Classic Watches For Men

Leading restaurants and takeaway chains would advise customers how many calories were in every dish on their menus under plans being discussed by ministers and the food industry.

The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, wants the information routinely displayed on menus, tables and counters of burger bars and sandwich shops to reduce obesity. He hopes to encourage people to choose healthier options – and so reduce the estimated £4.5bn annual cost to the NHS of treating patients with diet-related conditions.

"Our aim is to give people the help and advice they need to adopt a healthy lifestyle. I want to make it as easy as possible for them to do that. That's why we're working with industry to bring in calorie information on menus," he said.

"As a nation we are too unhealthy. We cost the NHS billions of pounds a year through bad diet, lack of exercise and poor lifestyle choices."

Calorie counts on menus would not be mandatory. But Lansley hopes that the voluntary system will be adopted across the industry as part of a new "public health responsibility deal" between Whitehall and large food producers and retailers. An advisory group of health experts, representatives of the food and drinks industry and campaign groups such as the consumer champion Which? has been established to work with the Department of Health to develop ideas to help people lead healthier lives.

Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury's are members, as are food giant Unilever, alcohol producer Diageo and the Food and Drink Federation.

Nutrition expert Professor Susan Jebb, a senior adviser to the government on obesity, is also in the group, as is the National Heart Forum and Dame Carol Black, who advises ministers on health and the workplace.

Calorie counts were discussed when the group recently held its first meeting with Lansley, and health ministers Paul Burstow and Anne Milton. Its discussions may also lead to the food industry reducing fat, salt and sugar content. Some food providers such as Wimpy, Subway, Pret A Manger and Costa give nutritional information about products, either in outlets or on their websites.

Lansley's plan was supported by Dr Lindsey Davies, a member of the Department of Health's advisory group and president of the Faculty of Public Health, which represents 3,300 specialists. "Having the calorific content displayed would be very helpful. I would hope that this idea would make a difference to the nation's expanding waistlines," she said. "If you give people an easy way to see how many calories there are in their food, that's great. But it has to be done in a way that's easy to understand." Asked if the scheme would have an impact, Davies added: "Anything that gives people more information is a good thing."

But food campaigners last night criticised calorie counts as inadequate. Jackie Schneider of Sustain, a food and farming charity, said that the scheme should be mandatory and include details of the fat, salt and sugar content.

"Our experience of voluntary schemes is that they are less effective," she said, citing the example of a recent Food Standards Agency pilot programme, that involved 18 companies. Fast-food chains such as KFC, Burger King and Pizza Hut initially joined but then decided not to continue. Pret A Manger is the only one of the 18 to still display the information next to its prepared food.

In the US, President Barack Obama used his controversial health reforms to compel fast-food chains to provide calorie information on their menus from 2011, indicating, for example, that a McDonald's Big Mac in the US contains more than 500 calories.

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A Nobel Peace Prize winner seized on an aid flotilla to Gaza earlier this year was stopped from entering Israel today.

Campaigner Mairead Maguire was detained in Tel Aviv airport after arriving in the country as part of a women's peace delegation.

The Nobel Women's Initiative, an organisation co-founded by Ms Maguire and five other Nobel peace laureates, planned the trip to meet women involved in peace initiatives in Palestine and Israel.

Professor Jody Williams, who is due to travel to Tel Aviv as part of the delegation later, said the group was concerned over her detention.

"We are very concerned that a committed fellow activist is being refused into the country," she said.

"Mairead's dedication to peace should not be considered a threat to national security."

Ms Maguire, who was told she was being repatriated rather than deported after being prevented from entering Gaza on the flotilla in May, is appealing the denial of entry. A court is expected to decide if she can enter.

She had been on board the MV Rachel Corrie in June when it was boarded by Israeli forces off the coast of Gaza.

Nine people were killed the previous week when Israeli commando forces boarded the Mavi Marmara, one of the vessels taking part in the flotilla.

The Nobel Women's Initiative travels to a troubled region of the world every two years to meet women's groups and highlight the difficulties they face.

The group last visited the Thai-Burma border and camps in east Chad holding refugees from Darfur in 2008.

