Close civil service gender pay gap, Labour urges government
In the wider economy too, women are paid less than men
The government should close the gap between salaries paid to men and women for equivalent civil service jobs, Labour has said.
Research by the party suggests senior female civil servants are paid an average of 5% less than men at the same grade.
Shadow equalities minister Gloria De Piero said the government should set an example on pay in its own workforce.
The Cabinet Office said it was urging Whitehall to address pay anomalies.
According to ONS figures for the wider economy, the gap between the earnings of men and women increased for the first time since 2008 to 10% in 2012-13.
The previous year, it had been 9.5% - and had been falling every year since 2008 before that.
Labour said ministers could help to narrow the gap by addressing the pay levels of its own employees.
Ms De Piero conceded that salary distributions had not been "perfect" under the previous Labour administration.
"But actually we were making progress," she said.
"If the government can't get their own house in order then how can anyone trust this government to address the pay gap for ordinary working women?"
Gloria De Piero said Labour could have done better in the past
The Cabinet Office has commissioned research on why more women are not reaching the very top of the civil service.
More than half of all civil servants are women but their average salaries are almost 10% beneath those of their male colleagues, according to Labour's research - which is based on a series of parliamentary questions.
While this might reflect a lack of seniority, the analysis suggests that even at the top of the civil service, women are paid around 5% less than men on average - the BBC's political correspondent Iain Watson said.
And the figures indicate that those who work part time have salaries that are almost 14% lower than their male counterparts, our correspondent added.
The Cabinet Office said the pay gap had narrowed since 2010 for those in full-time work.
The arrest followed the release of this identikit image of a motorcyclist
French police investigating the killing of a British family in the Alps in 2012 have arrested a 48-year-old man.
AFP is reporting that the man, from the Haute-Savoie region, strongly resembles an identikit image of a motorcyclist seen near the murder scene.
Officers are using metal detectors to search a garden 10km (6 miles) away.
Saad al-Hilli, 50, an Iraqi-born British citizen, was found dead in his BMW car; his wife Iqbal, her mother and a French cyclist were also killed.
AFP is also reporting that sources close to the inquiry say the man arrested, who is in formal custody, is a former police officer.
It reports the man, described as a quiet type who liked guns, was dismissed from the police in June last year.
Meanwhile, a garden in Talloires, a small town on the east shore of Lake Annecy, is being searched by police.
Mr and Mrs al-Hilli's two young daughters, aged seven and four at the time, survived the attack, which took place in a car park near Lake Annecy.
The older daughter, Zainab, was shot and beaten. Her sister, Zeena, was found traumatised but physically unscathed after hiding under bodies in the car.
French police are using metal detectors to search a garden in Talloires, a small town about 10km away from the murder scene
Under French law, police can hold suspects in criminal cases for up to 48 hours without charge
The body of the cyclist, Sylvain Mollier, was found nearby.
The identikit image of the motorcyclist was issued last November after French police said they wanted to speak to a man seen riding in the area between 3.15pm and 3.40pm shortly before the murders took place.
This followed a BBC Panorama programme broadcast in October in which a key witness - a forestry worker - was interviewed for the first time.
He described seeing a BMW 4x4 car close to the murder scene and told Panorama two of his co-workers saw a man on a motorbike near the scene. The biker lifted up his helmet and they saw he had "a bit of a beard".
Mr al-Hilli's car was found in an isolated forest car park
The man's helmet was said by prosecutors to be "very particular", one of only a few thousand such models worldwide.
Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud was quoted by AFP as saying the arrest was the result of witness statements that came in after the image was released.
He said there was no "direct link" apparent between the man and the victims.
Under French law, police can hold suspects in criminal cases for up to 48 hours without charge.
Hundreds interviewed
Mr al-Hilli and his family lived in Claygate, Surrey, and were on holiday at the time of the attack, along with Mrs al-Hilli's mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, who lived in Sweden.
Police freed Mr al-Hilli's brother Zaid from bail last month
More than 100 police officers in France and the UK have been involved in investigating the case and about 800 people have been interviewed.
Surrey Police said the arrest was prompted by a line of inquiry in France and was not as a result of investigation carried out in the UK.
