Happy (wet and windy) St Swithin's Day

Folklore says today's rain heralds 40 days of downpours - and forecasters have not dismissed the possibility.

Legend has it that showers on July 15 - St Swithin's Day - are an omen for a lengthy spell of wet weather.

But though today's deluges will not blight the entire summer, experts did not rule out the potential for some rain every day.

Forecasters said many parts of the UK would be deluged with showers this morning following heavy rain in the past 12 hours.

Met Office forecaster Charles Powell said 25mm to 30mm fell overnight and warned bad weather and unseasonably strong winds will continue into tomorrow.

Gusts of up to 60mph are predicted in the South West, hitting coastal areas with some force.

This could result in tiles being whipped from roofs, with the additional risk of trees being uprooted in exposed areas, he said.

"We are getting close to storm force winds which could do some damage," he added.

"It will be quite a showery and blustery day across the UK with fairly heavy rain pushing south."

But he said that though the unsettled weather is set to continue "for the foreseeable future", it will be broken up by sporadic sunny spells.

While it is good news for gardeners, those hoping to catch some rays over the weekend are likely to be disappointed - wet spells are forecast for Saturday and Sunday.

Asked whether the ancient legend might this year prove accurate, forecasters expressed some doubts.

Matt Dobson, of MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said: "There's usually at least one dry day in a summer - it's unlikely but it is possible."

Saint Swithin was a ninth century Saxon bishop.

Legend has it that the removal of the saint's bones from his preferred burial place outside Winchester Cathedral to another location coincided with 40 days of continuous rain and storms.

Since then, rainfall on July 15 has been taken as an omen of impending miserable weather.

Today also marks another important day in the meteorological calendar as one of the UK's greatest meteorologists, George James Symons, is honoured.

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The sheriffs of the wild web

On a Thursday evening in December a remarkable attack by a shadowy group of hackers briefly paralysed Twitter. For two hours anyone who typed www. twitter.com into their internet explorer's address bar was re-routed to a simple black screen showing a green flag and the words: "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army."

Beneath the flag was a line of Persian poetry which read: "We shall strike if the leader orders, we shall lose our heads if the leader wishes."

The attack caused ripples of excitement within the online community but it was largely thought to be a one off. Yet a month later the same group launched an equally bold assault on Baidu, China most popular search engine. For more than four hours a website with handles 60 per cent of the world's most-populous nation's web searches was completely inaccessible.

Both instances employed a specific type of hack known as a "DNS attack" and together they provoked an avalanche of discussion among cyber security experts.

DNS stands for Domain Name System and in many ways it is the beating heart of the internet. Computers are only able to read numbers, which means that every website address is given an individual numerical code (known as an IP address) which is stored on two vast servers at opposing ends of the United States.

When we type in a web address, the DNS acts like an enormous digital phone book, matching up website names to the correct numbers and ensuring that we actually reach the website we want to get to rather than an impostor site. Without it, trust in the internet – the most important concept in cyber security – would be broken. A world without DNS would create online anarchy because we would never know whether the website we were visiting – be it a bank account, Facebook, our email or a government site – was real or a fake.

The Iranian Cyber Army's attacks were significant because they had successfully broke into the DNS system and rerouted traffic away from Twitter and Baidu.

The assaults only targeted two websites and the damage was quickly rectified. But it begged a series of frightening hypotheticals: what if cyber criminals were able to take control of DNS? What if they took the whole system offline?

For a number of years such a prospect had been causing sleepless nights at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the non-profit independent body which effectively regulates internet addresses. A significant attack on the DNS system could cripple the internet, sending the world back to a pre-digital dark age. In the words of Bryon Holland, CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority: "If DNS were to stop working, it would render the Internet effectively non-responsive."

Icann realised that if the DNS system was ever brought down, someone would have to be given the job of bringing the world back online. You couldn't entrust that responsibility to a single group of experts based in one facility because the internet was supposed to be a truly global entity, universally accessible and outside the reach of a single sovereign state. It would also be much easier to steal the tools needed to rebuild the internet if they were all hanging up in the same shed.