It was established in 2006 by sister Nobel Peace Laureates American professor Jody Williams, Iranian doctor Shirin Ebadi, Kenyan professor Wangari Maathai, Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu Tum and Ireland's Betty Williams and Mairead Maguire.

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In a country that elevated social democracy into the natural form of government for decades, Maria has been a loyal stalwart. The 66-year-old retired canteen worker has always voted for Sweden's Social Democratic party, like the vast majority in her working-class suburb of Malmo. Until last Sunday, that is. That morning Maria broke the habit of a lifetime and in doing so helped redraw the map of Swedish politics. She voted for an extreme-right movement accused of being Islamophobic that broke into parliament in Stockholm for the first time, probably condemning the country to a fragile minority government.

She was not alone. In Maria's high-rise suburb of Almgården an astonishing one in three voted for Sweden Democrats, a party dubbed "racist and neo-Nazi" and led by Jimmie Åkesson, the new young darling of the European far right.

The reason is plain. Maria pointed across the dual carriageway to the neighbouring housing scheme of Rosengård, known locally as "the ghetto".

It is home to almost 20,000 immigrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, almost half of them jobless.

"It's become crazy around here. You can't go out in the evening," said Maria, who like other locals, did not want her surname revealed. "I've got nothing against foreigners. I've been married to a Bulgarian for 40 years. But these people don't share our values. If you don't like the colour of our flag, I say, I'll help you pack your bags."

Another resident, running a minicab service, remained loyal to the centre-left, but said: "Åkesson's right. Enough is enough. Even in the jungles of Africa, they don't know where Sweden is, but they know they can come here, get money and not need to work. I came so close to voting for Sweden Democrats. Maybe the next time."

Åkesson, a dapper, bespectacled 31-year-old, celebrated his party winning nearly 6% of the vote by declaring: "We're in." The Social Democrats slumped to their worst result. The same equation now applies across Europe.

Malmo, formerly an old industrial city, lays fair claim to being the cradle of Swedish social democracy. The centre-left still controls the city, but its power is eroding in what has been an exceptionally promising summer for Islam-baiting, anti-immigrant movements in Europe.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has been trying to recover support he forfeited in March to the National Front by expelling Romanian Gypsies. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' Freedom party goes from strength to strength with his single issue anti-Islam campaign, paralysing Dutch governance.

In Austria, the extreme right leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, is running for mayor of Vienna next month. He will lose. But he looks likely to take more than 20% of the capital's vote. Next door in Hungary the radical rightwing Jobbik has gained a parliamentary foothold and is demanding permanent, guarded internment camps for Gypsies. In Italy the anti-immigrant Northern League of Umberto Bossi is in government and is the country's fastest-growing party.

In Germany, meanwhile, where the extreme right has failed to make inroads, the political sensation of the summer has been the taboo-busting, bestselling book by Thilo Sarazzin, a former Berlin central banker.

He claims that the country is digging its own grave by admitting waves of immigrants he characterises as spongers, welfare cheats, and sub-intelligent beings copulating their way from ethnic minority to takeover majority.

Against this troubled background, Sweden has long seemed aloof and immune, an oasis of civility and openness, with the most generous welfare, asylum, and immigration policies in Europe. But with about 100,000 immigrants entering a country of almost 9 million every year, Åkesson's breakthrough suggests there has been a shift in the public mood.

"We will not get as tough on immigration as Denmark, Norway or the Netherlands," said Prof Jan Ekberg, a national expert on the economics of migration at Linnaeus University. "But the Sweden Democrats will increase their vote if we don't succeed in our immigration policy. That's the main issue."

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They might have been lifted from the most ghoulish of horror films: more than 200,000 jars containing more than a million snakes, monster frogs, bats, stunted fish, outlandish lizards and serpents, all garishly illuminated on nearly eight miles of theatrically back-lit shelving.

