Mr Wanless was granted options to buy 114,115 shares at 503p between September 1996 and August 2003. Politics, that's not for us.'And what about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the far-right Russian politician who has threatened to stop the withdrawal? 'Zhirinovsky,' Col Timashkov points out, 'is not the president.' Still, he is clearly not being ignored: many quotations in an interview with the would-be president have been highlighted, in a magazine lying in Colonel Timashkov's office.For those still in Wunsdorf, life has changed considerably. Only in the bus industry, where council sell-offs have favoured bids supported by employees, have they had much impact. Developments, in the US, however - where United Airlines, TWA and North West Airlines have all been restructured with heavy employee shareholdings, in return for concessions on reduced pay and other benefits - are unlikely to have an impact in the UK, say consultants specialising in employee share ownership. Which brings me to the not unconnected issue grumbling away this week over the rights and wrongs of leaving children at home without adult supervision. Clearly, leaving small children and babies unattended without food, drink and heat in squalid conditions for long periods, as in the cases which flared up over Christmas, is far from ideal. It was not, as far as we were concerned, a foregone conclusion despite what people might think But it is the decision we and the community wanted.

THE BBC is making radical changes to its controversial 'producer choice' free market system of programme making, which staff have been complaining about bitterly since its introduction last April. - Donal Donovan, Schull, Co Cork, Ireland. In England, the spiritual home of rugby union is Twickenham, football has Wembley and cricket has Lord's. This is why so many problems occur,' he said earlier.The Prime Minister said he had heard a report that large amounts of water had been pumped into two new tanks on the roof of the hotel because the city was experiencing periodic water shortages.. He had said: 'I saw another boy climb on to the Bandit's roof and put a piece of wood on his chimney to see if he would come out with soot on his face and chase us with a poker. Japan has been squeezed in between these two venues almost as an afterthought, and the Foreign Secretary will spend only one night in Tokyo.This casual treatment of a country with a gross national product three times larger than Britain's contrasts sharply with the ideas expressed in an interview in London given by Mr Hurd to the Japanese news agency Kyodo, before he left for Asia. He was always a Goodie.'The Witches': Duke of York's (071-836 5122). That was five years ago.I haven't felt in the least interested in men for a long time.

Sir: Nice as it is to learn of the Hirsch family's agreeable experiences in this country (letter, 16 March), I have to say that when my bilingual 13-year-old (English first name, German surname, accent-free) moved to this country from Bavaria, his first term was made wretched by a small number of fellow pupils giving the Nazi salute and shouting 'Sieg Heil' This, at a Quaker school and half a century after the war. In an attempt to regain the youth vote, which is moving strongly into the Democratic column in 1992, the man who only a month ago was vowing 'I will not be a teenybopper at 68,' has finally consented to an interview today on the hugely popular MTV pop-music cable channel.Some more obvious supporters, however, are less sanguine - including the Republican Congressman Don Sundqvist of Tennessee's 7th District, who still believes the Bush coat-tails are best avoided. But many St Paul's parents did not have the time or inclination to debate educational principles: they were anxious about pieces of paper in two years' time. (He undertook most of the basic historical research; she went and talked to people.) But a married couple is impossible to interview, since each vets the other's every remark, and she submits. If he lived in the provinces and had a last train to catch, he might take a different view. Among them are Alan Rudolph's Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, a surprisingly melancholy portrait of the Algonquin set, and Nanni Moretti's Caro Diario (Dear Diary), an intimate personal journal which, with great charm and wit, leads you straight to the heart of Moretti's eccentric, tragicomic private world: much praised, it won the prize for Best Director.The jury's most unpopular, indeed disgraceful decision was to snub Red, the superb new (and, he claims, last) film from Krzysztof Kieslowski, which topped all the international critics' polls but didn't nail a single gong.