Gaddafi buried in unmarked grave in Libya desert to avoid creating shrine

The belated finale for Muammar Gaddafi began on a marble slab in a car park and ended with a lonely burial in the desert far from the reach of family or foe.

After his body spent five days on gruesome display, Libya's new rulers finally decided late on Monday night to put Gaddafi to rest, capping a week of uncertainty about what to do with the slain despot's remains and closing an era of fear and infamy.

"We gave him all the Islamic rituals that we would give any Muslim," said the deputy chief of Libya's new governing council in Misrata, Sadiq Badi. "It was more than he would have given us, but we gave him a dignified end."

He was prepared for burial alongside two other corpses – his son Mutassim and his former military chief, Abu Bakr Younes, who had been holed up with him during the fall of Sirte.

Just before midnight, three Islamic holy men, all of whom have been imprisoned by rebels, along with three family members of the dead men, were taken from their cells in Misrata to a building on the outskirts of town.

The six men were told to wash the three bodies. Younes's sons, Osma and Younes, were allowed to clean their father, while the grandson of Gaddafi's sister, Sharif al-Gaddafi, had the task of washing his great-uncle. They were the only family members allowed near the bodies.

Libyan officials rejected repeated requests from the Gaddafi tribe in Sirte to hand over their patron and leader. Overtures from his wife, Safia, and daughter Aisha were also turned down.

Alongside the men were three sheikhs who the regime had used to help secure its 42-year grip. Khaled Tantoush, Medina Shwarfa and Samira Jarousi were loyal to Gaddafi until the end, their captors say.

They crouched at a cream-coloured marble slab, which was slick with water from a nearby garden hose. Nearby, three tables stood illuminated by a giant lamp, a generator purring next to them and uniformed rebels watching from the shadows.

The slab was outside a nondescript government building that like many others in Misrata had been ravaged during the civil war. It was purpose-built for washing corpses, an essential prerequisite for Islamic burials, almost all of which are conducted within 24 hours of death.

The extended time above ground had clearly taken a toll on Gaddafi's remains and Tantoush said preparing the dictator for burial was an unpleasant experience. For most of the previous five days, the decaying bodies had been displayed on blood-stained mattresses in a meat-packing crate, with thousands of people clamouring for trophy photographs.

The spectacle had stirred disquiet in Misrata and turned stomachs abroad. Libyan officials defended the display as a need for people of this traumatised country to find closure and to see for themselves that their 42-year ordeal was over.

"I didn't feel anything when I was washing him," said Tantoush. "I was just doing my duty as a Muslim. He was a person and he should be properly buried."

"Liar," muttered one of his jailers, Haithem Danduna, at Tantoush. "He is a chameleon," he added, pointing at Tantoush. "He was green until a week ago," in reference to the colour of the regime.

Appearing flustered, the sheikh continued: "It was a good thing what they did last night, allowing us to bury him. It was a good start of a new beginning. After we finished washing him we moved to the tables and we wrapped them in white, then prayed for them. The whole process took about an hour. The guards helped us move the bodies."

The whereabouts of Gaddafi's grave is a closely guarded secret in Misrata. Authorities here and elsewhere in Libya are anxious to avoid his grave site becoming a shrine for his supporters, or a target for his enemies.

Of his inner circle, only Gaddafi's long-term driver, Huneish Nasr, and Sharif were present at the burial alongside rebel guards. "We are not going to let him be remembered as a martyr," said Danduna. "He got a proper burial and now let the desert consume him."

Across town, at a cemetery for nameless victims of the war, gravedigger Salam Zwaid pointed a gnarled hand at the grey slabs behind him. "This is the best Gaddafi could have hoped for," he said, walking through the shallow graves, all of which were sealed by cheap concrete.

"He saw himself as the king of kings, someone who was better than all of this," he said. "But he was no god. He was a person and a bad person at that. No one should learn where he was buried."

Back at the prison, Tantoush claimed the burial could be cathartic for Libya, where Gaddafi's brutal end is still sinking in. "In the beginning I thought he was righteous and on the right path," he said in remarks his jailers insisted were self-serving. "And after 17 February every bit of news we got was wrong. We didn't know this was a real revolution.

