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A genetic test has been developed that can predict whether someone is likely to live an extremely long life, but scientists have warned that society is still not ready for such predictions.

The test is based on a scan of a person's entire genome; so far it can predict whether someone is likely to live to 100 with an accuracy of 77 per cent. However, refinements to the test will improve its precision, raising the prospect that it could one day be used to predict whether someone is genetically predisposed to extreme longevity.

Commercial organisations are likely to market the test within a few years. But the scientists behind the research warn that there should be a public debate on the ethical implications behind such testing.
Researchers developed the test by analysing the genomes of 1,055 centenarians from different parts of the world and comparing slight variations in their DNA with the genetic makeup of a set of people younger than 100. The scientists found that by concentrating on just 150 individual mutations in the human genome, they could predict with 77 per cent accuracy whether someone belonged to the group of centenarians. Although the test is still at a rudimentary stage, scientists said that they could foresee it being developed commercially within a few years to identify people with an inherited predisposition to live a long life that is likely, until the final years, to be largely free of age-related disorders such as cancer and heart disease.

Thomas Perls of the Boston University School of Medicine, who led the study published in the journal Science, said the aim of the research was to understand the genetic reasons why some people live longer than others despite having similar lifestyles.

"We embarked on the study to understand the genetics of exceptional longevity," Professor Perls said. "Clearly we realise that this is a very complex genetic puzzle. Exceptional longevity is not the vacuous entity that some people make it out to be. This really opens the door to understanding the genetic and lifestyle determinants of longevity."

Professor Perls said that a predictive accuracy of 77 per cent is "fairly unprecedented" and there is nothing to stop biotechnology companies from using this information, which is now freely available in the public domain, to develop commercial tests for extreme longevity. But he warned: "I for one don't think we're ready from a social point of view, but I think that won't stop companies from trying to market this."

The scientists found that 90 per cent of the centenarians in the study possessed a definite "genetic signature" of extreme longevity, denoted by the particular combination of genetic mutations they carried. The researchers also found that 45 per cent of the oldest centenarians – those over the age of 110 – had a genetic signature with the highest proportion of longevity-associated mutations.

Professor Perls said: "These genetic signatures are a new advance towards personalised genomics and predictive medicine, where this analytic method may prove to be generally useful in prevention and screening of numerous diseases, as well as in the tailored uses of medications."

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Britain's population of urban seagulls, the source of increasing complaints about dirt, health threats, noise and attacks on people, is now rising so fast that it may reach one million birds by 2020 if concerted action is not taken to manage the problem.

The national population is likely to be "substantially over 100,000 pairs" or 200,000 individuals, according to the leading expert on urban gulls, Peter Rock, an adviser to a string of councils in the South-west which are blighted by the urban gull invasion, among them Bristol, Bath and Gloucester.

The Government, however, has long claimed that there are only about 30,000 pairs – and has just turned down funding for the first serious research project on the ecology of urban gulls, which would seek to understand why their numbers seem to be exploding.

But pressure is mounting on the Government to recognise that what in the past has been seen as little more than a joke has become a serious environmental concern.

The phenomenon of the big urban gull colony is fairly recent: populations in towns and cities began to grow noticeably only in the early 1990s, mostly of herring gulls and their close relatives, lesser black-backed gulls.

But what is not understood is why urban gulls are flourishing, while herring gulls in the wild, in colonies in the countryside, and on the coastline, are in steep decline, and have been placed on the "Red List" of threatened species.

Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, a city which now has nearly 1,000 pairs of the birds nesting on its rooftops after their population doubled in six years, said yesterday: "The fact that no research is going to be done on this is more than daft, it's barking mad. It still appears that unless you've actually experienced the problem, as have many towns and cities now, you sort of think it's a bit of a joke.

"But when you start to see the level of damage these gulls are causing to buildings and the environment generally, you realise that it's a really serious issue."

Mr Foster is one of two MPs who have formally raised the issue of urban gulls with the Government via adjournment debates in the House of Commons in the past 18 months, as concern has grown.

In April 2009, he told MPs that the birds caused "significant problems to many people, and cost individuals, businesses and local councils a great deal of money". And he went on to paint a picture of "faeces deposited on tables, chairs and other furniture outside catering premises, creating a health hazard; stone pavements and steps rendered slippery by freshly deposited faeces, creating safety hazards; aggression towards pedestrians in public spaces and gardens, which is extremely frightening; and the pecking-open of refuse sacks, which leaves debris and encourages other vermin, creating further health problems."