The spectacular display, which uses some 21,600 gallons of alcohol, is the world's biggest, most sophisticated collection of so-called "wet species", comprised of rare reptile specimens collected across the globe in the past 200 years. Visitors to Berlin's natural history museum are able to pass through an elaborately constructed climatised air lock at the 200-year-old research institute and enter a vast darkened chamber where the alcohol-preserved reptiles have gone on permanent public display to the public for the first time.

Yet inside the magical "wet" collection room, it was crowds of delighted rather than frightened children that were pressing their noses against huge illuminated glass walls that seemed to be stuffed with creatures taken straight from Alice in Wonderland.

"In museum terms, this is like a Phoenix rising from the ashes," said Andreas Kunkel, a spokesman for the museum, which was inspired by the research conducted by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt two centuries ago. "After a break lasting all of 65 years, we are back in business," he said. The exhibition is the high point of what amounts to the rebirth of Berlin's once-legendary natural history museum. It is now aiming to resume its place among the world's foremost after undergoing a comprehensive €30m (£25m) restoration programme.

Its collection includes the world's largest dinosaur skeleton, 25 million mammals, fish and insects, and birds, now extinct, collected during Captain Cook's voyages, and the institution once rated alongside its counterparts in London and Paris in terms of global scientific importance. It was formally opened by the last Imperial Kaiser, Wilhelm II, in 1889 and was designed to put German natural science firmly on the map.

However in 1945, an Allied air raid reduced the east wing of the turn-of-the-century building in Berlin's Invalidenstrasse to a blackened ruin. During the Cold War, the museum was deprived of cash as it was located in the communist-run sector of Berlin, firmly ensconced behind the city's infamous Wall. "The museum was left badly neglected," Mr Kunkel said. "Almost nothing was done to it for over six decades."

As little as eight years ago, trees were growing out of sections of the bomb-damaged building. Its priceless collections of stuffed birds and mammals were so badly affected by the lack of a modern climate-control system that the skin and feathers were drying up, splitting and falling off the exhibits. "It is not nice for the visitors," complained the museum's director at the time.

Chronic underfunding meant that staff were unable to open, let alone catalogue, the museum's 250 tons of prehistoric skeletal specimens that were brought back to Berlin from the largest single dinosaur excavation on record, which took place in 1913 in German East Africa. In winter, museum researchers had to wear thick coats if they wanted to examine specimens. Heating was banned because it meant the alcohol containing the reptiles would evaporate too quickly.

The museum's plight prompted natural history professors from Britain, the United States, France, Switzerland and Denmark to publicise an appeal in 2002 for the equivalent of an initial £6.4m to help to rescue the building.

They pointed out its collections were "part of a national and international cultural heritage" and concluded that the museum was "dangerously underfunded". However, the suggestion that the Berlin museum should bid for sponsorship – as its London counterpart did for its popular Darwin Centre – was not taken up. Instead, the museum became mired in bureaucratic wrangling between Germany's federal government and the then government of the bankrupt capital, Berlin, which faced £31bn worth of debts.

Yet salvation arrived last year, when the museum was finally classified as one of the country's acclaimed Leibniz scientific research institutes, funded jointly by regional and central government.

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Even dead, they would get me, the man from Mugabe's spy agency, the CIO, had warned. My corpse would be shred into "mince meat" even if I returned to Zimbabwe in a coffin for burial, he told me when our paths crossed in Johannesburg.

I had been branded a "sell out", and an enemy of the state for my reports in the foreign media on how the ruling party and its supporters waged their land war against white farmers and then tortured and murdered hundreds of black opposition supporters. The decision to leave my homeland permanently came after I was told I was a dead man walking and after the arrival of an A4 brown envelope filled with live ammunition and containing chilling words in red telling me I was marked for death.

So now, nearly nine years on, as the captain tells the crew to prepare for landing my heart is pounding.

In the years of my exile, Zimbabwe has been dragged through bloody violence, economic collapse and political chaos. But the "unity government" formed in February last year has, for now, survived, and I am risking a return home.

"Things have changed," I've been told. The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, now Prime Minister to Robert Mugabe's President in the power-sharing government, is among those who reassure me I will be safe. But Roy Bennett, the MDC MP, broke his exile on the strength of similar assurances only to end up sharing a cell with the uncollected corpses of prisoners. I wonder, belatedly, if my decision to accept an invitation to a UN-sponsored media conference is wise.