French prosecutors previously said the "reasons and causes" for the killings had their "origins" in the UK and they investigated an alleged feud between Mr al-Hilli and his brother Zaid over inheritance.
Zaid al-Hilli, 54 and also from Surrey, denied involvement in the murders and accused French police of "covering up" the real target of the killings.
He was released from bail last month after being arrested last year on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.
Surrey Police said there was not enough evidence to charge him.
The motive for the shootings has remained elusive.
Speculation has focused on possible links to Iraq or Saad al-Hilli's work as a satellite engineer.
Police seize dog as six-day-old baby in Pontyberem dies
Ch Insp Ieuan Mathews said specially trained officers were helping the family
A six-day-old baby who died at a house in Carmarthenshire where a dog was later seized has been named as Eliza-Mae Mullane.
Dyfed-Powys Police officers were called to a home in New Road, Pontyberem, shortly before 08:30 GMT on Tuesday.
Eliza-Mae was airlifted to the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, but was later pronounced dead, the Welsh Ambulance Service said.
An Alaskan Malamute dog, which is not a banned breed, has been taken away.
Dyfed-Powys Police said it could not confirm the exact cause of Eliza-Mae's death or details of her injuries.
Her parents have not yet been interviewed.
"We are not going to speculate on reports from people in the community and we respectfully ask that you wait for the investigation to run its proper course," a police spokesman said.
News of the tragedy first emerged at about 08:30 GMT on Tuesday.
Neighbour Patricia Punter, 71, said Eliza-Mae's mother Sharon John ran outside shouting that her baby had died.
"It was terrible - I've never heard anything like it. Sharon was in a state of shock and just screaming," she said.
Mrs Punter said Ms John's partner Patrick Mullane had brought the Alaskan Malamute called Nisha home from a night out at the pub.
"She'd only brought the baby home in the last week. It is just awful - they loved their dogs as much as their children," she added.
Sharon John, who gave birth last week, screamed in horror after finding her baby. Neighbours said her partner Patrick Mullane had brought the dog home from the pub
The dog involved in the incident was an Alaskan Malamute, which is not a banned breed
Police have put up a tent outside the baby's home
Family friend Gemma Prosser, 22, said the couple had been looking forward to the arrival of their new baby.
"It's just heartbreaking for Sharon and Patrick," she said.
"One minute they had a bundle of joy in their arms and all those lovely things to look forward to when you are new parents.
"The next minute they have lost their little girl in such a terrible way."
Ch Insp Ieuan Mathews told BBC Wales there were two other children under the age of six in the house at the time and it was Eliza-Mae's mother who raised the alarm.
"We were called by the Welsh Ambulance NHS Trust just before 8.30am this morning and the baby was taken by Helimed... sadly she was later pronounced dead at University of Wales Hospital in Cardiff.
"The family dog - an Alaskan Malamute - has been seized by police in connection with the ongoing enquiry. I can confirm that this dog is not listed under the Dangerous Dogs Act."
Neighbours say they are 'shocked and saddened'
'Hugely distressed'
Mr Mathews said investigations were continuing and it was too soon to say whether the dog would be put down.
"I think it's fair to say that [the dog] is a key element of the inquiry from the initial information that was presented to us when the emergency services arrived," he said.
Speaking to reporters at a news conference in the village, Mr Mathews said police sympathies were with the family "at this tragic time" and that specialist officers were supporting them.
"As you can imagine, the family are hugely distressed," he said.
The dog seized was an Alaskan Malamute, similar to the one pictured
"We facilitated their transport and arrival at the [University] hospital to spend time with their little baby girl. As I say, very tragic circumstances and our hearts go out to everybody involved."
Alaskan Malamutes were originally bred as sled dogs for work in the Arctic but have become popular as family pets.
The Alaskan Malamute Club of the United Kingdom described the breed on its website as "heavy boned and powerfully built" as well as affectionate and friendly.
Caroline Kisko, Kennel Club secretary, said: "Any breed of dog can be wonderful or potentially dangerous in the wrong hands, which is why it is critical to have the correct training and socialisation.
"Alaskan Malamutes can make wonderful family pets but their rapid increase in popularity has largely been fuelled by fashion, with too many people failing to do their research and or to understand the amount of exercise that this breed requires."