In February this year, Parmjit Dhanda, then the MP for Gloucester, a town whose urban gull population doubled in five years and which now has 2,800 pairs nesting on its rooftops, raised exactly the same concerns in another adjournment debate. But although government representatives made sympathetic noises in both cases, they declined the MPs' principal request, which was for scientific research into the gulls' rapidly rising numbers.

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The first thing that rang alarm bells – almost literally – for Chris Singleton was a strange feeling of fullness in his left ear. "It felt a bit like when you come out of a swimming pool and your ears get clogged up. It gradually worsened until I actually felt physical pain in my ear when I heard certain sounds. But the day I flushed the loo and it sounded as loud as a pneumatic drill I realised something was seriously wrong."

For Chris, a musician, the idea of a problem with his hearing was quite terrifying. Music was his life and the only way he could earn a living. If his hearing was affected it could spell the end of his career. High-pitched noises affected Chris most. "Everyday sounds like an expresso machine, squeaky brakes on a car or the clattering of plates would make me wince with pain. The nightmare for me was that music started to be painful too. The higher the frequency the worse the pain and if anything got beyond a certain volume my ears really started to hurt. This was all going on while in the middle of recording my first album, so I was spending a lot of time in the studio trying to mix it and yet most of the time I was in terrible pain. Needless to say the album sounded awful!" he says.

These strange distortions of sound began in 2004, when Chris was 26. He had never suffered any problems with his hearing as a child and there was no his-tory of ear problems in his family. Initially, Chris thought it might be an ear infection and he went to see his GP. "He thought I might have a tiny perforation in the ear and I was prescribed antibiotics. But the problem persisted and I soon began to avoid sounds which caused me pain. So, for example, when I got on a train I would find a seat as far as possible away from the loudspeakers. Social situations started to become difficult and bars and clubs were a no-go area," explains Chris.

Eventually Chris saw an ear, nose and throat consultant, who ran a battery of hearing tests but could find nothing wrong. "I wasn't really surprised, because of course I could hear only too well. I thought I was going quite mad since there was clearly something wrong but nobody seemed able to come up with a sensible diagnosis. It made me very depressed and extremely ill-tempered to be around. I had just moved in with my girlfriend, so her first experience of me as a partner was this incredibly anxious man who was terrified of sounds. It was a really unhappy time for me."

Chris's "allergy to sound" was ruining his attempts to make it as a serious musician in London. "It's hard enough plugging your musical wares around the big city without having the additional worry of the music causing you actual physical distress," he says. He took to wearing earplugs in everyday situations. "They dulled the sound and made the pain bearable, but I subsequently discovered it was the worst thing to do for this particular condition, because as soon as you take them out the sounds become even louder." Still without a proper diagnosis, Chris scoured the internet for a solution and that's when he discovered his unusual condition actually had a name – hyperacusis.

"I found several websites which mentioned hyperacusis, but they all seemed to have different ideas about how it should be treated. There were treatments such as desensitisation, which meant being subjected to white noise at gradually increasing volumes to readjust your ears to normal sound, but they were extremely expensive and at that time I was pretty broke," he says.

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At 45, J K Rowling is now the same age as her mother was when she succumbed to the ravages of multiple sclerosis. Anne Rowling's untimely death in 1990 – five years before her daughter first gave the world Harry Potter – has had a profound and lasting influence on the writer, who has been a vocal champion for sufferers of the degenerative disease ever since.

Now the creator of the bespectacled boy wizard, one of the most lucrative film and publishing phenomena of modern times, is putting her considerable wealth behind the mission to find a cure for the disease.

It was announced yesterday that the author had donated £10m to build a new clinic which she hopes will one day "unravel the mysteries" of MS. As well as investigating the causes and treatment of the condition, helping doctors to slow and eventually reverse the symptoms of the illness, the new centre at Edinburgh University – which will bear her late mother's name – is intended to become a world leader in research into other currently incurable neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease.
The donation, one of the most generous that Ms Rowling has given to date and the largest ever received by Edinburgh University, comes a year after she resigned as a long-serving patron of the MS Society Scotland following a bitter row between the charity and its London headquarters over reorganisation plans.

But she has continued to support efforts to battle the condition, criticising the Scottish Medicines Consortium when it advised against prescribing the drug Tysabri on cost grounds, and giving substantial financial support to a new research unit also at Edinburgh University in 2007.