"I was in Sirte and after a while we knew he was there. But I changed my support for him a month ago when they wouldn't let the Red Cross enter to treat the wounded. After that it all became clear.

"His death should wake people up. It is time to move on now. I hope people never find his grave. If they wanted to tell me where it was, I would not want to know. All Libyans should think the same."

Pictures of Gaddafi's corpse continue to be published in Libyan newspapers and shown on TV. Freshly painted graffiti on the streets of Tripoli – in Arabic and English – read: "Dictator Gaddafi sent a message to the Libyan people from hell, saying 'I am staying here.'"

Images were also circulating on the internet apparently showing Gaddafi being sodomised with a stick or metal rod. The footage was shot on a video on a mobile phone and includes sounds of gunfire and shouts of "Allahu akbar."

Towns with jobs galore... but no one interested in doing them, says damning survey of bosses

Many job seekers cannot even be bothered to turn up for interviews on time and lack 'the right attitude to work', a damning survey of employers revealed yesterday.
Despite unemployment rocketing to a 17-year high, nearly half of employers said they could not find the right person for a job when they have a vacancy.
They said candidates were hampered by poor literacy and numeracy.

Even if they have the right qualifications, they often lack 'soft' skills such as timekeeping and communication, according to the report by the British Chambers of Commerce.
More than 440 firms in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire were asked whether they find it easy or difficult to recruit the right staff for a job. Unemployment in the East Midlands currently stands at 183,000.
Just 30 per cent said they find it easy – but 43 per cent said they find it quite or very difficult. When asked why candidates were wrong for the job, many bosses said they did not have ‘the right attitude towards work’.

Others said some job hunters were so lazy they could not even turn up for an interview on time.
George Cowcher, chief executive of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce, said: ‘A highly-skilled workforce is absolutely crucial to the success of any business.
‘But the results of this survey provide incontrovertible evidence of what our members have been telling us for some time.

‘Businesses want to expand, create jobs and develop their workforce, but are hampered by a lack of skills in the local labour market.’
Mr Cowcher said businesses believe that more needs to be done to help school leavers, young adults and the long-term unemployed.
He called on the Government to put skills and training at the ‘very heart’ of its growth strategy. 

Mr Cowcher said there were around 27,000 job vacancies in the region. Last month Dragons’ Den star Deborah Meaden said she could not recruit teenage apprentices for her textiles factory because they do not think manual labour is ‘cool’.
Last week a poll of some of Britain’s biggest firms, including HSBC, Santander and KPMG, found widespread despair with the quality of potential recruits.
Three in four bosses said school leavers and graduates lack the ‘basic skills’ needed to join the workforce, according to education charity Young Enterprise.
Another report, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said employers had ‘concerns about the employability of young people’.
It found bosses prefer foreign workers to British school leavers because they have a more ‘positive’ attitude.
Yesterday a spokesman for the Department for Education said: ‘We share the concerns of many businesses that too many of our young people leave school without the skills needed for work, in particular in the basics of English and maths.’

Citizen Cain

Herman Cain had last been at the Hyatt Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, in July as a ridiculously unlikely Republican candidate for president, a man who summarizes himself as an “ABC.”

“American black conservative,” Cain says.

Now, by the magic of his personality, a preacher-bred speaking style, a bootstrap personal narrative, and a catchy name for a tax overhaul, the ABC was back at the hotel as a frontrunner against the perpetually unexciting Mitt Romney. Sitting down for a breakfast interview with Newsweek on Friday morning, following a strong debate performance earlier in the week that helped propel him to the lead slot in several polls, Cain was suddenly the great black hope of the GOP, the anti-Obama. “I believe he’s a decent man,” Cain says of the president. “But he’s a terrible leader.”

Cain seems determinedly undaunted by political practicalities, however heavily they weigh against his chances. He remains a black Republican in a predominantly white party who has only a fledgling organization and no ground game in the crucial early primary and caucus states. And until very recently, he didn’t seem to have much of a sense of urgency about his own campaign, wandering off the trail to do a book tour for a time—which caused the departure of several staffers who were concerned that he wasn’t serious about running for president.

