours writing their profiles - and the Match algorithm uses them to find dates for them - but a recent experiment by OkCupid found that the photograph accounts for 90 per cent of what prospective dates think of you.

A trawl through the 75 million profiles uploaded to Match.com since its inception reveals a rich tapestry of changing fashions, hobbies and societal trends. Perms, Wham and shell-suits are out; Facebook, selfies and hipster beards are in.

It is Kate Taylor’s job to study these anthropological details. She is one of Match.com’s eight European “relationship experts” – a role that involves picking out trends in online dating and helping users build their profiles accordingly. Dressed in vampish black and velvet, her face framed by tresses of auburn hair, she looks the part of a modern-day Cilla Black.

Taylor met her first husband and her current fiancé on Match.com. “Summery pictures or ones of you engaged in an interesting activity lead to more conversation,” she says. “Women smiling into the camera get 15 times more responses than women smiling away from the camera; whereas that’s the reverse for men. It’s also been shown that photos taken with smartphones don’t do as well as photos taken with a proper camera.”

Last year, one of the most extensive analyses of online profiles revealed words such as “surfing”, “yoga”, “skiing” and “the ocean” attracted people to men; while women did better with “sweet”, “athlete” and “fitness”. Liking the band Radiohead, the TV series Homeland and reading The Great Gatsby scored highly among both sexes. Gay men get more interest if they pose outdoors. Men who refer to females as “women” rather than “girls” are 28 per cent more likely to get a date. Men who use “whom” get 31 per cent more communication online.

Match.com hasn’t escaped the internet’s darker side: the spammers, con artists, trolls and psychopaths. Tales of dates gone awry abound, ranging from awkward encounters to allegations of criminality. Just last month, Match.com removed a profile purportedly belonging to a former New York police officer dubbed the “cannibal cop”. His conviction for conspiring to kill and cook several women has since been overturned.

Mercifully, most mishaps are less serious. There is a tendency to exaggerate online: to play up your charismatic, amiable side and conceal your less attractive traits. Because of the sheer size of Match.com, Gregory says oversight on an individual level, beyond weeding out the illegal and offensive, simply isn’t possible.

At Telegraph Dating, however, a much smaller operation with 55,000 members, there is far more interaction between members and admin staff. “You get people who put up pictures that aren’t current, and occasional messages saying things like, 'I’ve been on a date with this guy who says he’s 50 but he’s nearer 80,’” explains Emma Iversen of The Dating Lab, the company that runs the Telegraph’s service. “These require delicate conversations with the users – what you say in your profile is a sensitive subject. We know it’s Big Brothery, but it can get a bit like a school playground and sometimes we have to step in to calm things down.”

A study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin showed that, on average, women make themselves four kilograms lighter, men tend to exaggerate their income by 20 per cent and both sexes make themselves two inches taller on their profiles.

Nonetheless, a tranche of serious scientific study into the durability of relationships forged online has found that they work. A study by psychologists at Chicago University in 2013 found that marriages that begin online are 25 per cent more likely to last than those between couples who met through more traditional means.

Women entering the workforce, people leaving their hometowns to study and work, people marrying later and divorcing more frequently are all things that have affected our courtship rituals in the last two decades. And our expectations of relationships have changed dramatically: Valentine’s Day, weddings, hen nights and stag dos have become global businesses; women’s magazines, cougars and sexting are all late twentieth century phenomena.

Time-poor, convenience-hungry consumers who already live much of their lives online see the internet as an obvious gateway to love. Choosing a partner has become pragmatic, akin to logging on to book a flight or buy a vacuum cleaner.

Susan Quilliam, a psychologist who runs an online dating course at London’s School of Life, says meeting someone on the internet actually bears remarkable similarities to courtship conventions dating back centuries. “It helps people focus on background, religious beliefs, life values, life goals – rather than physical appearance. I am a huge fan of that aspect because all too often partners in the first flush of love ignore these essentials. Online is much more akin to the 'slow’ love of traditional arranged marriage.”

But there is a downside. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and consultant to Match.com since 2005, points out that “when you have so many choices, you can get into a rat race where you’re always seeking something a little bit better.”

You don’t have to be in love to work at Match.com, but it helps. On their first day in the job, employees receive a copy of the “Match Manifesto”, a handbook containing the company’s guiding principles. “We believe that love is the most important thing in the world,” it begins. All staff members – coupled up or single – have obligatory profiles on the site, including Gregory (though he explains that they’re not all “active”). He actively encourages office romances, too. “People in a happy relationship are so much more productive at work,” he says.

The London HQ is staffed by a team of young, trendy bright sparks, their desks cluttered with romantic paraphernalia – framed photographs, paper hearts, lollipops. Match’s global HQ takes the company ethos even further. A towering, dusty office block in Dallas, Texas, it has been compared to a disco, a themed bar and a swingers’ hotel. Romantic films are played on a loop in the lobby, and coloured lights flash garishly from the ceilings. There are racy animal print carpets; plush banquettes; dance music blaring.

I meet Gregory, 41, in his office. Throne aside, it resembles a chic Scandinavian furniture store: all white, clean lines. This is his busiest time of year: new members to the site peak between the end of December and the third week of February. “We increase our staffing levels around this period,” says Gregory. “The holidays make people think about finding a partner. Around Valentine’s Day there’s a surge, too, because nobody wants to be alone then.”

Competitors are springing up all the time: VeggieDate (for vegetarians), Cupidtino (fans of Apple products), Clown Passions (you can guess). There are sites for casual sex, virgins and extra-marital affairs. And when Match.com launched, Facebook didn’t exist. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute found that of the UK couples who met online after 1997, only 50 per cent found each other through dedicated dating sites; the rest met on social networks and chat rooms.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, a huge chunk of its annual investment goes into innovation; working out how, after 20 years in the game, it can stay fresh. So what’s next?

The King of Love can barely contain his excitement. He’s tapping his foot on the floor and making big, wild hand gestures, his green eyes skipping around the room. “Imagine someone goes to a Match social [face-to-face meetings over cookery lessons, dog walks and golf days],” says Gregory. “They can check in, log the people they meet, and use wearable technology to monitor their pheromones, heart rate, sweat. Then the technology could introduce you to people who provide that chemical connection. What a conversation starter: 'You sent my chemistry into orbit.’”

Funnily enough, Gregory has never tried online dating himself. He met his wife, Sybelle, 13 years ago. “Call me old fashioned,” he grins, “but we met at work.” And, with that, he jumps up, strides out the door and gets back to playing Cupid.