So last month, in an announcement that could have come straight out of a Dan Brown novel, Icann announced that the internet would be protected by seven "guardians" on three different continents whose job would be to reboot the internet if the DNS system was ever critically impaired.

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Eat like a geek

The food photography you usually see in high-street food outlets wouldn't win many awards; it generally consists of yellowing images of burgers or takeaway chow mein encased in a greasy laminate. But I'm in the unusual position of gazing at a gorgeous image of a Thai beef salad that's being projected onto my plate from a gizmo mounted above my table at Inamo, a restaurant on London's Wardour Street. It closes the sale to this particular diner, so I order it direct from the kitchen using an iPhone-like touch panel which is also projected down onto the table. While I wait, I can enhance my mood of calm control by choosing a projected tablecloth of an idyllic rural scene; Inamo's waiters remain a discreet, uninterrupting presence, while passers-by press their noses to the window, intrigued by the activity inside. I click for a beer; it's brought to my table in less than 30 seconds. And for a magical moment, it feels like a futuristic dining utopia.

Inamo opened in the summer of 2008 in a difficult economic climate which would eventually drive many restaurants out of business. But by contrast, Inamo has performed surprisingly well: it now serves more than 200 customers per day; another restaurant opening is due later this year, and 900 reviewers on the restaurant website toptable.com give it a healthy average mark of 7.6 out of 10. A restaurant is nothing without good food, of course – and Inamo doesn't fail on that score thanks to signature dishes like yuzu mussels and cinnamon chicken – but it's the patented technology that's making gadget fans' mouths water. And the unlikely brainchild of two rookie restaurateurs is starting to hit paydirt, with other restaurants now set to license the technology that's kept Inamo buzzing throughout the recession.

Noel Hunwick, Inamo's managing director, recalls the moment where he and business partner Danny Potter, a fellow Oxford graduate (one classicist, one physicist) came up with the concept. "Five years ago we were at a venue for a friend's birthday party, and the service was pretty poor. And we thought how great it would be to get what we wanted by tapping the tabletop. We spent a year working on the idea with an industrial designer, and eventually had a software architect build a test unit in his bedroom for us to play with." Aside from Potter having spent three months chopping vegetables in the kitchen of the Ritz in Paris, the pair had no previous restaurant experience, but they nevertheless chose a high-profile – some might say high-risk – location for their launch after buying up an old trattoria, Luigi's, in the heart of London's West End. Fortunately their gamble paid off; an idea that could have been seen as a gimmick ended up being a hit with London's diners.

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Owner of the island of Mustique whose friendship with Princess Margaret kept him in the public eye

Colin Tennant, the third Baron Glenconner, had a permanent place in the gossip columns for most of the second half of the 20th century, largely because of his intimate friendship with Princess Margaret; but also because of his Faustian compact with fame – or, perhaps, notoriety. Throughout the 1980s in particular it seemed as though Nigel Dempster had a hot line to Glenconner's bedside phone. Given to extravagant gestures – for his 60th birthday party in 1986, the likes of Jerry Hall, Raquel Welch and Princess Margaret flew to Mustique at his expense for a Peacock Ball – he was seldom out of the limelight. And yet for all these fitful wonders he was an essentially honest and charming man in whose company one was often reduced to helpless laughter.

Lord Glenconner's background provided ample genetic precedence for his eccentricities. His paternal grandmother, Pamela, Lady Glenconner, was one of the aristocratic-bohemian Souls of the Edwardian era who conducted life at her Arts and Crafts manor near Salisbury, as a kind of Rousseauesque charade. Peter Quennell recalled that Lady Glenconner would greet visitors arranged in an 18th-century tableaux – a sense of fantasy inculcated in her son, Stephen Tennant, whose sayings as a child she published, and who would live out a decorative reclusion at Wilsford surrounded by tropical lizards, polar bear skins and the rainbow glitter of his imagination. It was to Wilsford that his nephew Colin brought Princess Margaret for an audience with his eremitic uncle, only to be told by Stephen's butler that his master was seeing only blond-haired visitors.