For all those shortcomings, Cain has become the vessel for a loud and stubborn resistance in Republican ranks to the party’s tradition of rallying around the big-name, big-bucks establishment candidate. He is the latest beneficiary of the anybody-but-Romney crowd, which fell in and out of love with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, and can only think “what if” of Chris Christie. In a year when anti-establishment sentiment is raging and conventional wisdom is useless, Herman Cain has found his moment and seems to be having a blast riding the high. Denying Sarah Palin’s charge that he is the flavor of the week, Cain quipped, “I’m H?agen-Dazs black walnut. It lasts longer than a week.”

From an early age, Cain, 65, has coped with racism by changing the civil-rights mantra to the singular—“I shall overcome”—to the fury of those African-American leaders who stick to “we.” A man who has called himself “the CEO of Self” has become a candidate who allows Republicans to oppose America’s first black president without feeling racist. He suggests that a matchup between himself and Obama would prove that race is not a major factor in American politics.

Romney would be tough on China, he says

Republican Mitt Romney said Thursday that the United States was enduring “a trade surrender” and that if elected president, he would crack down on foreign importers who circumvent trade rules and take a tougher stance with China over intellectual property violations.

“If you cheat, there’s a huge advantage,” Romney said. “Fortunately in most of our lives, we find a way to stop the cheaters.?.?. we haven’t done that with regards to trade. China, in particular, has realized the extraordinary advantage to cheating.”
In remarks delivered at Microsoft’s corporate headquarters near Seattle, a major port city for trans-Pacific trade, Romney accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. designs, patents, know-how and technologies.

“I want to make sure that people we trade with follow the rules and if someone consistently cheats, I want to make sure they understand that can’t go on,” Romney said.

Standing before a giant Microsoft logo at the software giant’s Redmond, Wash., offices, Romney called for opening global markets for U.S. goods and services. Romney said trading with other nations “is very good for a high productivity nation like ours,” but accused President Obama of standing in the way of free trade.

Romney lamented that it took three years for Congress to pass free trade agreements with Columbia, Panama and South Korea. During that time, Romney said, European Union nations and China negotiated or finalized 44 trade agreements with China.

“Despite the fact that trade is good for us, over the last few years our nation has been asleep at the switch,” Romney said.

Obama’s political team pushed back, saying the administration has pursued “strong” intellectual property enforcement, has pressed China repeatedly on monetary policy and is implementing World Trade Organization safeguards designed to protect U.S. products.

“President Obama has taken unprecedented steps to make sure China plays by the rules,” the Democratic National Committee said in a statement. “He’s made clear that he will enforce America’s trade laws and stand with American workers.”

More than any other candidate in the GOP presidential race, Romney has seized on China as a campaign issue, repeatedly talking tough about the Asian nation and labeling it a “cheater” and a “currency manipulator.”

Romney’s trade policy agenda includes imposing punitive tariffs on some Chinese products. He also calls for working together with other developed nations to impose intellectual property sanctions and block the transfer into China of some highly prized technologies.

Romney’s trade policy agenda includes imposing punitive tariffs on some Chinese products. He also calls for working together with other developed nations to impose intellectual property sanctions and to block the transfer into China of some highly prized technologies.

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr., who until earlier this year served as Obama’s ambassador to China, has criticized Romney’s posture.

“First of all, I don’t subscribe to the Donald Trump school or the Mitt Romney school of international trade. I don’t want to find ourselves in a trade war,” Huntsman said in Tuesday’s Washington Post-Bloomberg debate.

Does my bomb look big? Nudist beach contains 87 explosives

NATURISTS have been stunned by some bare facts... 87 bombs have been found at a nudist beach.

Experts at the Royal Navy unearthed 61 of the explosives – some dating back to the late 19th century – during a two-day sweep of the sands.

They were called in after 26 bombs – including two submarine depth charges and at least six 10lb mortars – washed up on the beach.

The Navy’s elite team of bomb disposal officers detonated explosives in the sea near the shore.