As the plane touches down at Harare International I recall how somebody has just been arrested for the "crime" of describing the 86-year-old president as an "old man". My own characterisations of the geriatric leader as a "clueless buffoon" in The Independent and in the free South African press would surely guarantee me lengthy incarceration if warrants were activated.

I've also had the dubious distinction of appearing twice on a list of 17 "saboteurs" whose passports would be seized if they ever returned, because they had "badmouthed" the country abroad. The High Court nullified the order. But this is a regime still defined by its flagrant disregard for the rule of law and the decisions of the Zimbabwe courts.

The officer at the passport desk looks at my documents, appears to recognise me, and then smiles and, in our native Shona, offers a warm welcome waving me through. But the Zimbabwe I find on the other side of immigration is certainly not the Zimbabwe I grew up in nor the Zimbabwe which once held so much hope for Africa. It is not even the Zimbabwe I fled in February 2002.

From the airport I am taken into town in a UN vehicle, but we are immediately plunged into darkness as there is no power in the entire eastern part of the city. "Life without electricity, water and proper sanitation is the norm here," the driver mutters.

Next morning, Christopher Mutsvangwa, the media czar in the ruling party Zanu PF and a former ambassador to China, approaches the podium at the conference. He prefaces his speech by welcoming me and urging me to feel safe "even though we don't see eye to eye with you on many issues". I begin to feel a bit more at ease.

I grew up in Chi Town, the local slang for Chitungwiza, a dormitory town built during Ian Smith's apartheid regime to confine blacks from the Harare factories outside working hours. We had severe overcrowding – a population of 250,000 swelled to quadruple that figure soon after independence – but it was nevertheless a liveable place. I cannot think of a single day in my childhood when we went without running water or electricity. Cousins my age from rural areas would visit us to take advantage of our electric light to read and prepare for exams.

Now the Chitungwiza I revisit to find my ageing parents is a sprawling place of three million people. Here, the claim that things have improved since the deal that brought the MDC into government seems scarcely credible. The consequences of Mugabe's misrule are everywhere. The roads are pocked, not by potholes but by huge gullies. Even in my borrowed 4x4 it is a challenge to navigate them. The "unity government" may have halted Zimbabwe's economic freefall but the neglect of infrastructure here seems total. Rivers of sewage water, from burst septic tanks, meander through the gullies. Nothing that has broken seems to have been repaired for years.

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Nick Clegg will tell the Liberal Democrats today that there was no alternative to entering the Coalition with the Conservatives as he rebuffs internal critics who claim he is shifting his party to the right.

In his speech to his party's Liverpool conference, Mr Clegg will declare that the Liberal Democrats would never have been taken seriously by voters if they had spurned a historic opportunity to share power.

The Liberal Democrat leader tried to reassure his party's doubters yesterday by promising that a shake-up of welfare in next month's government spending review would squeeze so-called "middle class" benefits as well as those paid to the poor. His remarks suggest that child benefit, child tax credits and winter fuel payments for pensioners could be curbed.

Mr Clegg told BBC Radio 5 Live he would happily give up his family's £2,450-a-year child benefit payments for his three sons. "It would be unfair to only deal with those benefits which only go to people on very low means. You have to also – because that's the fair thing to do – look at benefits that go high up the income scale to people who maybe are not so much in need and that's exactly what we're doing," he said.

Echoing Margaret Thatcher's blunt "there is no alternative" message to her Tory critics, the Deputy Prime Minister will tell the conference today: "People have got used to us being outsiders, against every government that's come along. Maybe we got used to it ourselves. But the door to the change we want was opened, for the first time in most of our lifetimes. Imagine if we had turned away. How could we ever again have asked the voters to take us seriously?"

He will add: "Some say we shouldn't have gone into government at a time when spending had to be cut. We should have let the Conservatives take the blame. Waited on the sidelines, ready to reap the political rewards. Maybe that's what people expected from a party that has been in opposition for 65 years.