Colombia armed forces boss dismissed over 'disrespectful remarks'
General Barrero was caught on tape saying officers should act 'like a mafia' against false positive probes
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos has dismissed the chief of the armed forces over disparaging comments about inquiries into extrajudicial killings.
Mr Santos said General Leonardo Barrero had been sacked for "disrespectful remarks" that emerged as part of an investigation into allegedly corrupt procurement deals by the military.
The allegations were published by the Colombian weekly magazine Semana.
Another four generals were dismissed over alleged wrongdoing in contracts.
Gen Barrero's remarks were caught on secretly recorded phone conversations made while investigators looked into the corruption allegations.
'Like a mafia'
President Santos stressed that Gen Barrero was being sacked for his comments about the inquiries into the extrajudicial killings known as "false positives" - thousands of murdered civilians who were passed off by the military as rebels killed in combat.
"The commander of the armed forces is not leaving for any corruption deeds but for his disrespectful remarks about the judiciary," Mr Santos said, adding that the other officers "knew about the irregularities and did not act".
On the recorded audio, Gen Barrero can be heard telling an imprisoned colonel that officers should join forces "like a mafia" against investigating judges.
The Semana report suggests that part of the money was channelled to officers with suspected links with extrajudicial killings.
The conversation that cost Gen Barrero his job was with an officer investigated for possible involvement in "false positive" cases.
Gen Barrero is being replaced by the head of the army, General Juan Pablo Rodriguez.
Some generals and other senior officers are accused of taking bribes of up to 50% of the contracts they awarded; others of diverting money that was meant to be spent at the barracks on petrol and other supplies.
The defence budget has soared in recent years and the US continues to pay Colombia a generous annual allowance to wage war on drugs.
The irregularities allegedly took place in 2012 and 2013.
Two weeks ago, Semana published another set of potentially damaging allegations involving the Colombian army.
It said that an elite military group had spied on government officials engaged in peace negotiations in Cuba with Farc rebels.
Mr Santos dismissed the army's intelligence unit. The army said the group had been set up legally and had not performed illicit activities.
The Scottish government is being given the power to issue its own bonds, the UK government has announced.
The move will give the Scottish government an additional source of financing when borrowing powers are implemented from 2015.
Chancellor George Osborne called it "a historic day for Scotland".
The Scottish government has argued that independence is needed to give it full control over Scotland's economy and finances.
Under the Scotland Act 2012, the Scottish government is able to borrow up to £2.2bn for major capital projects such as transport infrastructure, hospitals and schools.
The act's provisions come into force in 2015 and allow the Scottish government to borrow through the UK's National Loans Fund and through commercial loans.
The UK government said adding the power to issue bonds would give the Scottish government the ability to directly access capital markets, which it claimed Scottish ministers had requested.
'New responsibility'
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said: "This is a historic announcement, demonstrating once again how Scotland can grow and prosper within the UK.
"From 2015, Scotland will be able to borrow up to £2.2bn to invest in its hospitals, roads and other capital projects. In addition to having access to the National Loans Fund, our decision today means that the Scottish government can directly issue its own debt.
"It will of course be up to the Scottish government to manage their borrowing, but this is complemented by the tax powers in the Scotland Act providing the Scottish government with an independent source of revenue to support borrowing costs."
Bonds enable the borrower to obtain funds from an investor for a fixed period of time for a pre-determined interest rate.
The Scotland Act implemented many of the recommendations of the Calman Commission on Scottish Devolution. In addition to borrowing powers, the Scottish government will be able to set a Scottish income tax rate from 2015.
Mr Osborne said: "Being able to issue its own bonds gives Scotland new powers and new responsibility, within the security of the UK.
"Alongside the considerable new tax and spending powers we have already given in the Scotland Act, it is further evidence of why being part of the UK gives Scotland the best of both worlds."
But perhaps more than any other Chinese city, it tells the story of how China's remarkable three decades of modernisation and enrichment, its economic miracle, is apparently drawing to a close, and why there is a serious risk of a calamitous crash.