This article was written by Sarah Rainey from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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The research is expected to fuel moves to categorise obesity as a disability and could change thinking in the UK's National Health Service about how the condition is treated.

Fat genes are to blame for more than a fifth of obesity meaning exercise and dieting are of little use to millions, a new study has found.

The landmark research, published in the journal Nature, is the most precise estimate yet for the percentage of obesity caused by DNA rather than lifestyle and is expected to fuel moves to categorise obesity as a disability.

It could change thinking in the NHS about how the condition is treated, experts suggest.

Current figures suggest about a quarter of adults and one in ten children in Britain are obese and up to £8 billion a year is spent treating obesity and related illnesses.

Researchers from the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits consortium analysed DNA from more than 300,000 people worldwide to complete the study.

Elizabeth Speliotes, of the University of Michigan, who led the research, told The Times the research clearly showed there was no single gene that drove obesity.

"The large number of genes make it less likely that one solution to beat obesity will work for all and opens the door to possible ways we could use genetic clues to help defeat obesity," she said.

Alistair Hall, professor of medicine at the University of Leeds, who contributed data to the study, added that exercising and eating healthily were still the best protection against becoming fat, but the discovery "could help many people born with a disposition to put on too much weight".

A companion paper, also published in Nature, claimed that women are much more prone than men to genetic quirks that cause fat to accumulate around the waistline rather than the hips, exposing them to a greater risk of type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular trouble.

Out of the 20 areas of DNA linked to fat distribution that affect one sex more than the other, 19 have a stronger effect on women.

The authors suggested that the disparity could be explained by sex hormones.

READ MORE: 6 Huge Health Lies We Tell Ourselves

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Is it true that "Fifty Shades" costars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan don't get on? If so, they wouldn't be the first screen couple whose chemistry wasn't quite what it seemed.

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MI5 posts 1,600-word job advert calling for Russian-langauge applicants who are British, bright and discreet enough not to tweet the good news if successful

It is over 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended and Britain’s spooks were recalled from behind the Iron Curtain.

But now UK security services are recruiting a new generation of Russian-speaking spies to help monitor Vladimir Putin's undercover agents as relations worsen once again.

Applicants should be British, bright and discreet enough not to tweet the good news if successful, according to an online advert for the intelligence agencies.

In remarkable detail the 1,600-word post, linked from MI5’s recruitment webpage and accessible to the public, spells out the shadowy activities potential spies will undertake if they get the job.

Successful applicants will spend hours listening into tapped phone calls, scouring documents “intercepted under warrant” and chasing new leads for a better understanding of the Russian state.

Their work will cover “terrorism”, “espionage” and “potential threats to national security” but will also be “fascinating and rewarding”, the advert says.

Any intelligence uncovered will be fed back to teams of investigators in London, operatives abroad and “influence Government policy” on how to deal with Mr Putin. There are also chances for postings overseas.

With positions at MI5, MI6 and GCHQ all on the cards and a potential salary of £30,000 there is unlikely to be a shortage of applicants before the 26 March deadline.

But the sudden drive to employ new Russian experts has raised questions about whether our intelligence agencies have been to slow to react to an apparent surge in espionage from the East.

It comes as tensions with Russia reach heights not seen since the Cold War following its seizure of Crimea and the aggression of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Dr Andrew Foxall, Director of the Russia Studies Centre at The Henry Jackson Society, says the Ministry of Defence dropped the ball on watching Russia after the Berlin Wall came down.

“There is clearly a desperate need within the security services and Government as a whole for Russian-speaking individuals,” he told the Sunday Telegraph.

“There was a process that began in 1990 which involved frittering away the capability to understand Russia due to an increasing lack of Russian speakers. That’s continued unchecked ever since.”London has now become a “hotbed of activity” for Russian “dark forces” in recent years, according to Dr Foxall, who said it was about time MI5 strengthened its coverage of Kremlin-placed spies.

“Individuals that we traditionally think about as being spies in the James Bond sense are actually relatively few and far between,” Dr Foxall said.

“Instead what the Russians have are individuals in think tanks, in banks or high up in particular organisations who are on their pay role and placed to feedback information to the Kremlin. It is a subcontracting of traditional spy activities to individuals who the Russians can pick up, use and drop when they’re not useful.”

Those thinking about joining the British state’s efforts to counter Russia’s influence should be warned - a gruelling application process awaits that could last up to nine months.

First, only British citizens need apply. Each candidate must have spent eight of the last 10 years living in the UK and have at least one British parent. Interested parties are urged to “check your suitability for the role” by taking a test designed to gauge the ability to speak Russian and “recall detail”.

Next comes “pre-screening questions” online which include listing biographical details, employment history and an explanation as to why you have an interest in Russia, plus an application form.

After a prolonged period of sifting, MI5’s recruitment team then handpicks candidates to attend a language test in London. An “assessment centre” day follows for those that pass, which includes face-to-face interviews, before yet another stage of “recruitment activities”. Only then are decisions made.

So what is Britain’s secret service looking for? “Enthusiasm, flexibility and team-working are all important. You’ll have an analytical and enquiring mindset, sound judgment and good attention to detail,” the advert says.

And, of course, an ability to stay tight-lipped: “Discretion is vital. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member, providing that they are British.” The advert adds: “You should not post on social media sites about your application.”

Sir Tony Brenton, who would get regular intelligence briefings as Britain’s ambassador in Russia between 2004 and 2008, explained why having Russian-speaking spies was so important.

“Russia is a pretty opaque place, therefore quite a lot of material is not available through overt sources. The action of intelligence agencies and the stuff that they can sweep up is very helpful in filling out our picture about what’s going on in Russia and what’s driving them,” he said.

Sir Tony said those who make it tend to be “loyal”, “bright” and “stable: “You don’t want people who are going to go over the edge or go off and sell everything they know to a newspaper.”

Candidates who think they fit that bill have around five weeks to apply. 

This article was written by Ben Riley-Smith Political Correspondent from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Dubai has given the green light to yet another outrageous building project - a 4,000-acre complex of towers inspired by characters from Arabian Nights, including Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor.

“Aladdin City” will feature six towers, some designed to resemble Aladdin’s magic lamp, linked by air-conditioned bridges with moving walkways (magic carpets?).

Construction will begin next year, and although the total cost has yet to be revealed, Hussain Nasser Lootah, Director-General of Dubai Municipality, told the Future of Dubai website that it had the funds to finance the project .

The towers will reach heights of 34, 26 and 25 storeys, and will include offices, at least one hotel, and parking for 900 cars.