A string of other items such as bullets were part of the haul found at Leysdown Beach on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.

North Kent coastguard manager Colin Ingram, who oversaw the controlled explosions, said: “It is quite a find. A lot of shooting and plane exercises happened around Leysdown. Sometimes the shells wouldn’t go off when dropped from a plane or shot from a rifle.

“They were cushioned by the mud and did not explode.”

The east side of the beach – often called Shellness – is the official nudist area.

It is listed on the UK’s Naturist Factfile which says: “Recent reports suggest regular use by 20 to 30 naturists, with up to 100 at busy weekends.”

The website adds: “This beach is a mixture of sand, shingle, shells and, in places, mud.”

A sunken Second World War wreck – the SS Richard Montgomery – lies two miles off the coast and is packed with 1,400 tonnes of explosives. But the bombs on the beach are not thought to have come from the stricken US vessel which went down in 1944.

There is an exclusion zone around the ship – whose masts can still be seen from the shore – and worries have been raised that if it is not recovered it could lead to the remains of the ship collapsing and the munitions escaping.

Supermarket price war hots up as Sainsbury's declares it will match Tesco and Asda cuts

Sainsbury’s has pledged to match thousands of prices at rivals Tesco and Asda as the price war between the UK’s leading supermarkets intensifies.
The 'Brand Match' promotion starts on Wednesday and comes two weeks after Tesco launched a ￡500million 'Big Price Drop' that cut the prices on 3,000 lines including milk, bread, fruit and vegetables.
Sainsbury’s has installed a price comparison system at tills across its branches that will instantly calculate the price of branded goods in a customer’s shopping basket against the same brands at Asda and Tesco.
If the basket is cheaper at its rivals, Sainsbury’s customers will get a coupon for the difference that is valid for two weeks. The minimum spend is ￡20 and the promotion will not apply to online shopping.
Britain’s third largest supermarket has promised to match the prices charged by its main rivals on thousands of branded goods, such as Heinz Baked Beans and Tropicana orange juice.
Competition for shoppers’ cash has become increasingly fierce as economic uncertainty, wage freezes and high inflation have squeezed consumer income.
Households are facing the most severe squeeze on disposable income since World War II due to soaring food and energy costs and below-inflation pay rises.
Last week Tesco posted its worst sales UK figures in two decades as customers bought less food, shunned luxury items and switched to budget rivals such as Aldi.
Four out of five UK shoppers are now in the ‘squeezed middle’ facing struggling to cope with the surging cost of living, Tesco warned last month.
The outlook for the High Street is unlikely to improve soon after the Indian summer heaped further pressure on beleaguered retailers, research from accountants BDO released this morning.
The unseasonably hot weather kept consumers sweltering at home rather than visisting their local shopping mall, it said.
The autumnal weather may prove only a temporary respite as a retail recovery will be hampered by the gloom enveloping the economy.
Analysts at BDO said: ‘With consumer appearing to be hamstrung by weak confidence levels, retailers may have to promote heavily to stimulate demand.’
Demand, especially for big-ticket items, such as new kitchen ware and electronics is feeling the effects of the plunging disposable incomes.
Howard Archer of HIS Global Insight said: ‘The serious squeeze on  consumers’ spending power has if anything increased recently.’
Inflation is running is 4.5pc and is expected to top 5pc over the coming months, while average  earnings are rising by less than 2pc.
From Wednesday, shoppers in Sainsbury’s will be given coupons to make up the difference between its prices and those of its rivals.
Shoppers will have to spend ￡20 or more to receive the vouchers, which expire after a fortnight.
Mike Coupe, Sainsbury’s Group Commercial Director, claimed its new price matching offensive was a ‘revolution in retail’ and ‘fantastic news for hard-pressed shoppers’.
‘We have been listening to feedback from consumers and they tell us that stretched budgets mean they are shopping around to get the best deals,’ said Mr Coupe.

Lord Sugar tells Apprentice winner Stella English 'you're fired'!

She was the gutsy mum-of-two who clawed her way up from a troubled childhood to land a ￡100,000-a-year job as Lord Sugar’s Apprentice.