Although he preferred the exploits of his maternal grandmother, Lady Muriel Paget, who during the Russian Revolution had had guns pointed at her, only to reply "Nonsense!" and push them away, Glenconner would maintain more than a little of the Tennants' mercurial, sometimes frustrating feyness in the character he created for himself. Modern eyes would be opened to his more colourful aspects in The Man Who Bought Mustique, a film directed by Joseph Bullman in 2000, which followed Glenconner as he prepared for a visit by Princess Margaret to his island. The vision of Glenconner barking imperious and impetuous commands to his hapless assistants encouraged reviewers to believe he represented an egregious example of feudal arrogance, if not near-lunacy.

A few months after the film aired, I was sent on assignment to interview Glenconner for an article commissioned by Tina Brown for her magazine, Talk. He had agreed to talk about his relationship with Princess Margaret, who was then seriously ill. As I had written a biography of his uncle Stephen, Glenconner told Brown he wanted me to conduct the interview.

Having recently watched Bullman's film, I almost turned down the offer. I recall arriving in St Lucia, the island to which Glenconner had retreated after his Mustique dream had ended in acrimony, with some trepidation. In fact, as his faithful driver and loyal factotum, Kent, delivered me to what looked like a beach hut perched in the most desirable position on the island the man who greeted me was charm itself. Tall, thin, clad in white shalwar kameez, a battered straw hat and all-terrain sandals, Lord Glenconner resembled a character out of Evelyn Waugh via Hello! He bid me sit down, and we talked – for the next five days. Intelligent, well-read, with impeccable manners, he was one of the most entertaining men I have met; I saw that he had inherited his uncle's winning, but perhaps dangerous, allure.

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Pakistan spot-betting scandal throws cricket into crisis

The betting scandal involving the Pakistan cricket team, centring on Mohammad Amir, pictured, threatens to throw cricket into turmoil. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images

Scotland Yard detectives have confiscated the mobile phones of three of the Pakistan cricket team's leading players as part of an investigation into one of the biggest betting scandals in the sport's history that is threatening to engulf the game.

The cricketers, captain Salman Butt and bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif, were questioned along with wicket keeper Kamran Akmal by detectives following allegations that they were involved in a betting scandal during the Lord's Test match won by England today. As well as the phones, detectives took away documents and other possessions in plastic bags.

Police have contacted the Crown Prosecution Service, and officers from the Met's economic and specialist crime command are leading the investigation.

The allegations centre on the timing of three no-balls – where the bowler oversteps the line – delivered by Amir and Asif during the game. Undercover reporters from the News of the World, posing as representatives of a "far east gambling cartel", allegedly paid a middleman £150,000 and in return were told exactly when the balls would be bowled.

Today Butt refused to be drawn on the allegations during a news conference but insisted he and his team-mates had "given our best … "I would say that everybody in this team has given 100%".

The England captain, Andrew Strauss, said he was "absolutely astonished" by the allegations. "There was no prior warning or anything like that … First astonished, then pretty saddened straight away."

Pakistan are due to play a number of Twenty20 and one-day games as part of the tour and their team manager, Yawar Saeed, insisted the fixtures would go ahead.

But Strauss said it was too early to say what impact the allegations would have and officials from the ECB, led by the chairman, Giles Clarke, were due to enter 24 hours of urgent talks with their Pakistan counterparts.

Strauss said: "I honestly think the best thing to do is let the dust settle on this. It's all new and raw and it's easy to get quite emotional ... I think for all of us it's best to see how things pan out."

The alleged fixer, 35-year-old Mazhar Majeed from Croydon, was arrested yesterday on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud bookmakers. He was last night released on bail without being charged.

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Amount of clone-derived meat in UK 'unknown'

The Food Standards Agency has admitted that it does not know how many embryos from cloned animals have been imported into Britain, after it was revealed that meat from one had already entered the food chain and been eaten.