"Labour left the country's coffers empty. So the years ahead will not be easy. But you do not get to choose the moment when the opportunity to shape your country comes your way. All you get to choose is what you do when it does."

Mr Clegg will insist that the public deficit must be tackled rapidly. He will praise his own party for showing conviction and courage at a difficult time and urge it to keep its eyes on the likely long-term prize after the cuts have been made.

Promising that the Liberal Democrats will fight every seat at the next election rather than enter a pact, he will say: "The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives are and always will be separate parties, with distinct histories and different futures. But for this parliament, we work together to fix the problems we face and put the country on a better path. This is the right government for right now."

During the conference yesterday, Mr Clegg faced a series of challenges from Liberal Democrat activists. In a question and answer session with delegates, he was tackled over the impact of spending cuts on the poor and the elderly, plans for a cap on immigration numbers and the slump in the party's poll rating.

Jill Hope received applause as she asked him: "Why are the Liberal Democrats being blamed for the cuts, while the Conservatives are being praised for policies we brought to the Coalition?" She urged Liberal Democrat ministers to make clear when they disapproved of policies championed by their Tory partners.

Mr Clegg replied that trying to "grab the opportunity to create some synthetic differences" might win helpful short-term headlines but would do long-term damage to the Coalition.

Another delegate, Linda Jack, protested: "We have a commitment to the poor, we say no one should be enslaved by poverty. Yet so many of these cuts are going to disproportionately affect the poorest."

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After a section of false ceiling near the weightlifting stage at the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium collapsed this morning, news channels here simply rehashed the stories they had done 24 hours earlier, when a footbridge fell down near the stadium leaving at least five workers critically injured. Every farce requires a pantomime villain, and the Commonwealth Games has one in Suresh Kalmadi, the son of a Maharashtrian freedom fighter who is chairman of the organising committee, while at the same time serving his fourth term as president of the Indian Olympic Association.

As the Games lurches from one infrastructure mishap to another, amid allegations that the athletes village is beyond filthy, Kalmadi is a convenient whipping boy. But the organising committee is not the only culprit. Most of the stadiums for the games come under the control of the Sports Authority of India, which is run by the sports ministry. According to the original schedule, work on the stadiums was to be finished by January and then handed over to the organising committee for the final touches – wiring, cabling and Wi-Fi.

The organising committee finally took charge of the venues on 25 July. Work was not complete, but if the handover had not been made the games would have been called off. So after unjustifiable delays, MS Gill, the sports minister, talks of "world-class stadiums", while the organising committee carries the can for every subsequent fiasco.

The Delhi games are massively over budget. For a poor country with little grassroots sporting infrastructure – PT Usha, who so nearly won 400m hurdles bronze at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, has to beg and borrow funds for her athletics school – it is hard to see the games as anything but a white elephant.

But having beaten Canada to stage the games in 2003, what was the government doing for so long? Construction started only in 2008 and the delays and poor preparation have been exacerbated by the arrogance and stupidity of some officials. When Michael Fennell, the president of the Commonwealth Games Federation, complained about cleanliness in the village – with reports of human waste in sinks – the organising committee secretary general Lalit Bhanot said: "Everyone has a different standard of cleanliness. The rooms of the Games village are clean according to you and me, but they have some other standard of cleanliness."

The fiasco is a microcosm of all that ails Indian sport. The country's athletic failings can be summed up in one word: politicians. Every champion, whether that's Abhinav Bindra at the Beijing Olympics or Vishy Anand in chess, has been successful despite the system – not because of it.

Other sports have been ruined by organisational incompetence. "India has huge numbers, huge resources, and gifted players," said Ric Charlesworth, one of world hockey's great thinkers, when interviewed by Inside Sport a few years ago. "But they don't have the organisation, the discipline, the tactics – things that are important for the team to be successful. They have been unwilling to embrace anybody from outside, or take on other ideas. The game is evolving and even if India has gifted players, that isn't enough."

The same applies to every sport. More often than not, federations are run by political sycophants with no passion for the game, or empathy for the athletes. Contracts and tenders are given to friends and acquaintances. When coaches such as Charlesworth are employed, they are not used properly.