Mr Lootah has previously said that Aladdin City’s towers will be “icons of legends of the past with a touch of beauty and tourism characteristic of the city.”

Although located in the historic Dubai Creek area, where wooden sailing boats still cross the river mouth and traders exchange goods in the souks, the new development is outside the area that is currently bidding for World Heritage status from Unesco.

The complex is the latest in a string of ambitious building projects in Dubai. The Dubai Frame, an 150-metre-high, 93-metre-wide structure similar to the Grande Arche de la Defense in Paris, is scheduled to open in the second half of this year.

Dubai Municipality, the emirate’s city council, is also overseeing construction of the Desert Rose, which is expected to cost 30 billion Emirati dirhams (£5.3bn).

It will be a "sustainable" satellite city with housing for 160,000 people. Building work is planned to begin next year, according to ArabianBusiness.com .

Some projects have been in the pipeline for years, but have yet to materialise. The Dubai Eye, which has been billed as the world’s largest ferris wheel, was due to open in 2015, according to the Daily Mail, but now has a more likely completion date of 2018.

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As the Russian president visits his EU ally Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, we look at other leaders around the world who have embraced the divisive Vladimir Putin

North Korea

The Kremlin has been nurturing ties with Pyongyang for years as a way of thumbing its nose at the West, but the effort accelerated last year as the Ukraine crisis took hold.

In January, the Kremlin confirmed that Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s eccentric leader, will attend the annual Victory Day celebrations on Red Square on May 9 marking the Soviet triumph over the Nazis during the Second World War.

Syria

Russia is the main international backer of Bashir al-Assad’s Syria and Western politicians have accused Vladimr Putin of supplying his regime with arms .

Earlier this month, Mr Putin renewed his criticism of US airstrikes targeting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Syria, saying they should not be carried out without Damascus’s permission.

Venezuela

Caracas is a major buyer of Russian weapons and has recognised breakaway pro-Russian territories such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

Moscow reciprocates by investing billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil projects.

Vladimir Putin once even gave Hugo Chavez a puppy.

Hungary

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, famously said last year that he wanted to abandon liberal democracy in favour of an “illiberal state”.

He has provoked street protests by cosying up to the authoritarian Mr Putin, despite the unease of Hungary’s EU partners.

Greece

After the Syriza party came to power in Greece in January, it quickly emerged that members had been in correspondence with Alexander Dugin, a Russian ultra-nationalist admired in some Kremlin circles who has called for a genocide of Ukrainians.

Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s new prime minister, has spoken against further sanctions on Russia over its backing for separatists in Ukraine, to Moscow’s delight.

France

Some observers suspected a Kremlin hand after it emerged in November that France’s right wing National Front party received a €9 million (£6.6m) loan from First Czech Russian Bank, which is owned by Roman Popov, a government-leaning oligarch.

Europe's far-Right

Russia has also cultivated ties with a number of Right-wing or “insurgent” parties across Europe, including Independent Greeks in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Northern League in Italy, Ataka in Bulgaria and NPD in Germany.

There are no proven links between UKIP and Russia but Nigel Farage, the party’s leader, said in March last year that Mr Putin was the world leader he most admired“as an operator, not as a human being”.

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The particle accelerator, which has been shut for maintenance since 2013, is bigger and better than ever.

The Large Hadron Collider will restart this spring following an upgrade to allow it to discover particles which are even more mysterious than the Higgs boson.

The particle accelerator, which has been shut for maintenance since 2013, is bigger and better than ever and will be able to produce collisions with 60 per cent more energy.

Scientists at Cern said the higher energies mean they stand a good chance of discovering the sub-atomic particles involved in ‘supersymmetry’ which are “twins” of the particles that form the basis of matter.

Discovering supersymmetry would be an even bigger breakthrough than finding the Higgs boson, a fundamental sub-atomic particle that accounts for gravitational attraction.

The first supersymmetry particle is likely to be something called a gluino, the symmetric twin of a gluon particle and "it could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we’re really lucky,” said Professor Beate Heinemann of the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

“This would rock the world... For me, it’s more exciting than the Higgs.”

Discovering an elusive ‘gluino’ would be mark a step forward in understanding elusive dark matter and dark energy which have so far defied detection.

The upgrades to the collider include 18 new “superconducting dipole magnets.”

The Large Hadron Collider has 1,232 of them, and CERN engineers had to replace 18 of them because of wear and tear. Additionally, they fitted over 10,000 of the connections between those dipole magnets with splices that provide alternative paths for the 11,000 amp currents.

This will allow the interconnections to be saved even if a fault occurs.

CERN also installed nearly 60,000 new cores and more than 100 petabytes of memory so that the collider will be able to handle the significantly larger amount of data it will be processing from the experiments.

1 New magnets

2 Stronger connections

3 Safer magnets

4 Higher energy beams

5 Narrower beams

6 Smaller but closer proton packets

7 Higher voltage

8 Superior cryogenics

9 Radiation-resistant electronics

10 More secure vacuum

This article was written by Sarah Knapton from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: Scientists just discovered 2 never-before-seen particles, and they're refining our understanding of fundamental physics

READ MORE: 11 Mind-Blowing Physics Discoveries Made In 2014

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As the Islamic State group tries to expand and take root across the Middle East, it is struggling in Syria — part of its heartland — where it has stalled or even lost ground while fighting multiple enemies on several fronts.

Signs of tension and power struggles are emerging among the ranks of its foreign fighters.

The extremists remain a formidable force, and the group's hold on about a third of Iraq and Syria remains firm. But it appears to be on the defensive in Syria for the first time since it swept through the territory last year and is suffering from months of US-led coalition airstrikes and the myriad factions fighting it on the ground.

"They are struggling with new challenges that did not exist before," said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

Kurdish forces dealt the Islamic State its heaviest setback by driving it from the border town of Kobani in northern Syria last month. Since then, those forces have joined with moderate Syrian rebels to take back about 215 villages in the same area, according to Kurdish commanders and activists, including the Britain-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The gains have strained supply lines between the Islamic State group's westernmost strongholds in Aleppo province from its core territory in eastern Syria. The Kurdish-rebel forces are now expected to take the fight to some of those strongholds, particularly the large towns of Minbij and Jarablus, as well as Tal Abyad, a border crossing with Turkey that is a major avenue for commerce for the extremists.

Around the town of al-Bab, one of the IS group's westernmost strongholds, the extremists are making tactical withdrawals. Residents have noted a thinner militant presence in al-Bab.