Yesterday, the FSA revealed that meat from the offspring of a cloned cow entered the UK food chain a year ago, in the first official confirmation of a breach of food laws.

A second bull born from an embryo taken from a cloned cow was slaughtered last week, but the meat was intercepted before it could be sold. The agency has found another cloned offspring in a dairy herd.

Today, Highland council said it was investigating the history of both bulls with farmer Callum Innes from Auldearn, Inverness. "We are working with the FSA and we sent two animal health officers to the farm yesterday to meet and speak with the farmer."

At least 96 cattle have been reported to be registered by the company New Meadow Holsteins of Inverness. Investigations by the food agency into the dairy cattle were also continuing. This is not believed to concern the same farm.

This morning, the FSA chief executive, Tim Smith, stressed there were no health risks associated with eating meat or drinking milk from the descendants of cloned cow, but admitted the agency was unsure of how deeply cloned offspring had penetrated the British market.

"There's a live investigation going on at the moment and, whilst we have got a first-class cattle tracing scheme, what we don't know is precisely how many embryos have been imported into the country," Smith said.

However, he insisted that while there was debate within the EU about how far the progeny of clones should be regulated, the FSA believed that the novel food regulations do apply and should have been followed.

Yesterday, officials from the European commission had said the FSA was wrong in its interpretation of the EU regulations, and that offspring of cloned animals were not covered.

A commission official said at a briefing in Brussels: "There could be lots of milk from the offspring of cloned animals in Europe as there is no need to notify the authorities over this. We have no figures on this."

Smith defended the FSA, saying the UK had a "first-class cattle tracing scheme and direct supervision of all abattoirs", and called for co-operation from breeders.

"It's a bit like the police being there and being an efficient service and us expecting no crime," he told BBC Radio 4.

"It's inevitable that however good the system is, it ultimately relies on the honesty of the people who are participating in the chain.

"So it means that every farmer, every breeder, every processor has to come clean and tell us what it is they're actually doing. It's impossible for us to stand by each animal and watch what happens to it throughout its life cycle."

The environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, promised today: "If we need to change our procedures to ensure full traceability of cloned cattle and their offspring in the UK, then we will work with our European partners to ensure that this happens."

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The day I cooked like the best restaurant on earth

For the past decade, the top slot in Restaurant Magazine's poll of the World's 50 Best Restaurants has been occupied by Ferran Adria's El Bulli near Barcelona, Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck in Berkshire or Thomas Keller's French Laundry in California.

But this week, the position was awarded to Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, where 32-year-old chef René Redzepi has developed a cuisine based on local ingredients (all his staff must double as foragers) and eschews the hi-tech approaches of Adria and Blumenthal.

The multi-course meals served at Noma, a converted salt mill that seats 42, have acted as an irresistible magnet for gourmets and chefs. "It was a brilliant meal," said Marcus Wareing, culinary genius of The Berkeley, Knightsbridge. "It captured Redzepi's country and his immediate surroundings perfectly. I had 22 courses – the à la carte menu is very small – it's all about his flavours, but there wasn't a single combination that didn't work."

Since Noma was virtually impossible to get into even before its accolade, I decided to settle for second best and attempt to cook a Noma meal at home. But is it possible to recreate the Danish maestro's dazzling dishes in suburban London rather than in Scandinavia? A further problem is that Redzepi's book, Noma: Time & Place in Nordic Cuisine, is not published in the country until September. However, a few websites such as caterersearch.com and the endless banquet food blog offer sample recipes and descriptions of his legendary nibbles.

After giving it some thought, I decided against "a mahogany haunch of musk ox from Greenland's west coast resting in gamboges jus". Similarly, wild beach roses ("Last year we picked 100 kilos," said Redzepi) marinaded in apple vinegar posed a slight problem as a garnish. The same went for strandsennep (beach mustard), fermented Icelandic milk, sautéed bulrush and birch sorbet, though lingonberries are available (in jam form) at Ikea.