Stella English won the show in front of 10million viewers in December 2010, with the tycoon hailing her determination and “never say die” attitude.

Ice-cool Stella, 32, beat investment banker Chris Bates in one of the most closely fought Apprentice finals ever. Her voice cracked with emotion as she -accepted her dream job and declared: “I’m so -excited about the future.”
But now, less than 10 months later, Stella’s dreams have been shattered after Lord Sugar told her: “You’re fired!”

The ex-banker was stunned to be told she would be out of a job by -Christmas in a devastating boardroom meeting with the straight-talking businessman 10 days ago.

Stella told the Sunday Mirror: “I’m gutted. This was my dream and I had worked so hard for it... suddenly it’s all over.”

Stella reveals how she relocated her -family close to work to prove her commitment and even fell into debt as she pursued her ambition of a career with Lord Sugar. But she was disappointed she didn’t get to work more closely with him or ever given the opportunity to do “a proper job”.

Stella walked out this week after being told her contract wasn’t being renewed, bringing to an end two rollercoaster years since she quit her ￡85,000 job in the City to take part in The Apprentice.

Her backstory made great TV. She was given up for adoption by a mother with severe mental health problems, grew up on South London’s tough Thamesmead est-ate and left school with no qualifications.

But she worked her way up from PA to a senior trading floor job with Japanese bank Daiwa, giving birth to two boys along the way. She said: “I didn’t see The -Apprentice as a way out of banking, I saw it as a way into the commercial world.”

In November 2009 she filmed the final boardroom scenes with Chris, expecting the winner to be announced within six months. But the end of the show was hugely delayed amid concerns about Labour peer Lord Sugar appearing on TV in the 2010 General -Election campaign.
TV company Talkback Thames agreed to pay Stella to cover the 10-month gap, but she -struggled to get by. She said: “The money was just enough to cover the mortgage but I couldn’t pay the arrears, couldn’t pay the bills, I got myself in a mess.”

In September 2010, Stella and Chris started a three-month trial for Lord Sugar to decide the -winner. After she was placed with his IT firm Viglen, she moved her family from South London to a house near its HQ in St Albans, Herts, to prove her commitment to the company.

She was excited when Lord Sugar asked her to work with a team -working on IT projects for schools and hospitals. But she felt the responsibilities she was given did not match up to the job -description, so after a few weeks she asked to meet Lord Sugar. She asked him for feedback and she claims he told her, ‘I’ll tell you the feedback, shall I? Nice girl... don’t do a lot’.”

Stella was devastated, but then -impressed her boss by giving him a -presentation of the work she had been -doing.

Lord Sugar then called in Viglen’s chief executive Bordan Tkachuk – one of the interview panellists on The Apprentice –and another executive and made her explain again. Stella said: “It was terrifying. They put up a fight and had an answer for everything. Clearly I was rocking the boat, having brought the boss down to scrutinise them. Lord Sugar called me later and said, ‘I can tell you, you ain’t got any support here.’ But he also told her Apprentice winners often had a tough time. “He told me, ‘You get put into a company. People have been there a long time and they know what you’re earning. It’s a lot of jealousy.’

“But I felt I could still win them over. I was pleased Lord Sugar stood by me and gave me a chance to speak up for myself.”

Stella now feels her career went downhill from that day on. She said: “For one -colleague, the minute I went over his head to Lord Sugar, that was career -suicide.”

In December she was officially named as Lord Sugar’s ￡100,000 Apprentice -winner and hoped life as a project -manager at Viglen would change for the better.

“I remember thinking, ‘Do I really want this job?’ I’d got what I worked for, but there were real doubts. Then when I went in on my first day I was told, ‘The cameras have stopped rolling, welcome to the real world...there is no job’.”

Then she was told someone had left, and they had found her a position reporting to a manager paid a fraction of her salary.

Stella said: “My jaw hit the floor -because he was so junior. There were four or five people between me and Lord Sugar. It was disappointing because I knew previous Apprentices had been given the chance to work more closely with him.”