Ms Rowling, who is the seventh-richest person in Scotland with an estimated fortune of £519m, said her home city had already attracted some of the best clinicians and researchers in the field of neurodegeneration, and that the new clinic would put patients at the centre of any advances when it is completed next year. The Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic will be based in a purpose-built premises next to the city's Royal Infirmary.

"I have supported research into the cause and treatment of multiple sclerosis for many years now, but when I first saw the proposal for this clinic, I knew that I had found a project more exciting, more innovative, and, I believe, more likely to succeed in unravelling the mysteries of MS than any other I had read about or been asked to fund," she said.

Anne Rowling was 34 when she first began to suffer from pins and needles in her arm, and was diagnosed with MS the following year. Five years later, she relied on a wheelchair every day.

"At first, life went on much as usual, perhaps too much as usual. My mother made few, if any, concessions to her illness," Ms Rowling said, adding that she wept every time she wrote about her mother. "I saw her for the last time just before Christmas 1990. She was extremely thin and looked exhausted. I don't know how I didn't realise how ill she was."

MS affects about 100,000 people in the UK, and Scotland has one of the highest rates of sufferers. While doctors know that the disease causes myelin, a protective layer surrounding nerve cells in the brain, to break down, leading to symptoms such as numbness, fatigue and weakness, the exact cause is still not understood.

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A month after devastating floods first brought havoc to Pakistan, thousands of people were still fleeing surging water yesterday as the Indus broke its banks close to a historic city in the country's south.

Officials said water had breached the river's defences close to Thatta and had also flooded a second canal that feeds from the Indus. Yesterday evening, officials estimated that the 20ft breach in the levee, which happened early in the morning, could cause flooding in the outskirts of the city by nightfall.

Most of the 200,000-strong population of Thatta, 75 miles south-east of Karachi, have already left the city, camping out by the sides of roads or trying to move to cities out of the flood zone. Hundreds of families were taking shelter in an ancient Muslim graveyard and in a nearby Hindu temple.
Up to a million people have been forced to flee their homes in the past 48 hours. With so many needing help and so little relief reaching the southern parts of Sindh province, scores of people blocked a road in Thatta to demand more assistance. They complained that the scant supplies available were usually thrown from the backs of trucks, resulting in crowds of people fighting among themselves for food and water.

"The people who come here to give us food treat us like beggars," an 80-year-old woman called Karima (who has just one name) told Associated Press. "They just throw the food. It is humiliating."

Another woman, Geeta Bai, 32, sitting outside an ancient Hindu temple, added: "I am fasting and praying for the flood to recede as it has snatched husbands from wives, sons and daughters from parents, brothers from sisters and sisters from brothers."

The floods began in the mountainous north-west of the country four weeks ago with the onset of annual monsoon rains. Ceaseless torrential downpours created flooding the likes of which had never been seen before. Then, as the water slowly began receding in the north-west, the floods moved southwards, enveloping large areas of Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan provinces. Aid organisations have estimated that around eight million people are now in need of emergency assistance and hundreds of thousands who need food, water and medicine are accessible only by air.

Of particular concern to the aid organisations are children, who are more vulnerable than adults to waterborne diseases and whose needs are often overlooked during emergencies.

"We fear the deadly synergy of waterborne diseases, including diarrhoea, dehydration and malnutrition," a senior official with Unicef, Karen Allen, said in a statement. Another UN official said if nothing was done an estimated 72,000 children in flood-affected areas and suffering severe malnutrition would be at high risk of death.

Having evacuated those homes that are at highest risk of flooding, the most pressing needs are to provide people with emergency supplies and shelter. But aid organisations say that with the lives of up to 17 million people affected, the authorities must also urgently start reconstructing homes, schools and infrastructure.

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Glenn Beck speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Tens of thousands descended on Washington today for one of the biggest culture clashes in decades – one that pitted an almost exclusively white crowd against one that was predominantly African-American. Both claimed the legacy of Martin Luther King.

The biggest crowd was for a rightwing rally supported by the Fox Television host and author Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Tea Party activists, who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his "I have a dream" speech 47 years ago to the day.

Beck estimated that the crowd, the biggest show of strength by Tea Party activists this year, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many of whom had travelled long distances. He claimed he had been unaware when he organised the rally that it coincided with the King anniversary, but insisted that the civil rights leader was an inspiration for all Americans and not any one section of the community.

The other rally, held hours later, was a more traditional event, supported mainly by African-Americans, marching through Washington to mark the anniversary of King's speech. Many of those on the march accused Beck of hypocrisy and of stirring up the black community.