However, a few dishes did look feasible, including truffled eggs on spice bread and sautéed scallops with dill and crème of egg yolks. Somewhat ambitiously, I decided to have a bash at Redzepi's signature dish – vegetable field with malt soil and herbs. This field actually resembles a miniature field. For all his back-to-the-roots earthiness, Redzepi is not averse to an element of cheffy playfulness. His CV includes a stint at the French Laundry, where Thomas Keller's dish "oysters and pearls" combines oysters with pearl tapioca.

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Mark Hix serves up a feast of bite-sized venetian snacks

I know I wrote about tapas a few weeks ago, but what's really catching on these days is serving small plates of Italian food. These delicious cicchetti, as they are known, are served during the early evening in the bars of Venice – with a glass of wine, naturally.

My friend Russell Norman opened his new restaurant Polpo around the corner from me in Beak Street in Soho at about the same time as I opened Hix; and he is packing in the customers with his snack-sized portions of Venetian fare. The atmosphere is relaxed and non-pretentious and just goes to show how people really want to eat these days.

You could have a lot of fun serving these up for an informal dinner party with a few glasses of prosecco.

Calf's tongue Milanese

Serves 4-6

Whether it's served hot or cold, tongue is one of those great under-used cuts of meat – and I reckon that even the kids might consider eating this dish.

1 calf's tongue weighing about 500g
Flour for dusting
1 egg, beaten
50-60g fresh white breadcrumbs mixed with 1tbsp freshly grated parmesan
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2-3tbsp vegetable or corn oil
60g butter

For the tomato sauce

3tbsp olive oil
1 small red onion, peeled, halved and finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1tsp fresh oregano leaves
1 x 227g can of good-quality chopped tomatoes

Put the calf's tongue in a saucepan and cover with water, add a tablespoon of salt, bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 2 hours or until tender. You may need to top up the water during cooking. Either leave the tongue in the liquid to cool or remove from the liquid. Once cool enough to handle, remove the tough outer skin and cut into cm slices and put to one side. Any extra tongue can be refrigerated and used cold.

Meanwhile, make the tomato sauce: heat the olive oil in a saucepan and gently cook the onion, garlic and oregano for 2-3 minutes until soft, add the chopped tomatoes, season, bring to the boil and simmer gently for 30 minutes, stirring every so often.

While the sauce is cooking, have 3 bowls ready, one with the flour, one with the beaten egg and the third with the breadcrumbs. Season the slices of tongue then pass through the flour, shaking off any excess; then put them through the beaten egg and finally the breadcrumbs.

Heat some of the vegetable oil in a heavy or non-stick frying pan and cook the slices of tongue for 2-3 minutes on each side, adding a couple of good knobs of butter halfway through cooking. You will probably need to cook the tongue in a couple of batches. Drain the tongue on some kitchen paper, then spoon the sauce on to a warmed serving dish and arrange the tongue on top. Serve with wedges of lemon if you wish.

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The Mediterranean 'heritage' diet

Due to the incredible power of the internet and an editor who can't quite grasp the concept of 'holiday', I'm writing this under an umbrella in France. To be more precise, I'm writing it from a cafe terrace overlooking the Pont Du Gard. Many of you will have been lucky enough to visit this place, many more will have seen it in pictures or on video. It's a staggering piece of Roman civil engineering, built by enslaved Gauls and richly deserving of its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It stands to reason. Like so many other monuments and natural features the combined bridge and aqueduct is part of our international history and culture; it belongs, in some way, to the whole world, and we should all help look after it.

Strange, then, to be told in such a lovely place that the Italian government is pushing to apply UNESCO World Heritage Status to "the Mediterranean diet". Yes, if the vote goes through in November this year, fresh fruit, veg and grilled fish will join the UN's special list of "intangible cultural heritage".

Our first problem, I guess is defining the Mediterranean diet at all. Tomatoes, olive oil, aubergines, grapes, grilled fish and great earthenware jars of wine dark … well, wine, are all things that mimsy food writers have developed into a bit of a cult, but I'm not entirely sure that's good enough. What are we going to do about the equally fascinating cuisine of the north African coast where there is little wine drunk and large amounts of lamb eaten? While we're bandying foodways should we chuck in the fantastic mezes that feature heavily in diets from Greece right round the middle eastern end of the med? This is going to be a tough one.