It would be a massive loss of face if the Games were taken away or if they were anything other than a success. But for the sake of future generations, perhaps we should hope that it all goes belly up. Only then might we see a generation of parasites evicted from the rotting carcass that they have reduced Indian sport to.

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The five-month long contest for the Labour leadership ended tonight as the ballot closed, leaving the two Miliband brothers, David and Ed, waiting until Saturday afternoon to discover which of them will be given the task of leading the party.

The result, which is said to be too close to call, will be announced at the opening of the party's annual conference in Manchester, giving the new leader two days to prepare his set-piece speech to the conference.

Both camps exuded private confidence that they had won, but also stressed that the victor would reach out not only to his brother, but also to rival supporters to heal any wounds inflicted during the contest.

With the result certain to be close, the winner is not going to be able to claim a complete mandate to push the party exclusively in one direction. The new leader will have to provide a more collegiate style. The electoral college is divided equally between 170,000 party members, union political levy payers, and MPs and MEPs.

The contest is conducted by a form of alternative vote. Ed Miliband is expecting his brother, David, to be in the lead after the first round, but hopes to overhaul him by taking more second preferences from the trailing candidates Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott.

Allies of Burnham, the self-styled anti-elitist candidate, are hopeful that he will come third in the members' and union sections. Polling has suggested that Ed Miliband may be powered to victory by a strong showing in the union section where he has the active endorsement of the big union leaderships. The Conservatives will move quickly to frame him as Red Ed, in hock to the union barons.

Labour meets in Manchester in surprisingly upbeat and energised mood. A YouGov tracker poll for the Sun yesterday showed the party drawing level with the Tories for the first time since the general election. The headline figures were: Conservatives 39%, Labour 39%, Liberal Democrats 13%.

In a New Statesman interview tomorrow, Harriet Harman, the outgoing interim party leader, indicates she is hoping for a shadow departmental portfolio once the new leader is elected. Some have tipped her for shadow home secretary.

Shadow cabinet elections, which will start as soon as the new leader takes over, could see some high-profile casualties, with as many as 60 MPs standing in what is likely to become a lottery.

The new leader will have to appoint his shadow chancellor only two weeks before the spending review on 20 October, expected to be the seminal moment of the first year of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.

Harman believes she will be leaving the party in comparatively good shape for whoever is leader. "I remember last time when we were in opposition after a general election defeat [in 1979], and … I can remember how crushed a party can be when it loses. I can remember that vividly, and I was in the house both when the Tories lost and when we lost. I didn't want the Tories to get away with murder while our spirits were low. Of course, it made a huge difference that we had prevented them from getting an overall majority, but there was still that prospect that Labour could lose its purpose."

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When Hollywood meets Wall Street, two worlds collide in a tectonic rumble of mutual loathing. A series of finance-themed movies will shortly hit big screens – and America's money-making elite are resigned to a bashing on camera.

As if the banking industry didn't have enough reputational problems, the poster boy for financial corruption, Gordon Gekko, is about to return. Played by Michael Douglas, the fictional star of Oliver Stone's 1987 hit movie Wall Street is back for a long-awaited sequel – Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps – and he minces few words about what he finds: "Somebody reminded me I once said 'greed is good'. Now, it seems, it's legal."

Gekko isn't the only big-screen critic for financiers to worry about. A documentary called Inside Job, by the Oscar-nominated producer Chris Ferguson, comes out next month with a narration by Matt Damon, containing interviews on the credit crunch with top financiers and academics such as George Soros, Nouriel Roubini and Barney Frank. It is safe to predict that Ferguson will not be kind to Wall Street.

On top of that, there's an unemployment-themed feature film, Company Men, starring Ben Affleck as an innocent victim of brutal layoffs by ruthless business chiefs.

And Client 9, a documentary about the rise and fall of the one-time sheriff of Wall Street, Eliot Spitzer, will drop dark hints about manoeuvring by high financiers in the public exposure of the former New York governor's penchant for call girls.