In Wuhan I interviewed a mayor, Tang Liangzhi, whose funds and power would make London's mayor, Boris Johnson, feel sick with envy. He is spending £200bn over five years on a redevelopment plan whose aim is to make Wuhan - which already has a population of 10 million - into a world mega city and a serious challenger to Shanghai as China's second city.
The rate of infrastructure spending in Wuhan alone is comparable to the UK's entire expenditure on renewing and improving the fabric of the country. In this single city, hundreds of apartment blocks, ring roads, bridges, railways, a complete subway system and a second international airport are all being constructed.
The middle of town is being demolished to create a high tech commercial centre. It will include a £3bn skyscraper that will be more than 600m high (roughly double the height of London's Shard) and either the second or third tallest in the world (I met executives of the state owned developers, Greenland, who were coy about precisely how tall it would finally be).
And, of course, the point of my visit to Wuhan was to tell a broader story. Over the past few years, China has built a new skyscraper every five days, more than 30 airports, metros in 25 cities, the three longest bridges in the world, more than 6,000 miles of high speed railway lines, 26,000 miles of motorway, and both commercial and residential property developments on a mind-boggling scale.
Third wave
Now there are two ways of looking at a remaking of the landscape that would have daunted Egypt's pharaohs and the Romans. It is, of course, a necessary modernisation of a rapidly urbanising country. But it is also symptomatic of an unbalanced economy whose recent sources of growth are not sustainable.
Perhaps the big point of the film I have made, to be screened on Tuesday (How China Fooled the World, BBC2, 9pm) is that the economic slowdown evident in China, coupled with recent manifestations of tension in its financial markets, can be seen as the third wave of the global financial crisis which began in 2007-08 (the first wave was the Wall Street and City debacle of 2007-08; the second was the eurozone crisis).
Why do I say that?
Well in the autumn of 2008, after the collapse of Lehman, there was a sudden and dramatic shrinkage of world trade. And that was catastrophic for China, whose growth was largely generated by exporting to the rich West all that stuff we craved. When our economies went bust, we stopped buying - and almost overnight, factories turned off the power, all over China.
I visited China at the time and witnessed mobs of poor migrant workers packing all their possessions, including infants, on their backs and heading back to their villages. It was alarming for the government, and threatened to smash the implicit contract between the ruling Communist Party and Chinese people - namely, that they give up their democratic rights in order to become richer.
So with encouragement from the US government (we interviewed the then US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson), the Chinese government unleashed a stimulus programme of mammoth scale: £400bn of direct government spending, and an instruction to the state-owned banks to "open their wallets" and lend as if there were no tomorrow.
The lending boom led to a huge increase in construction
Which, in one sense, worked. While the economies of much of the rich West and Japan stagnated, boom times returned to China - growth accelerated back to the remarkable 10% annual rate that the country had enjoyed for 30 years.
But the sources of growth changed in an important way, and would always have a limited life.
Toxic investment
There are two ways of seeing this.
First, even before the great stimulus, China was investing at a faster rate than almost any big country in history.
Before the crash, investment was the equivalent of about 40% of GDP, around three times the rate in most developed countries and significantly greater even than what Japan invested during its development phase - which preceded its bust of the early 1990s.
Here is the thing: when a big economy is investing at that pace to generate wealth and jobs, it is a racing certainty that much of it will never generate an economic return, that the investment is way beyond what rational decision-making would have produced.
That is why in China, there are vast residential developments and even a whole city where the lights are never on and why there are gleaming motorways barely tickled by traffic.
But what makes much of the spending and investment toxic is the way it was financed: there has been an explosion of lending. China's debts as a share of GDP have been rising at a very rapid rate of around 15% of GDP, or national output, annually and have increased since 2008 from around 125% of GDP to 200%.
The analyst Charlene Chu, late of Fitch, gave a resonant synoptic description of this credit binge:
"Most people are aware we've had a credit boom in China but they don't know the scale. At the beginning of all of this in 2008, the Chinese banking sector was roughly $10 trillion in size. Right now it's in the order of $24 to $25 trillion.
"That incremental increase of $14 to $15 trillion is the equivalent of the entire size of the US commercial banking sector, which took more than a century to build. So that means China will have replicated the entire US system in the span of half a decade."