The militants are also finding themselves bogged down in costly battles with the government forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The extremist group, also known as Isil, has been stuck in fierce fighting with the Syrian army near the Deir el-Zour air base, the last major Syrian military stronghold in the eastern province. IS launched an unsuccessful attack to seize the base last month, and it continues to try.

It is too early to call the shifts a turning point, but they represent the slow grind of the international campaign against the Islamic State group, which long seemed unconquerable as it seized territory stretching from outside the city of Aleppo in northern Syria's at one end to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad at the other.

In Iraq, the combination of coalition airstrikes, Kurdish forces, Shiite militias and Iraqi troops have pushed IS back around the edges, but the militants succeeded this week in taking new territory for the first time in months. They also raised new alarms with the presence of their affiliate in Libya.

But it was in the Syrian town of Kobani that the Islamic State suffered its worst single loss — more than 1,000 militants killed — and much of its heavy weaponry and vehicles destroyed. The January defeat followed five months of fighting by mostly Kurdish ground forces and coalition airstrikes that left about 70 percent of the town in ruins and sent tens of thousands of its residents fleeing over the nearby border into Turkey.

After the loss of Kobani, signs of fissures within the IS group have emerged.

Bari Abdellatif, a resident of al-Bab who also has fled to Turkey, said friction between Chechen and Uzbek militants recently led to clashes between the two that ended only with the intervention of Omar al-Shishani, a prominent Chechen IS commander. At least two senior figures were killed because of the internal strife, he said.

"The prolonged battle for Kobani caused a lot of tensions — fighters accused each other of treachery and eventually turned on each other," Abdellatif said.

Several other activists confirmed recent clashes between factions from different national backgrounds within IS.

Last month, a senior official with the group's Hisba, or vice police, was found beheaded in Deir el-Zour province. A cigarette was stuffed in his mouth, apparently trying to show he was killed for smoking, which is banned by IS, but there are suspicions the official — an Egyptian — was killed by the extremists who suspected him of spying.

An activist based in the group's de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, said foreign fighters bicker over administrative and financial issues. Several militants have been killed on suspicion of spying or trying to defect.

"Daesh tries to portray itself as one thing, but beneath the surface there's a lot of dirt," the activist said, using the Arabic acronym for the group and speaking on condition of anonymity out of concern for his security.

Earlier this month, the extremists dismissed one of the group's religious officials in Aleppo province and referred him to a religious court after he objected to the immolation of a captured Jordanian air force pilot, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"IS is now beginning to struggle to keep its own forces coherent - and this is separate from all the external factors that are impacting it negatively," Khatib said.

She said the new troubles have a lot to do with the fact that IS in Syria is operating in the context of a civil war where people become greedy and refuse to cede power to others.

"Even ISIS is not immune from the warlord phenomenon that takes place in the context of civil war and is being witnessed in Syria today," she said.

In Raqqa, stepped-up coalition airstrikes in response to the Jordanian pilot's killing has shaken the group, activists say.

An anti-IS media collective called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said the extremists have been forcing residents to donate blood after dozens of fighters were seriously wounded. It also reported that the group recently imposed a nighttime curfew and put up nighttime roadblocks to curb desertions by members trying to reach Turkey.

While foreigners from around the globe have joined IS, many disillusioned new recruits have left or are trying to leave, finding life to be very different and more violent than they had expected.

The Observatory says the militant group has killed more than 120 of its own members in the past six months, most of them foreign fighters hoping to return home.

"When we take all these little puzzle pieces together and we assemble our mosaic, it's very clear that they're having issues. ... I believe that they are hurting," said Scott Stewart, vice president of Tactical Analysis at Stratfor, a global intelligence and advisory firm.

Faysal Itani, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said it has become more difficult for IS to make substantial territorial progress, but the group still does not face any significant challenge to its rule in its strongholds.

"ISIS continues to build support among tribal groups, and attract fighters defecting from other insurgent groups," he said.

This article was written by Agencies from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Tensions with Russia could blow up into all-out conflict, posing “an existential threat to our whole being”, Britain’s top general in Nato has warned.

Gen Sir Adrian Bradshaw, deputy commander of Nato forces in Europe, said there was a danger Vladimir Putin could try to use his armies to invade and seize Nato territory, after calculating the alliance would be too afraid of escalating violence to respond.

His comments follow a clash between London and Moscow after the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, said there was a "real and present danger" Mr Putin could try to destabilize the Baltic states with a campaign of subversion and irregular warfare.

The Kremlin called those comments “absolutely unacceptable".

Sir Adrian told the Royal United Services’ Institute there was a danger such a campaign of undercover attacks could paralyze Nato decision making, as members disagreed over how much Russia was responsible, and how to respond.

Nato commanders fear a campaign of skilfully disguised, irregular military action by Russia, which is carefully designed not to trigger the alliance's mutual defence pact.

He said the "resulting ambiguity" would make "collective decisions relating to the appropriate responses more difficult".

But Sir Adrian, one of the most senior generals in the British Army and a former director of special forces, went further and said there was also danger that Russia could use conventional forces and Soviet-era brinkmanship to seize Nato territory.

He said Russia had shown last year it could generate large conventional forces at short notice for snap exercises along its borders. There was a danger these could be used “not only for intimidation and coercion but potentially to seize Nato territory, after which the threat of escalation might be used to prevent re-establishment of territorial integrity. This use of so called escalation dominance was of course a classic Soviet technique.”

He went on to say that “the threat from Russia, together with the risk it brings of a miscalculation resulting in a strategic conflict, however unlikely we see it as being right now, represents an existential threat to our whole being.”

Nato has agreed to set up a rapid reaction force of around 5,000 troops ready to move at 48 hours notice, in case of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. Supplies, equipment and ammunition will be stockpiled in bases in the region. Alliance leaders hope the force will deter any incursion.

David Cameron warned Vladimir Putin there will be more sanctions and "more consequences" for Russia if the ceasefire in Ukraine does not hold.

The Prime Minister vowed that the West would be "staunch" in its response to Russia and was prepared to maintain pressure on Moscow "for the long term".

He rejected the findings of a scathing parliamentary committee report that the UK found itself "sleep-walking" into the crisis over Ukraine.

The EU Committee of the House of Lords found there had been a "catastrophic misreading" of mood by European diplomats in the run-up to the crisis.

Earlier this week, Mr Fallon said the Russian president might try to test Nato’s resolve with the same Kremlin-backed subversion used in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

A murky campaign of infiltration, propaganda, undercover forces and cyber attack such as that used in the early stages of the Ukraine conflict could be used to inflame ethnic tensions in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia, he said.