One of the marchers, Chicago student Brendan Yukins, 18, said of the Beck rally: "It is really insulting… the Tea Party always makes a big deal of being open to everyone, but when you look at the crowd it is white, over-45s."

Beck, conscious that so many of these events are judged on the numbers of those attending, looked out on a crowd that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial all the way up the Mall to the Washington Memorial, and put the figure at more than 450,000.

Even if the final tally is lower, the crowd was still substantial and a tribute to his drawing power. The rally had no specific agenda, billing itself as "restoring honour" to the US and rekindling what Beck and other speakers saw as the spirit of the American Revolution – family values, low taxation and cutting the federal deficit.

He told the crowd, in a speech peppered with references to God: "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning.

"We have had moments of brilliance and moments of darkness. But this country has spent far too long worried about scars and thinking about the scars and concentrating on the scars. Today, we are going to concentrate on the good things in America, the things that we have accomplished – and the things that we can do tomorrow."

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The number of "single-use" plastic bags given to customers by leading UK supermarkets has fallen for the fourth year in a row.

The total has dropped from 10.6 billion in 2006 to 6.1 billion in the year to May, a reduction of 43 per cent, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said. That compares with a reduction of 37 per cent in the year to May 2009. Over the same period the total weight of material used has more than halved.

The BRC said the figures were "a ringing endorsement" of the voluntary approach taken by supermarkets at a time when sales volumes increased by more than 6 per cent.

To forestall the threat of legislation or a government-imposed bag charge at the checkout, seven of the big stores have made two successive agreements to cut back on plastic bag use. The stores involved are Asda, the Co-operative Group (now incorporating Somerfield), Marks &  Spencer, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose.

There is no formally agreed a new target, but bag use is still being monitored by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap). The figure for supermarket distribution of all carrier bags, including reusable bags, has also continued to decline, and the new numbers for 2009/10 show a decline of 41 per cent over 2006 against 35 per cent in 2008/9. But in one accounting measure, a spot-check analysis of bag use during the month of May, the number of single-use bags had increased compared with last year.

In May 2009 the one-month figure was 48 per cent below that of 2006 – just missing the 50 per cent target the supermarkets had set themselves, and so prominently publicised. But this year the "snapshot" May figure for single-use bags was only 45 per cent below that for 2006, suggesting that momentum may be falling.

In general, though, the figures are very positive. "This is a tremendous achievement by supermarkets, customers and staff, especially as between 2006 and 2009 the amount of goods sold by participating retailers grew by over 6 per cent," the BRC Director-General, Stephen Robertson said.

"The sustained reduction shows that customers are permanently adopting the habit of reusing their bags. The continuous decrease in total annual bag use demonstrates the voluntary approach continues to make good progress."

He added: "The reduction in bag use is great news, but it's the halving of the total weight of single-use carrier bags which shows retailers really scoring on the crucial issue of reducing environmental impact. Retailers are working hard on a range of other environmental measures, such as reducing food waste, reducing and redesigning packaging, as well as providing customers with recycling information through the on-pack recycling label."

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Look away Eurosceptics. Those meddling Brussels bureaucrats have let you down again and are not going to ban the sale of eggs by the dozen.

To the disappointment of red-top newspapers and irate contributors to talk radio, the European Union confirmed yesterday that MEPs had not voted to do away with a cherished feature of Great British life.

In an emergency statement, the European Parliament said: "Selling eggs by the dozen will not be illegal under the terms of the amendments adopted to EU food labelling proposals. Labels will still be able to indicate the number of items in a pack – whether it's eggs, bread rolls or fish fingers."
While dismaying EU critics who had pounced on reports suggesting it was banning common-sense labelling, the news will put at rest the minds of shoppers facing the spectre of having to guess how many food items were in cartons containing a dozen or half a dozen eggs.

The Great Egg Scare – which had echoes of the hysteria that greeted Edwina Currie's remarks in 1988 that most British egg production was infected with salmonella – began with an exclusive in The Mail on Sunday.

On Sunday its front-page story was headlined: "EU to ban selling eggs by the dozen: Shopkeepers' fury as they are told all food must be weighed and sold by the kilo."

The story began: "British shoppers are to be banned from buying eggs by the dozen under new regulations approved by the European Parliament. For the first time, eggs and other products such as oranges and bread rolls will be sold by weight instead of by the number contained in a packet."

According to the paper, MEPs had ended a British opt-out from EU rules forbiding the selling of goods by quantity, meaning that instead of packaging telling shoppers a box contains six eggs, it would show the weight the eggs in grams.