Anyone living in the rich West does not need a lecture on the perils of a financial system that creates too much credit too quickly. And in China's case, as was dangerously true in ours, a good deal of the debt is hidden, in specially created, opaque and largely financial institutions which we've come to call "shadow" banks.
There are no exceptions to the lessons of financial history: lending at that rate leads to debtors unable to meet their obligations, and to large losses for creditors; the question is not whether this will happen but when, and on what scale.
Which is why we've seen a couple of episodes of stress and tension in China's banking markets over the past nine months, as a possible augury of worse to come.
Slowing growth
More broadly, for the economy as a whole, when growth is generated over a longish period by debt-fuelled investment or spending, there can be one of two outcomes.
If the boom is deflated early enough and in a controlled way, and measures are taken to reconstruct the economy so that growth can be generated in a sustainable way, the consequence would be an economic slowdown, but disaster would be averted.
But if lending continues at breakneck pace, then a crash becomes inevitable.
So what will happen to China's economic miracle?
Well, the Chinese government has announced economic reforms, which - in theory - would over a period of years rebalance the economy away from debt-fuelled investment towards consumption by Chinese people.
Charles Liu, a prominent Chinese investor, with close links to the government in Beijing, explained to me how far China's growth rate is likely to fall from the current 7-8%:
"I think China could do very well if the quality of the growth is transformed to higher value add." He said. "You're really looking at 4% is fine."
But as yet the reforms are at a very early stage of implementation, and the lending boom goes on. What is more, the current building splurge so enriches many thousands of communist officials, from a system of institutionalised kickbacks, that there are concerns about the ability of the central government to force the changes through.
Also, the social and political consequences of Charles Liu's 4% growth could be profound: it is unclear whether that is a fast enough rate to satisfy the people's hunger for jobs and higher living standards, whether it is fast enough to prevent widespread protest and unrest.
And what if the lending and investing bonanza can't be staunched? Then we would be looking at the kind of crash that would shake not just China, but the globe.
The biggest story of my career has been the rise and rise of China. Hungry, fast-growing China has shaped our lives, sometimes but not always to our benefit.
It boosted our living standards, by selling us all those material things we simply had to have, cheaper and cheaper. But its exporters killed many of our manufacturers. And the financial surpluses it generated translated into our dangerous deficits, the secular and risky rise of indebtedness in much of the West.
Also its appetite has led to huge increases in the price we all pay for food, for energy, for commodities. What's more, China's influence in Asia and Africa has profoundly shifted the global balance of power.
So would an economically weakened China be good for us in the West? Well, it wouldn't necessarily be all bad.
But a China suddenly incapable of providing the rising living standards its people now see as their destiny would be less confident, less stable, and - perhaps for the world - more dangerous.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
As the barrage of bad weather eases, another kind of turbulence is brewing over one of the potential causes.
Listen to some environmental campaigners and you might think that there is total certainty that global warming led to the recent rain; listen to some climate sceptics and there is absolutely no connection at all.
Viewers have berated me either for failing to explicitly blame climate change in my reporting of the floods - or for suggesting that the rain may conceivably have been made more likely by the rising presence of manmade greenhouse gases.
For anyone coping with clearing up a flooded home, this question will not exactly be the highest priority.
However, political figures have raised its profile, making the connection rather more forcefully than many scientists.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, set the tone by telling the Commons that he "very much" suspects that climate change is involved. And the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, warned that "we are sleepwalking into a national security crisis on climate change".
Of course not every politician agrees. Lord Lawson, on the Today programme, dismissed any link to the weather, saying, "the question is whether global warming has marginally exacerbated it. Nobody knows that".
Different takes
If we stand back from the Westminster hothouse, what do the scientists actually say?
The fact is that attributing a human influence to individual weather events is an emerging area of research and is acknowledged by those involved to be extremely challenging because so many factors are at work.
One leading figure in climate science, Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, summed it up bluntly: "There's no simple link - we can't say 'yes' or 'no' this is climate change."
Instead, he and others point to a range of factors which would make intense downpours more likely.
The key one is a basic physical relationship: since warmer air can hold more moisture, it makes sense that our warming atmosphere would produce more intense rain.