The military alliance must be prepared to repel Russian aggression “whatever form it takes”, Mr Fallon said, as he warned that tensions between the two were “warming up”.

His comments were dismissed in Moscow. Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesman said the country does not pose a threat to Baltic countries and accused Mr Fallon of going beyond “diplomatic ethics” .

Alexander Lukashevich said: "His absolutely unacceptable characteristics of the Russian Federation remind me of last year's speech of US president Barack Obama before the UN general assembly, in which he mentioned Russia among the three most serious challenges his country was facing.”

"I believe we will find a way to react to Mr Secretary's statements."

This article was written by Ben Farmer Defence Correspondent from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: Putin: Russia's military strength is unmatchable

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It contains the sort of cod motivational speak that one might assume would be better suited to a middle-ranking ASDA manager rather than an elite sportsman. The discovery of a list belonging to British No1 Andy Murray at the Rotterdam Open boasts well worn phrases such as "Try your best" and "Focus on the process."

Clearly, Mr Murray has already had such mantras - "focus on your legs" is another - drilled into him by his training team, but the desire to put pen to paper is something shared by us all. From shopping to revising to dismantling a tennis rival, nobody, it seems, is above the need to write a list.

Even journalists are giving it a go.

So why do our brains love to categorise things so?

- Michael Lamb, professor of psychology at Cambridge University and editor of the Journal of Psychology, Public Policy and Law, says there is a clear science behind our love of lists. Many of us, he says, begin a list in order to motivate ourselves. "It provides one with a very clear statement - in this case a motivational statement - that helps one to focus."

- It is also, he says, a way of organising thoughts and ranking them in order of importance. "The succinctness is really crucial, particularly if you are writing it for yourself. You don't need the extra vocabulary that you would normally put there."

- Renowned intellectual Umberto Eco has a different philosophy. After opening an exhibition on the essential nature of lists at the Louvre, he proffered the theory that "we like lists because we don't want to die". "The list doesn't destroy culture; it creates it," he told a German newspaper . "Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century."

- "My novels, by the way, are full of lists," Eco says. But he is not the only literature heavyweight to swear by them. In Ulysses, James Joyce has his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, open his drawers and list all the items he finds. In the Iliad, Homer turns to a simple list to describe the size of the Greek army when all other words have failed him.

- Back in the modern world, a list also supposedly helps achieve our financial goals. A 1979 study at Harvard University asked students if they had set clear, written goals for their future and made plans to accomplish them - ie, a good-old fashioned list. Ten years later, the same group was interviewed again. 13 per cent of the class who said they had goals, but did not write them down was earning twice the amount of the 84 per cent who had not. Some 3 per cent organised souls, meanwhile, had written goals as students. The study found they were earning, on average, ten times as much as all the rest of the class combined.

- Money-making aside, in a world of shrinking attention spans, a list has been found proven to better keep wandering minds occupied. Information is organised and presented for us in an accessible manner. This type of organisation, so say neuroscientists such as Walter Kintsch, promote both immediate understanding and the ability to recall.

- From snatching points on the tennis court to stopping one forgetting the frozen prawns - lists simply make us better.

This article was written by Joe Shute from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: Psychologists explain how your birth order affects your health, happiness, and success

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Strategy document suggests Moscow was already pondered plan to annex Crimea and assimilate pro-Russian regions

The Kremlin received advice to break up Ukraine and absorb its pro-Russian regions even before the country’s president fled in the wake of street protests a year ago, according to an alleged strategy document obtained by a Russian newspaper.

Novaya Gazeta said the “plan” for annexing Crimea was passed to Vladimir Putin’s presidential administration between February 4 and 12, 2014, at least 10 days before Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s then leader, left the capital, Kiev.

The newspaper published parts of the document, which urged the Kremlin to “play on the centrifugal ambitions of different regions of the country with the aim, in one way or another, of initiating the joining of its eastern areas to Russia.”

Mr Putin has argued that Russia was forced to absorb Crimea in March as a result of what he calls an “unconstitutional coup” which ousted the pro-Russian Mr Yanukovych and brought in what Moscow claimed was a nationalist Ukrainian government which threatened the peninsula’s largely Russophone population.

But the document, if genuine, suggests the Kremlin was already considering a plan to divide Ukraine as a means of strengthening Russia’s economy and global status.

While taking on the financial support of Crimea and “several eastern regions” would be a burden, the unknown authors of the paper argue, “in a geopolitical sense the gain would be priceless: our country would receive access to new demographic resources, highly qualified cadres of industry and transport specialists would become available…

“The industrial potential of East Ukraine, including the military-industrial sector, joined to the military-industrial complex of Russia, would allow the quick and successful fulfillment of the programme of rearmament of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.”

The document argues that the European Union wanted to take over Ukraine, and Russia must “intervene in the geopolitical intrigue of the European community” in order to maintain some control of gas pipelines through Ukraine and avoid losing energy markets in central and south Europe, something “that would inflict huge economic damage to our country”.

Novaya Gazeta said it believed the document was prepared with the help of Konstantin Malofeyev, a well-known pro-Kremlin businessman with links to the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, although Mr Malofeyev reportedly denies that. The newspaper did not say who in Mr Putin’s administration viewed the strategy document or whether it was adopted but said that, “the extent to which this project coincides with the subsequent actions of the Russian authorities is striking”.

Proposals laid out in the document do bear a strong resemblance to some of the tactics adopted by the Kremlin and the rebels in eastern Ukraine, where more than 5,700 people have died since April as a result of fighting between separatist and government forces.

The document recommends that referendums on autonomy are held in pro-Russian regions of Ukraine in order to strengthen their claims to self determination, “and later to joining Russia”. A controversial pro-independence referendum result in Crimea was used by the Kremlin to endorse its annexation of the region.

The plan also proposes a PR and press campaign to legitimise the “pro-Russian drift of Crimea and eastern Ukrainian regions” which argues for three things: federalisation of Ukraine (providing regions with a high degree of autonomy without breaking away from the state), independent accession of eastern regions to the Russia-led Customs Union, and full sovereignty and eventual annexation by Russia.

Those three proposals are frequently put forward by Russian politicians and rebel figures, although the Kremlin has shied away from fully endorsing or absorbing the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

Also familiar in the document was the use of highly contentious arguments to approve Kremlin intervention in Ukraine, as often employed in Russian media.

Pro-Western demonstrators in Kiev, the authors claimed, were mostly football fans and criminals acting under the control of Polish and British special services. No evidence was offered for the allegation.

There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin on the document.