Stella claims that no-one would listen to her. While the job stress took its toll, she planned her March wedding to Ray Dewar, dad to her sons Edward, five, and Frank, three.

She said: “The situation at work cast a bit of a shadow, but I felt it was an important step to solidify the most important thing in my life... my -family.”

The final straw at Viglen came when Stella felt she was being sidelined on the schools projects she had expected to lead. She felt her Apprentice dream had gone horribly wrong.

Based 25 miles from his HQ in Essex, she says she had only four or five conver-sations with her mentor in five months.

She said: “I don’t blame Lord Sugar for what -happened at Viglen. He had taken an active -interest. I didn’t want to be another let-down, so if he asked me if things were going OK I would say yes – even though everything was -terrible. In fact I was going home to my children in our beautiful house and bursting into tears. I had never been more miserable in my adult life.”

She told Lord Sugar she was thinking of -leaving at a meeting in May and he told her to talk about her concerns to a senior col-league. But at the last minute she decided to hand in her resig-nation at that meeting, without telling Lord Sugar.

Stella said: “He called me and was obviously angry because the last -conversation we had was, ‘Go in there, give ’em hell’ and suddenly I was -leaving. I was terrified and shaking but I told him it just hadn’t worked out and never would and I just wanted to go so I could get on with my life.”

Stella said she then had two calls from a PR firm representing Lord Sugar and -Apprentice winners. She told them she had no plans to speak out publicly.

But then she got a call from Lord Sugar offering her a new role at set-top- box firm YouView, where he is part-time non-executive chairman.

Stella said: “I didn’t have a job, and I still wanted to work for him.”

She moved back to London and started in June as a commercial -manager at YouView. She claims the job was going well and a promotion to business development manager was discussed, but she became nervous as her contact with Lord Sugar tailed off.

Then on September 28 she was stun-ned when he called her to a crunch meeting at YouView’s HQ and said, ‘Your -contract’s up at the end of December and I don’t know what to do with you after that because that’s it, so you might think about what you want to do.’

“He said people liked me, they liked having me around but the fact is they couldn’t pay me. He said, ‘I’ve met my obligations to you as far as I’m concerned... you were happy to walk out on me, weren’t you?’”

Then, she claims, Lord Sugar, with typical directness, told her: “If you think Lord Sugar was *****ing himself when you left the Viglen job you’re wrong, because I don’t give a s***.”

She claims he then told her the reason she was there was to protect the BBC show, himself, then finally her.

She said: “What I took offence at was feeling my new job was just PR for the show. That was the nail in the coffin... every last bit of loyalty just went.”

She was devastated when YouView confirmed they could not offer her a job. She left after handing in her phone and laptop on Monday – and handed in her resignation on Friday, two days ago.

Stella said: “I have to stand up for myself. I don’t want to be seen as -another failed Apprentice. I respect Lord Sugar, I was trying to make him proud. To be told I don’t have a job and realising I don’t know how I will support the kids at Christmas is tough.

“I feel like I’ve wasted two years of my life when I could have been doing something much better.”

Lord Sugar declined to comment, but a source confirmed Stella had resigned for a second time and claimed many of her allegations were untrue or misrepresented the facts. The source said she “constantly complained” about being in debt despite her ￡100,000 salary. Staff at Viglen and Lord Sugar, said the source, had decided she was “not as good as she thinks”.

The source also claimed Stella blamed others for her own failings, didn’t accept that she had a lot to learn and suggested she was motivated by money in giving this interview contradicting what she had previously publicly said.

In March this year she made a speech thanking Lord Sugar for an “amazing opportunity”, the source pointed out.

Lord Sugar’s team also worked hard, the source added, to protect Stella from media claims that her husband had links with London’s criminal underworld.

An Airline Eases Seat Squeeze; Will Others Follow?

German airline Lufthansa shoehorned 8% more seats into some of its planes by squishing rows of new seats two inches closer together.
"When the guy in front of me put his seat back, I still had a good four to five inches in front of my burgeoning belly," said frequent traveler Darren Mak of Winnipeg, Canada, who has a bad back but felt good, firm support.