But how much rain? And where? The computer models used to explore scenarios for the impacts of different levels of greenhouse gases are recognised to be weaker on rainfall than on temperature.
Surely, you might think, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the consensus assessment of the latest science, might clear this up? As so often, you can read its documents in different ways.
If you think global warming is overplayed, you focus on this conclusion in the most recent IPCC report:
"There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale."
Translated, that means we're not seeing more floods, story over.
However, if you do think climate change is serious, your eye may fall, first, on the line that "the frequency or intensity of heavy precipitation events has likely increased in North America and Europe."
Second, the IPCC predicts that "extreme precipitation events" over the mid-latitudes (which includes Europe) will very likely become more intense and more frequent. Doesn't this explain the recent British weather? Is this the smoking gun? No, because this scenario will unfold "by the end of this century" rather than right now.
Looking for answers
Another take comes in a report by the European Academies Science Advisory Council published in November last year.
It suggests a future in northern Europe in which "high intensity and extreme precipitation become more frequent…" and that "future projections suggest increases in flood risk over a wide area of Europe…"
So bad news on the way, clearly, but none of this categorically nails the question we began with - exactly how much manmade greenhouse gases are involved in the current weather.
A study by the Met Office and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology concluded that "it is not possible, yet, to give a definitive answer on whether climate change has been a contributor or not."
Their report points to the sea level rising and an increase in storminess in the North Atlantic as factors consistent with climate change. But it also highlights what is not properly understood, including the path of the jet stream, which has acted as a conveyor belt, delivering storm after storm.
At the launch of the report, the Met Office chief scientist, Dame Julia Slingo, seemed to go a bit beyond what appeared in print.
She said: "All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change." Not some of the evidence, but all of it.
So what about that unexplained path of the jet stream? The Mail on Sunday quoted one Met Office scientist, Professor Mat Collins, as saying that "there is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter."
The Met Office scrambled to produce a statement to assert that there was no disagreement. It also confirmed the "uncertainty" about the storm track in the North Atlantic but did not address whether the chief scientist had gone beyond the conclusions of their own report.
Does this leave us any wiser? No. In my experience scientists always disagree - that's how research advances.
Dr Tim Osborn of the University of East Anglia is among climate researchers concerned about the science of extreme weather being portrayed as a little more certain than it might appear.
"You've got a lot of natural variability superimposed on the long term trend - in the next 20 years, the frequency of weather like this winter's could drop below the trend or rise above it. We're not expecting a year on year change."
The only way to detect a human fingerprint on weather is to run simulations of the event as it actually happened - and then to repeat them having stripped out the greenhouse gas component in the models.
Previous studies of this kind, for example into the 2000 floods in England, have found that the storms were made more likely because of manmade climate change - likely but not certain.
The answer is framed as an increased probability. A categoric answer may never be possible.
As the country copes with the floods and starts repairs and thinks about making things safer for the next one, people will look up at the skies and want certainty about whether wild winters will become normal. And at the moment, the science cannot provide that.
Keeping crowdsourcing honest: can we trust the reviews?
By Orin GordonBBC Business reporter
Can crowdsourced reviews be trusted?
The crowdsourced review - where the opinions of thousands are collected to help customers decide what to purchase or whom to hire - has proved to be one of the most disruptive business forces of the modern age.
TripAdvisor is perhaps the industry's best-known name.
The hotels and restaurant review site enjoyed a 55% rise in traffic last year, attracting 260 million unique monthly visitors. It is expanding its remit too, having recently acquired seatguru.com, where air passengers get help choosing the best seats on specific flights.
Local business review site Yelp has just formed a partnership with Yahoo! search, and the UK's assess-and-hire-a-builder service RatedPeople is preparing for a public floatation on the London Stock Exchange.
These companies can make or break the businesses listed on their pages.
But that can be a problem when some of the opinions they promote cannot be trusted.
Bad experiences
The big review sites say they operate robust editorial controls to weed out the fakes.
But some of the people who have suffered bad experiences have their doubts.
Feolla Chastanet is a sales manager at her family's hotel in St Lucia. At a recent staff meeting she showed her colleagues a TripAdvisor review of their business.
It was bad.
"What's the story with this guest?" she asked.