This article was written by Tom Parfitt Moscow from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: Military expert: Russian snap military drills could turn into assaults on Baltic capitals

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The so-called "Islamic State" was fashioned from two failing states, Syria and Iraq. It will soon be joining them.

The trappings of statehood include its own currency, police and security forces, governors and a nominal territory that accounted for an area larger than Britain.

Having lost in Kobane despite a huge effort, being bombed from the air by the US-led coalition and pegged back largely by Kurdish forces in both Iraq and Syria, statehood looks increasingly frail. Its overt activity has been forced to become covert. On the defensive, its formal institutions are easily targeted and its communications compromised. Deserters are increasing in number. That the statehood experiment will struggle on still owes more to the weaknesses and divisions of those opposing it.

But the slow death of the state will not be the extirpation of Isil the movement. This period has allowed the accumulation of great wealth, resources, fighters and expertise as well as massive global profile. The movement may fragment and go underground but if anything will be an even greater threat, not least as it fosters branches in Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

If the state fails, it will return to being a far more dangerous non-state actor than it was a year ago. Do not forget that Isil is the just the latest regressive evolution of in al-Qaeda Iraq. And it can still pose as the champion of Sunni Muslims who feel excluded and marginalised. Its brand will remain powerful.

Yet the mythology around Isil is truly impressive. Much of this is of its own making, its slick online marketing show making rival user-Jihadis al-Qaeda look decidedly analogue and 20th Century.

For a start many of its adherents are not that pious, some barely familiar with the core teachings of Islam. Remember the wannabee Jihadis ordering "Islam for Dummies" from Amazon? In reality Isil’s support is not that huge in number.

500 British Muslims have gone out to join – including the man who has become the frontman for Isil's murder videos, Jihadi John, named this morning as Mohammed Emwazi– but out of a population of nearly three million.

Isil’s seizure of Mosul that shocked so many was largely as a result of its alliance with former Ba’athists from the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, and because it faced a ghost army (One in three paid Iraqi soldiers did not exist). The area Isil purportedly controls is largely vast tracts of desert.

But the primary reason why Isil will never succeed as a state is that the vast overwhelming majority of Muslims detest it more than we can imagine.

Focused as the international media has been with the killings of western journalists and aid workers, Iraqis and Syrians are fully away of the horrors of Isil’s rule, its decapitations, crucifixions and violence. The filming of the burning of the Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasaesbeh served merely to unite Jordan, not divide it.

Muslims, the world over, know that the greatest victims of al-Qaeda and Isil attacks are Muslims. One survey showed that from 2004-2008, of all al-Qaeda’s victims, 15 per cent were western.

Perhaps more Muslims could confront extremism not just condemn it, but for many of them, it carries a great risk. Like a Sicilian speaking out against the mafia, the costs can be fatal. Isil has majored in fear and intimidation.

But the essential reality that western leaders in particular fail to realise and build on is that Muslims can be and should be our greatest ally in this struggle. Encouraged rather than chastised and humiliated they can take the lead.

In fact, as King Abdallah of Jordan told me in November, Muslims have to take the lead with the West supporting, not the other way round.

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Royal Bank of Scotland has disclosed that it is under investigation from German authorities over whether its Swiss private bank helped its wealthy clients evade tax.

The announcement from the bank follows a major controversy over the tax affairs of HSBC's Swiss operations.

Coutts, the taxpayer-owned company's private bank, is being investigated by "a prosecuting authority", the bank said on Thursday.

The disclosure, on page 120 of its annual results, said: "A prosecuting authority in Germany is undertaking an investigation into Coutts & Co Ltd in Switzerland, and current and former employees, for alleged aiding and abetting of tax evasion by certain Coutts & Co Ltd clients.

"Coutts & Co Ltd is cooperating with the authority."

A spokesman for the bank did not elaborate on the nature of the investigation, or who the authority is.

The announcement comes just weeks after allegations around HSBC's Swiss bank sparked a political storm, that has seen the bank apologise and its chief executive admit "shame".

RBS has previously disclosed details of a US-led programme to recover tax payments that were concealed by wealthy clients in the private bank.

Coutts submitted its findings to the US Department of Justice in November, and said on Thursday it expects to "reach resolution with the DoJ in 2015".

Customs officials in Hamburg seized thousands of documents related to Coutts last year, when RBS said it was not aware of any investigation.

The German investigation was not disclosed at the bank's half-year or third quarter results.

The bank made the disclosure as it revealed a seventh-consecutive annual loss.

This article was written by James Titcomb from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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In a world-first, the drone uses automated voice technology to issue and receive calls to and from air traffic control.

It speaks in English – in a male or a female voice and various accents – and uses the International Civil Aviation Organization standard phraseology for pilots.

The drone was developed by Melbourne's RMIT University and was designed primarily to make the machines safer by providing them with a backup if they lose contact with the person flying them from the ground.

"An air traffic controller could talk to a drone just like they would with any other aircraft," Dr Reece Clothier, an aerospace engineer from RMIT University, told The Telegraph.

"It allows the drone to broadcast its position exactly like a pilot would. The drone could converse with air traffic control and request entry into airspace or a waypoint. They can receive instructions to hold or climb or descend. The drone could respond exactly like a pilot and say 'roger' and execute the clearance."

Dr Clothier said the device could improve safety because it could allow drones "to behave exactly like a pilot would so they don't cause congestion".

But he said the next step was to develop the drone's use of artificial intelligence technology and improve its decision making ability.

This could involve ensuring the drone acts more like a human pilot and are able to assess air traffic control advice before acting on it or alter requests because of sudden changes such as shifts in the weather.

"There are lots of further avenues for making it think more like a pilot so it checks the commands and takes into consideration the weather and other aircraft," Dr Clothier said.

"It has a long way to go. We have demonstrated we can interact using voice automated technology. There is more work to do in replicating pilot decision making."

Here is a video of the drone in action:

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Elizabeth Taylor’s estate is suing Christie’s, the auction house, over the $8.8 million (£5.7 million) sale of the “Taj Mahal” diamond, a gift to the late actress from Richard Burton on her 40th birthday.

The Taj Mahal was sold by Christie’s along with the rest of Taylor’s jewels and wardrobe in New York following her death in 2011.

The collection, which was dubbed the “Crown Jewels of Hollywood,” broke all expectations and brought in $183.5 million to benefit the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation .

But the trustees of her estate have now filed a complaint alleging breach of contract.

They claim the anonymous buyer of the Taj Mahal diamond returned it months after the sale saying it had not, as they had believed, once belonged to the wife of a 17th century Mughal emperor.