It's ironic that it should be the Italians attempting this act of insane redefinition. "Italian cooking" after all, is a concept largely imposed by unifying revisionists like Pellegrino Artusi on a land where the cuisine is so singularly diverse and fiercely regional that you can still get stabbed in the neck for putting the wrong sauce on the wrong shaped pasta.

Given that we - ie the rest of the world - are going to have some difficulty defining what constitutes a Mediterranean diet, perhaps we might also question how much we benefit from it. Though organisations like the Medical Research Council's human nutrition research unit see advantages in elements of the diet, there are equally vocal advocates of the Japanese diet, the paleolithic diet and even the so-called "Norman Paradox" - figures which show that those following the traditional diet of northern France, laden with butter, cream, animal fats, pork and alcohol have bafflingly long life expectancies and low levels of heart disease. My own particular favourite is the less well known "Inuit paradox" wherein people with a diet containing no vegetables at all live long and healthy lives, their vitamin requirements being obtained from seal meat and whale liver.

Finally there is the vexing issue of enforcement. I realise the UN does less actual fighting these days but can we expect to see blue berets in restaurants keeping the peace by driving half-tracks between those who want oil and vinegar on their rocket and those who might favour salad cream or even some chips?

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Gilbert believes Murray's new-found aggression will land him a Grand Slam

Andy Murray is on course to win a tennis major, according to his former coach Brad Gilbert. Murray begins his bid to land the US Open title at Flushing Meadows in just over a week, and Gilbert maintains he is finally playing the right type of aggressive tennis to end Britain's 74-year wait for a men's Grand Slam singles champion.

Gilbert, who coached Murray for 18 months, said: "When I started coaching him almost five years ago he had this five-year plan that his game was going to blossom. He felt it was going to happen at the Australian Open [where he was beaten by Roger Federer in the final]. Everything was lined up and I think he had a hangover from that for about four or five months.

"I think now that he has changed his game he's finally over that and at 23 years old he is coming into his own and now it's just a matter of getting to the finish line, but he really believes he can do it."

Gilbert maintains that Murray, who won the Toronto Masters this month despite being still without a coach after releasing Miles Maclagan, has accepted he needs to play more aggressively. He told BBC Radio Five Live's Sportsweek programme: "I have never seen Andy play more positive and aggressive tennis than in Toronto. He did not rely on defence and it is so much more economical to play offensive tennis.

"By nature he likes to play defensive, he can weave tangled webs and get out of it, but it's so much more enjoyable and fun to play offensive and win offensive and that's what he's doing and that's what he needs to do to win majors."

Meanwhile, Britain's Youth Olympic boys' tennis doubles gold medallist, Oliver Golding, has put his success down to his secondary career as an actor, claiming it helps when playing in front of big crowds in tennis

Golding, who won gold on Friday with his Czech partner Jiri Vesely and has appeared in the Wet End in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, said: "It certainly helps a little bit, especially when I play in front of big crowds like at Wimbledon this year. Even in the final here with a pretty big crowd it definitely helps me a lot. It definitely gives me an advantage when I play against guys who haven't done it before."

Golding and Vesely saw off Victor Baluda and Mikhail Biryukov in straight sets at Kallang Tennis Centre in Singapore. Golding made up for the disappointment of a quarter-final exit in the singles with a 6-3 6-1 triumph over the Russian duo in 53 minutes .

"I'm over the moon," he said of the victory. "A gold medal, it's what I came here to get and I've got one. Obviously it would have been nice to get another one in singles but it's an amazing feeling. Its been a great experience, and something I'll remember for the rest of my life for sure."

Golding said that he and Vesely will renew their partnership at Flushing Meadows having never played together before Singapore. "We're going to play together at the junior US Open in a couple of weeks' time so hopefully we can get a title there as well," he said.

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