Joe Winogradoff of New York City boarded a Lufthansa flight recently in Munich, saw coach rows scrunched together and figured the short flight to Frankfurt would be painful. "I thought, oh God, this will be bad. But I was really surprised," he said.

A next generation of ultra-thin airplane seats creates extra inches of space by using strong mesh similar to fancy office chairs instead of inches of foam padding. Tricks such as moving magazine pockets to the top of the seatback also leave more space for knees. The result benefits both passengers, who get extra space, and Lufthansa, which gets more room to add seats—and boosts revenue potential.

The seats, which will make their way into airplane cabins around the world, throw into question something airlines and savvy travelers watch closely: "seat pitch," a standard measurement of the distance from a point on a seat to the same point on the next row. Most airlines post seat pitch on their websites so passengers can make legroom comparisons.

The new Lufthansa seating looks ultra-skimpy—worse than almost anything flying in the U.S. or Europe—with a seat pitch of 30 inches. But because the seats take up less space, travelers actually have more room in that 30-inch row than they had when Lufthansa's seat pitch was a more traditional 32 inches. At knee level, because of the magazine-pocket relocation and other changes in the slim design, passengers get more than an inch of additional room.

"The importance, at the end of the day, is comfort for the passenger, not seat pitch," said Christian K?rfgen, Lufthansa's manager of in-flight product who led the airline's seat redesign.
Lufthansa has asked the government-run German Institute for Standardization to come up with a new standard for passenger space. The project manager for the aerospace standards committee said the group hopes to submit a preliminary proposal to a European aerospace industry group by the end of the year, with work to follow with the industry next year.

"Everybody who is really interested in giving quality information about seat comfort needs to come up with something more than seat pitch," Mr. K?rfgen said.

SeatGuru.com, a website popular with frequent fliers that rates best and worst seats on particular planes, uses seat pitch as a foundation of its comparisons. SeatGuru has flagged the new Lufthansa seats, noting they are thinner. But SeatGuru founder Matt Daimler, who recently traveled in the new Lufthansa seating, says he's now convinced the measurement that needs to be taken is the distance from the back of the seat, where it meets the bottom cushion, to the back of the seat in front of you. That would be the space available for your fanny and knees.

"The measure we need to compare is knee room," he said. "We need some new kind of representation of comfort to share with people."

When he sits in an AirTran seat with 30-inch seat pitch, said Mr. Daimler, who is 6-foot-1, his knees touch the seat in front of him. In the Lufthansa seat at 30-inch seat pitch, there was ample room. "Lufthansa felt to me like 32 inches," he said. "That number [30 inches] is not reflective of what you actually get."

Other seasoned travelers on recent Lufthansa flights felt like they had even more room. Ed Pizzarello, a private-equity executive from Leesburg, Va., flew Lufthansa in Europe recently and found the seating akin to the extra-room rows available on jetBlue Airways and United Airlines, which have a roomy 36-inch seat pitch.

"They have carved out two to three extra inches, and it felt like even more," said Mr. Pizzarello. "It was definitely better than anything in the U.S. in regular coach, other than Economy Plus and jetBlue."

Airlines have been moving to slim seats for several years, with varying levels of comfort. Some passengers complain that taking away the thick foam cushioning has worsened the ride, especially when rows are pushed closer together.

In the U.S., financial struggles prompted older major airlines to cut legroom to make space for more seats. United, Delta, American, Continental and US Airways all have the most basic coach seats in typical domestic planes like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 at 31-inch seat pitch.

Newer, low-fare carriers that avoided giant losses kept seat-pitch at more traditional levels. JetBlue Airways has 34 inches of seat pitch in its standard rows. Southwest has the same number of seats (137) in its 737-300 and 737-700 jets that it has had for decades, laid out in rows with 32- and 33-inches of seat pitch. Virgin America and Alaska Airlines also offer 32-inch seat pitch.

More change is coming as airlines, which have spent heavily to upgrade business-class cabins for international service, turn more attention to refurbishing coach cabins.

