I regret anything that causes humans to despise animals, or gives people the opportunity to justify exploitation and maltreatment of animals.
Animal Farm illustrates well the way totalitarian regimes are tolerated, indeed often welcomed, because they exploit weaknesses in human nature. Alan Clark – historian, former Conservative minister and animal rights campaigner

Animal Farm is permanently relevant as a parable to warn of the consequences of allowing a totalitarian system to supplant a democratic one. The Edinburgh Book Festival this year has a particularly high profile line up, with talks from Lord Jenkins, Rose Tremain, Marina Warner, John Mortimer, Steven Berkoff and David Bellamy, among others.. This year’s fringe festival will stage 49 Shakespeare plays, a 200 per cent increase on last year. Not all of them, it must be said, are faithful readings of the folio – the Reduced Shakespeare Company will perform Hamlet backwards in 30 seconds.
But there is a more traditionalist look to this year’s fringe in ironic contrast to the official festival, which has its most avant garde look for some years.Among the highlights of the official festival is Bernd Zimmermann’s Requiem For A Young Poet, a choral work scored for an 85-strong orchestra, mas- sed choruses and a jazz combo, with electronic tapes integrating the words of Mao Tse Tung, Winston Churchill, Albert Camus and James Joyce.While official festival audiences will have to wait for the morning papers to read reviews of the performances, fringegoers can both read and write reviews almost instantly.For the first time, the fringe will have a site on the internet giving details of all fringe shows, as well as a public “reviews” site where fringe audience members can post their own critiques of shows.The Fringe Society are hoping that, together with local poets, they can stage a fringe performance that will be filmed and broadcast live down the Net.Offstage, the main festival, under the directorship of Brian McMaster, has opened two shops which will sell clothes, sweets, books, records and whisky glasses. Shakespeare has been claimed by the Edinburgh Festival fringe as the radical dramatist of the moment. Her husband, John, and three teenagers in the house escaped uninjured.
In the second incident, a two-year-old girl died in a fire which severely damaged a terraced house in Derby..

Tina Walker, the children’s mother, suffered burns and injuries from a fall. Four young children were killed yesterday in two separate house fires. Three sleeping children died when fire swept through a house in Redcar, Cleveland. They were named as Kimberley Walker, 5, her brother, John, 10, and their 11-year-old half-sister Susan Hall.

There were other overnight disturbances in Belfast and in Armagh city.. Two couples killed on Friday night when a light aircraft crashed in Hampshire were named as Paul Lockwood and his wife Jacqueline, both 36, who served in the RAF, and Ian Fraser, 36, a member of the Royal Artillery 47 Regiment and his 44-year-old wife Sylvia Gibson, who served with the RAF

Joyrider killed. The parade itself passed off peaceably but early yesterday stone-throwers injured a fireman and damaged shops and vehicles with petrol bombs and other missiles.Police replied to the petrol-bombing by firing a number of rounds of plastic bullets, some of which hit members of the crowd of about 100. He said the Government should set a date early next month to get all parties to the table to agree an agenda.The RUC yesterday defended its decision on Saturday to allow loyalist marches to pass along the Ormeau Road in south Belfast and along a section of Londonderry’s historic walls which overlook the Catholic Bogside area.In Londonderry, police in riot gear removed 200 demonstrators from the city walls.

They had also made it clear, he said, that an IRA surrender “isn’t on”.His call for talks was echoed by John Hume, the SDLP leader, who said the weekend violence underlined the need for early talks. But he said there was no expectation within the British establishment or within Unionism that the IRA would disarm.He said that he and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein had recently made clear to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, that all-party talks represented their minimum demand in the peace process. As Mr Adams accused the Government of intransigence and of strangling the opportunity for peace, a man called out: “Bring back the IRA.” Mr Adams was applauded when he responded: “They haven’t gone away, you know.”Many of the bands and marchers chanted pro-IRA slogans as they made their way to the rally.On the de-commissioning issue, Mr Adams said Sinn Fein was committed to taking all guns, including those of the Army, RUC and loyalists, permanently out of Irish politics. Those days are finished.”He exhorted his followers not to lower their expectations, saying: “Let no one tell you that we won’t have Irish unity – we will.