According to the complaint the auction house had only ever stated that the diamond was of Indian origin. But it still agreed to cancel the sale.

Christie’s then requested that the estate return the proceeds of the sale.

The complaint said: “Despite facing no credible threat of legal liability Christie’s nonetheless rescinded the sale of the diamond.

“In doing so Christie’s not only deviated from its usual business practices and its own established policies, but it violated its obligations to the trust, all in an effort to appease the buyer.”

Taylor's trustees claimed the auction house also refused to pass on $3 million from the sale of another gem called the Bulgari Ring.

They said: "(Christie's) failed to pay the trust the proceeds from the sale of the Bulgari ring in an attempt to strong arm the trust into returning the proceeds that the trust rightfully received from the sale of the Taj Mahal diamond."

In a statement Christie’s said: “Christie’s was pleased to create a landmark auction event on behalf of the Elizabeth Taylor Trust that produced over $183.5 million in proceeds for the beneficiaries of the trust - the friends and family of Elizabeth Taylor.

“This suit stems from Christie’s seeking the return of a small portion of these proceeds due to the cancellation of a single item from that sale, and Christie’s looks forward to a speedy resolution of this matter.”

This article was written by Nick Allen Los Angeles from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook was recently interviewed by The Telegraph, and he took the time to further expand upon Apple's firm stance on privacy, calling it "a basic human right."

"None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information," Cook told The Telegraph. "This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn't give it up. We shouldn't give in to scare-mongering or to people who fundamentally don’t understand the details."

While Cook is a firm believer that Apple should protect and encrypt its users' data, he also clarified that he thinks "terrorism is horrible and must be stopped," going so far as to say that "these people shouldn’t exist" and that "they should be eliminated."

But Cook doesn't believe the answer is in allowing governments back-door access, which he says would cause people's personal data including health and financial information to eventually "be taken."

Cook also argues that "terrorists will encrypt" because "they know what to do," suggesting that "if we don’t encrypt, the people we affect [by cracking down on privacy] are the good people."

Apple, Tim Cook says, doesn't "make money selling your information to somebody else," pointing out that while it could increase profits by doing so, collecting and selling data to third-parties is "not in our values system."

Cook's comments come just weeks after he visited the White House to defend Apple's default encryption on its iPhones, which government agencies like the NSA have argued only make it easier for criminals to go undetected.

You can read Tim Cook's full interview over at The Telegraph.

SEE ALSO: Big, beautiful photos of all 22 models of the Apple Watch

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Malcolm Brabant's face – round, ruddy, full-featured, and crowned by a bald dome – is immediately recognisable. For 30 years he has been an award-winning member of the BBC’s team of foreign correspondents, bringing wars, natural disasters, political stand-offs and occasionally something a bit more cheerful into our living rooms on the evening news.

If the countenance is familiar, though, his current location isn’t. His usual on-screen sign-off is ringing in my ears — “Malcolm Brabant, BBC News, Athens” – but today he is welcoming me into his home in Copenhagen.

He is, he explains, currently living in exile from the Greek capital, and thereby “missing one the biggest news stories of my career”. The reason is the biggest personal story of Brabant’s 58 years. As he puts it with what I quickly learn is characteristic bluntness: “I went bonkers.”

In April 2011, he attended an Athens clinic for a routine vaccination against yellow fever before an assignment in the Ivory Coast. As well as reporting from Athens, he has also travelled the globe to cover international stories, winning a coveted Sony award in 1993 for his reporting from a besieged Sarajevo at the height of the Bosnian crisis.

His reaction to the vaccine, however, was anything but routine. “It fried my brain,” he states simply. Overnight a previously sane man developed severe psychosis. An agnostic, Brabant became so convinced he was the Messiah that he telephoned his bemused fellow correspondent, Allan Little, to appoint him “first disciple” and ask him to record his words of wisdom.

One minute he was announcing that the Queen was aware of his divine status, the next he was claiming to be able to stop the traffic just by thinking about it, and control all technology. To prove the point, he flushed his Kindle down the lavatory.

It was utterly bewildering for those around him, especially when he switched into the persona of Winston Churchill, and then the Devil. Yet, because he had no insight into how strangely he was acting, Brabant also attempted to carry on reporting, with results that horrified previously admiring editors at the BBC.

With the corporation’s support, he was sent to hospital in Athens, then released, but shortly afterwards he experienced a second mental breakdown. Unable to work, broke and broken, he returned to his childhood home in Suffolk where he tried and failed to get the help he needed from the NHS. While there, and out of control mentally, he presented himself, clad only in cycling gear but minus a bike, at BBC Television Centre in West London, which was being picketed in a pay dispute. He demanded to see senior managers and generally caused such a scene that the police were called.

“I was the man in Lycra, come to solve the strike,” he recalls without flinching. “I really thought in my madness that I could do it but, of course, I was away with the fairies. That will have been the last time many of those people at the BBC saw me face to face.”

At one stage, he bumped into Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent partially paralysed after being shot in Saudi Arabia in 2004. Brabant attempted, Messiah-like, to effect a miracle cure by rubbing his back.

He ended up back in Greece and no better. He was persuaded by his Danish wife, Trine Villemann, to abandon their rented home, pack what few possessions they could fit into their estate car, alongside their 11-year-old son, Lukas, and the family dog, and drive across the continent in a desperate search for psychiatric help in Denmark.

Perched on the sofa beside her husband in their typically Scandinavian white-walled apartment in the Danish capital, Villemann grimaces when she recalls just what a state he was in. “I have been around mental illness before [her father hanged himself], but I have never seen someone so gone before. Malcolm was clawing around in the deepest, darkest parts of his mind,” she says. “It would have killed a lesser human being.”

She pauses as she pushes her long blonde hair back from her face. “I am ashamed to remember them now, but there were even times when I thought it would be better if he died because his suffering was so great.

“I have this nagging image in my head that won’t ever go away of Malcolm, sitting on his bed in the hospital, with his arms folded. He was rocking backwards and forwards, saying, ‘I’m the Devil, I’m the Devil’. Whatever anger I’d felt about the situation we were in evaporated in that moment.”

The Danish health professionals who slowly and painstakingly brought Brabant back to sanity told him that he would have to spend the rest of his life on medication. He decided otherwise.

“I was determined this wasn’t going to beat me. When I finally left hospital in 2012, I would rattle as I walked around because I was carrying so many pills. I was a one-man chemist’s shop. It took me another year and a half to reduce my medication. I stopped taking it in January of last year, and since then I have gradually been getting stronger and stronger.”