Adding more seats to planes is extremely attractive financially for airlines, potentially turning money-losing flights profitable when an extra five to 10 fare-paying passengers are on board. The new configuration also saves the airline hundreds of millions of dollars in new-jet purchases. On the A320, for example, Lufthansa added two rows of seats, giving the plane 174 seats instead of 162. Lufthansa says the extra seats on its entire continental European fleet are the equivalent of having 12 more Airbus A320 jets.

Saudi police open fire on civilians as protests gain momentum

Pro-democracy protests which swept the Arab world earlier in the year have erupted in eastern Saudi Arabia over the past three days, with police opening fire with live rounds and many people injured, opposition activists say.

Saudi Arabia last night confirmed there had been fighting in the region and that 11 security personnel and three civilians had been injured in al-Qatif, a large Shia city on the coast of Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province. The opposition say that 24 men and three women were wounded on Monday night and taken to al-Qatif hospital.

The Independent has been given exclusive details of how the protests developed by local activists. They say unrest began on Sunday in al-Awamiyah, a Shia town of about 25,000 people, when Saudi security forces arrested a 60-year-old man to force his son – an activist – to give himself up.

Ahmad Al-Rayah, a spokesman for the Society for Development and Change, which is based in the area, said that most of the civilians hit were wounded in heavy firing by the security forces after 8pm on Monday. "A crowd was throwing stones at a police station and when a local human rights activist named Fadel al-Mansaf went into the station to talk to them and was arrested," he said.

Mr Rayah added that "there have been protests for democracy and civil rights since February, but in the past the police fired into the air. This is the first time they have fired live rounds directly into a crowd." He could not confirm if anybody had been killed.

The Shia of Saudi Arabia, mostly concentrated in the Eastern Province, have long complained of discrimination against them by the fundamentalist Sunni Saudi monarchy. The Wahhabi variant of Islam, the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia, holds Shia to be heretics who are not real Muslims.

The US, as the main ally of Saudi Arabia, is likely to be alarmed by the spread of pro-democracy protests to the Kingdom and particularly to that part of it which contains the largest oil reserves in the world. The Saudi Shia have been angered at the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain since March, with many protesters jailed, tortured or killed, according Western human rights organisations.

Hamza al-Hassan, an opponent of the Saudi government from Eastern Province living in Britain, predicted that protests would spread to more cities. "I am frightened when I see video film of events because most people in this region have guns brought in over the years from Iraq and Yemen and will use them [against government security men]," he said. He gave a slightly different account of the start of the riots in al-Awamiyah, saying that two elderly men had been arrested by the security forces, one of whom had a heart attack.

"Since September there has been a huge presence of Saudi security forces in al-Qatif and all other Shia centres," he said. Al-Qatif was the scene of similar protests in March, which were swiftly quashed by security forces.

The Saudi statement alleges that the recent protests were stirred up by an unnamed foreign power, by which it invariably means Iran. The interior ministry was quoted on Saudi television as saying that "a foreign country is trying to undermine national security by inciting strife in al-Qatif". Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the western Gulf have traditionally blamed Iran for any unrest by local Shia, but have never produced any evidence other than to point at sympathetic treatment of the demonstrations on Iranian television.

The 20 doctors in Bahrain sentenced to up to 15 years in prison last week say their interrogators tortured them repeatedly to force them to make false confessions that Iran was behind the protests. The counter-revolution in Bahrain was heralded by the arrival of a 1,500-strong Saudi-led military force, which is still there.

Mr Rayah, who flew from Saudi Arabia to Beirut to be free to talk about the protests, said: "People want a change and a new way of living." He said that, in particular, they were demanding a constitution and a free assembly for the Eastern Province. He also wanted the Society for Development and Change legally registered.

Mr Hassan blamed the protests on the fact "that there has been no political breakthrough".

"I am from the city of al-Safwa, which is very close to al-Awamiyah, and there is very high unemployment in both," he said. Some 70 per cent of the Saudi population is believed to be under 30 and many do not have jobs. "We were hoping for municipal reforms and regional elections for years but we got nothing."

He said reforms reported in the Western media were meaningless and that only a few Saudis had bothered to vote in the most recent local elections because local councils had no power.