None of these are likely to shine a flattering light on Wall Street but many in the financial industry are phlegmatic. Scott Talbott, a spokesman for the US Financial Services Roundtable, says that anything aiding comprehension of the financial world is a positive: "An understanding of how Wall Street works is beneficial to America and the economy. Done properly, there's a plus in anything that sheds a light on the industry."

For some, though, there is a question mark over whether Oliver Stone is a helpful practitioner of the art of financial illumination. In an interview with the New York Times this week, Stone declared that financiers, like all humans, are "a mixed bag of good and bad" but could not resist a shot at Wall Street's wealthiest bank.

"It's silly to be simplifying and say Wall Street is evil," said Stone. He paused, then added: "Goldman Sachs is evil, maybe."

Other banks rank higher in Stone's world view – scenes from his movie were shot on the New York trading floor of Royal Bank of Canada and the director has praised that financial institution for "behaving impeccably". Some 80 RBC employees found their way on to the screen as extras.

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Britain and the United States are to spearhead a renewed attempt to meet stalled poverty-reduction targets in the developing world, asking rich countries to stand by financial pledges made a decade ago and demanding that nations given aid do more to ensure they are not wasting it.

Ministers from governments across the world will meet at a United Nations summit in New York on Monday to discuss efforts to tackle hunger, education and disease in poor nations as part of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed in 2000.

In an interview with The Independent, Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, warned progress towards the MDGs, which the G8 group of the world's most powerful nations committed to achieving by 2015, had been blown off course.

He said Britain would be "focusing above all on results", lobbying for a stricter system of measuring how wisely poor countries were spending aid.

"We've had the first 10 years and many of these goals are miles off track," he said. "The focus of the summit meeting must be to ensure that everyone is engaged in trying to reach these goals in the next five years. What is most compelling, particularly at a time when money is scarce, is sweating all the money we can get together."

Mr Mitchell said Britain and the US had hatched a plan to deliver faster progress over the next five years and ensure funds handed to developing countries are not wasted. The two nations will use the summit to outline a new annual review that will test which nation has been the most successful in tackling each of the eight MDGs. Countries failing to show improvements would then be asked to follow the example of others.

"Ensuring that we use top examples to disseminate good practice to every country will give extra propulsion to reach these MDGs," he said. "We want to ensure that we grip the issues that are at stake."

The Overseas Development Institute in Britain, and the Centre for Global Development, Washington, will devise a test used to judge the performance of nations receiving aid.

Britain will also announce two new programmes to tackle malaria in Africa at the summit. In partnership with the US and the Gates Foundation, Britain will contribute to another major project to give 100 million more women access to family-planning facilities by 2015.

"We think it is outrageous that 73 per cent of women in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to contraception," Mr Mitchell said. "That is incredibly important. On malaria, one programme will save 5,500 lives of children in Zambia by increasing access to prevention, diagnosis and treatment. And in Ghana, we will finance 2.4 million new bed nets, which should save 13,000 lives a year."

Mr Mitchell also defended attempts by the Government to ensure aid was only spent in Britain's national interest. An internal memo, leaked last month, suggested aid money may be redirected to defence and anti-terrorism projects by ensuring the spending made "the maximum possible contribution to national security". Aid groups reacted angrily to the memo.

But Mr Mitchell rejected "any suggestion at all" that money was being siphoned off for defence. "This is the product of unnecessary paranoia," he said. "All of Britain's aid is spent in Britain's national interests, and some of it contributes to Britain's national security as well. The answer is to get the balance right.

"It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development. Aid works, but the focus has to be on the results – on the outputs and the outcomes, so that we can demonstrate that we're really delivering those results."

He also said that a move to more results-based spending would help convince a sceptical public that increasing the aid budget in a time of economic difficulty was justified. "When people are told the results, they can see that it is morally right, and in Britain's national interest to do these things," he said.

"By the middle of next year, we will express Britain's offer of support and help to the developing world in a results-based framework that I believe will make every Britain proud of the way that the country is contributing to development around the world, in the same way we feel proud of the contribution our armed forces make to peace and security."

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