Promising a fight-back from the Food Standards Agency, the paper reported: "It could be the first test of David Cameron's pre-Election promise to stand up for Britain's interests in the EU."

The Federation of Bakers warned, though, that it might be too late to save the sale of "six bread rolls".

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When you have a little time on your hands, there is nothing nicer than to be in a kitchen surrounded by eggs, flour, sugar and butter: four ingredients that with a little mixing produce a glorious, sweet-smelling piece of joy.

I decided to write about cakes this week as it is my youngest daughter's birthday – I promised to make her one she could take to school. Both these chocolate and blood-orange cakes have three layers – sponges look nice when piled high; for the coconut cake, the third sponge decorates the top.

On another note, we are into Fairtrade Fortnight and I've donated a cake to the cause of the Big Swap, trying to encourage residents to swap to Fairtrade ingredients. Please give it a try where you are too.

Chocolate cake

550g/19oz self-raising flour
550g/19oz caster sugar
550g/19oz very soft butter
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla extract
10 eggs
4 tbsp milk
4 tbsp dark cocoa powder and a little boiling water

For the icing

500g/1lb cream cheese at room temperature
200g/7oz icing sugar

Heat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas6. Mix the first seven ingredients together in a food processor; you may have to do this in two batches. Put the cocoa powder into a bowl and add enough boiling water to make a loose paste. Stir this into the cake mix.

Butter and flour three 20cm spring-form cake tins and divide the cake batter evenly between all three. Put the tins on the middle shelf, or bake one after the other if your oven is too small to hold all three. Bake for 20 minutes, then remove and allow to cool to room temperature.

To make the icing, put the cream cheese in a bowl and sift the icing sugar over the top, then beat well to combine. Divide the icing into three, leaving just a little to ice the sides of the cake, and spread generously over one side of each cake. Pile on top of each other and ice the sides.

Grate a little good-quality dark chocolate over the top and place in the fridge to let the icing set.

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It's a baking hot afternoon in New York and I'm standing in line at TKTS, commonly known as "the half-price ticket booth" in Times Square, crossing my fingers that the theatre ticket I am after will be a) available and b) offered at a price that is at least vaguely near the half-price mark. TKTS hovers close to the trading-on-false-pretences boundary, as its discounts are usually more like 20 per cent, but a discount is a discount, and I have guiltily taken the afternoon off in order to wait here, patiently, among the tourists and the flashing neon lights, for a few hours.

If I told you that I'd already seen the play in question – Red, by John Logan – three times in London, would you think I was mad? You might if I told you that the combined ticket price of those three trips (£78) still wouldn't quite add up to how much a single ticket for its Broadway incarnation – same play, same cast – costs ($126 and a $4.50 fee, or £82).

But I loved the play and am curious to see it again in New York, the city in which it is set, and in which I currently live. Eventually, I reach the front of the queue and am offered a mid-range seat for $95 – more than my weekly household grocery budget. Biting the bullet and banishing the sickening thought that the top-price seat at London's Donmar Warehouse, where the play originated, cost £26, I hand over the money and head for the Golden Theater on 45th Street.
Welcome to New York, one of the cultural capitals of the world; a culture funded overwhelmingly by philanthropy and private sponsorship and presumably, therefore, the sort of model Jeremy Hunt had in mind when he recently announced his intention to slash the UK culture budget by up to 50 per cent, asking the arts world to lean more on individual and corporate donors. Supposing this were possible, what would this new funding model really mean for Britain's culture? New York is the ideal city from which to explore the question of what happens to the arts when private money runs the show.

In New York there are 36 Broadway theatres, 370 non-profit theatres, 95 orchestras, 330 dance companies, and 1,000-odd galleries and museums, although it's hard to keep exact track. As with so many other things in the city, whatever you're seeking you can probably find it, but you have to be able to pay for it.

Art here is eye-wateringly, and often prohibitively, expensive. In London this summer you can see the finest musicians in the world for £5 at the Proms; plays that will end up on Broadway for £10 at the National Theatre; an opera at Covent Garden for the same; and your pick of world-class museums and galleries for free.

In New York, the average Broadway ticket is $120; a trip to the Metropolitan Opera will realistically set you back between $100 and $250 unless you can afford to take time off work to queue for a "rush" ticket; most museums and galleries, even those extravagantly endowed by beneficent individuals, will charge you an admission fee of $20.

When Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters opens in New York later this year, a pair of premium seats will cost more than the weekly wages of some of the staff at Newcastle's Live Theatre, where the play was first staged in 2007.

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