So much so that he is now back at work, and back on our screens after almost four years away. His unheralded return came earlier this month with his reports on the murder of two people by an Islamist extremist in separate attacks in Copenhagen.

Brabant says: “In the aftermath of those attacks, I was working in the old way: until I dropped. I need to. Because of my illness, we have lost everything. I have a 15-year-old son to support, and we don’t even have a car any more. I am the man from the BBC who arrives by bicycle. It makes me feel like a cub reporter again.”

Picking up the threads of his career and of his reputation is one part of his life today in Copenhagen. But Brabant and his wife are also pouring their considerable energies into spearheading a campaign that they hope will prevent others suffering as a result of vaccinations.

“My husband had absolutely no previous history of mental illness,” says Villemann. “There was nothing latent in him. I have no doubt at all that his severe psychosis was brought on by the yellow fever vaccine.”

Brabant adds: “I was not a one-in-a-million case. We are determined to make the manufacturers, Sanofi Pasteur, investigate what is happening. I have provided them with open access to all the doctors who treated me so they can hear what their vaccine did to me, but they haven’t been in touch. They are refusing to engage.”

Faced with this silence, the couple have been collecting reports from many others around the globe who suffered similar consequences to

Brabant. And it is not just a question of a few individuals sounding the alarm bells. In 2005, Dr Thomas Monath, a world expert on yellow fever, who sits on various World Health Organisation committees, confirmed publicly that the vaccine in question can cause “really severe and significant, serious adverse events”.

Even the manufacturer seems to be aware that all may not be well. In 2013 its head of vaccine innovation, Dr Ronald Neeleman, admitted to a conference that the vaccine in question had not been reviewed in many years. “[It serves] a small market, with very low returns, and there is not really an incentive to redevelop,” he said.

If Dr Neeleman was hinting that it is past its sell-by date, then, as Brabant points out, it remains a product “routinely available in high street chemists. It is given to British soldiers who are going overseas. And it is used widely in Africa, where there are few channels for reporting when people go mad after taking it”.

“We are not anti-vaccine in general,” stresses Villemann. “Yellow-fever vaccination saves lives, but what concerns us is that, when something goes wrong, there appears to be no help for people like Malcolm whose lives have been ruined.”

They are seeking financial compensation and they are prepared for it to be a bruising fight. To which end they have bared all in a book, Malcolm is a Little Unwell.

They are also working on a documentary film, using some footage they shot during the most gruelling chapters of Brabant’s illness.

Aren’t they tempted to draw a veil and just get on with their careers?

“Even if we wanted to,” Brabant replies phlegmatically, “we couldn’t. It’s out there anyway because of how I behaved.”

“No one rolls out the red carpet to welcome back people who have suffered a mental illness,” says Villemann. “That cannot go unchallenged.”

• Malcolm is a Little Unwell is published by Andartes Press

This article was written by Peter Stanford from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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When Elon Musk, the PayPal billionaire, announced his plans for a near-supersonic transport system of passenger capsules levitating inside tubes it sounded like science fiction.

Now the concept is to get its first working test track.

A full-scale version of the Hyperloop concept is to be built in central California next year, using magnets and fans to push passenger pods through five miles of depressurised tubes at speeds of up to 200 mph.

This model will be slower and shorter than the full-sized system described by Mr Musk but will be used to test the concept and its safety.

Dirk Ahlborn, chief executive of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, said: "This installation will allow us to demonstrate all systems on a full scale and immediately begin generating revenues for our shareholders through actual operations."

His plan is based on a blueprint set out by Mr Musk in what he called a "white paper", describing the idea for a fifth mode of transport - after planes, trains, cars and boats.

"Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome, the only option for super-fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground," wrote Mr Musk in the 57-page document about 18 months ago.

Think of it as a cross between Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table, he said.

He imagined a system that could carry people from Los Angeles to San Francisco at speeds almost 800mph, cutting the 400-mile trip to a little over 30 minutes.

The plan requires building a network of steel tubes, elevated above street level and mounted on earthquake-proof pylons.

Today, friction limits the maximum velocity of high-speed trains. Instead the Hyperloop system would use tubes at very low pressure to reduce air resistance and the capsules would run on a "ski" of air - rather than wheels - a bit like a puck on an air hockey table.

In short, it would be the sort of fast, cheap way to travel long imagined by futurologists.

Then, soon after setting out his revolutionary vision, Mr Musk made one small, additional admission: With so many other projects on the go, such as putting men on Mars with SpaceX and producing mass market Tesla electric cars, he simply did not have time to work on the Hyperloop.

Instead he threw the idea open to the public, asking entrepreneurs to take his brainchild and turn it into reality.

The result is Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a company set up by Mr Ahlborn and his crowd-funded online incubator JumpStartFund.

They have established a network of almost 200 scientists and engineers across the US working to refine and develop the idea.

According to Mr Ahlborn, many have day jobs at Nasa, SpaceX, Airbus, Yahoo! and other cutting edge companies.

In an interview with Wired, he described what passengers might expect at a Hyperloop station. They would hand their luggage to a Kiva robot (of the sort used by Amazon in its warehouses) before being whisked through security on moving walkways and then boarding the passenger capsules.

He believes the team is steadily working through many of the technical challenges. One remaining problem is how to best to build a national network of tubes criss-crossing the US using as many straight lines as possible and reducing the number of potentially nausea-inducing bends.

The risk of earthquakes means Mr Musk's idea of starting with Los Angeles and San Francisco may have to wait.

But there is still the issue of funding. The company plans a public offering towards the end of the year with the goal of raising $100 million (ﾣ65m).

"I have almost no doubt that once we are finished, once we know how we are going to build and it makes economical sense, that we will get the funds," Mr Ahlborn told Wired, adding that Mr Musk's cost estimate of $6-10 billion for a 400-mile stretch of Hyperloop seemed accurate.

This week he announced plans for the test track after striking a deal with the developers of Quay Valley, in California. It is an experimental community being built from scratch and designed to reduce America's dependence on cars and run entirely on solar power.

It 25,000 homes will be a test bed for new technologies.

Quay Hays, its chief executive, said: "For these reasons, the Hyperloop is the ideal clean community transit system for Quay Valley."

The system will be built alongside the Interstate 5 freeway in central California.

Until now, the futuristic plan has frequently been met with scepticism. None of which has not stopped Boris Johnson embracing the idea.

He told an audience of urban planners during a recent trip to the US that he hoped the system could one day be used to link British cities.

This article was written by Rob Crilly New York from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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