They told her that the man who had posted the review had been at the front desk barely an hour ago. He was upstairs, not far from where they sat. He had demanded a room upgrade and did not get it, she tells the BBC. He had said nothing, left the front desk, gone upstairs, gone online - and vented his anger.
Feolla Chastanet's hotel in St Lucia
Ms Chastanet says that much of the review was unfair and a direct reaction to his request being denied rather than a fair reflection of her establishment.
She also has doubts about some of the other comments posted on the site.
"How does a guest know how much it costs to renovate a hotel?" Ms Chastanet asks.
"It's clearly fake when they write about the kind of details they couldn't possibly know."
Checks and balances
"If I tell you, I'd have to kill you," jokes Julio Bruno, TripAdvisor's global vice-president of sales.
He has just been asked about the system put in place to catch bogus reviews.
The company says it uses a confidential algorithm - software that carries out step-by-step checks to root out odd posts from the mountain of user reviews.
He likens it to the secret formula of Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders' KFC restaurants - but stresses that it is supported by hundreds of workers who sift through the flagged material.
"We call them the content integrity team," Mr Bruno says.
"But we always give the last word to the establishments."
Problem with the roof? Some people will use crowdsourcing site to find a repairman
Botched job
Unfair, bad reviews can depress sales. But unfair good reviews are also a problem and can lead to buyer's remorse.
Michael and Diana, a couple in their sixties living in south-west London, wanted a workman to fix their leaking roof.
They turned to RatedPeople, found a builder with good reviews and paid him £2,000 to do the job. The roof started leaking again a week later. He refused to return to do it properly. A subsequent survey found that he had actually made the problem worse.
The couple then discovered the person they had picked had subcontracted the work to someone else without their knowledge, meaning the reviews they had read were not for the person who had come to their home.
They questioned RatedPeople in a series of email exchanges. The company closed the builder's account, but the couple ended up paying £9,000 to rectify the damage caused.
While the damage was regrettable, the company says farming work out was not against its rules.
"Subcontracting is a big part of our business - many tradesmen subcontract work," RatedPeople chief executive Chris Havemann tells the BBC.
"It is in their interests to only subcontract to tradesmen that they know and trust, as the rating left by the homeowner will be attributed to the tradesman/business who employed the subcontractor."
But he acknowledges that tradesmen do sometimes try to game the system.
"One way is to pretend to be a homeowner, effectively buy access to that work, and try and rate yourself," he says.
But he insists his company has taken steps to stop such problems before they occur - for instance, a quick rating would raise alarms.
"If you joined our platform at 4.30pm, how can you get a rating on a bathroom project at 7pm? We're also checking IP [internet protocol] addresses and going down to the digital fingerprint of the device."
People use crowdsourcing sites to review restaurants, hotels and services
Yelp also says it uses automated software, and supplements that with sting operations.
"Once [someone is] caught red-handed, we clearly make this information available to consumers looking to patronise these businesses with a banner on their business page, outing their shady business practices," Yelp's senior PR manager Elliot Adams tells the BBC.
"[We recommend] that they may want to take their business elsewhere."
Growing challenge
But do these checks mean customers can be confident about making what might be very expensive purchases?
Giorgos Zervas, an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University, says its research indicates that the number of suspicious reviews has been rising.
"Reviews are becoming a more integral part of consumer decision-making," Mr Zervas said.
"I believe algorithms can only go so far in detecting fake reviews.
"In the end, crafting a legitimate-looking fake review is not that hard, and those who commit review fraud are becoming increasingly sophisticated."
It is not exactly what Ms Chastanet or Michael and Diana want to hear.
Hundreds of families in Spain are evicted every day, after falling behind on mortgage payments - and under Spain's draconian laws they must continue paying off the loan even after the home has been repossessed. Their main source of support is a determined woman from Barcelona - Ada Colau.
Back in 2009, when Colau organised the first meetings for mortgage defaulters, she was amazed to see hundreds of people turning up. But what surprised her even more was the way they behaved.
"We expected to see lots of angry people in the hall", she says "but most were depressed and ashamed. They were embarrassed about discussing their problems. Our government kept telling these people that they were the ones responsible for this situation, that they were to blame. And that message was repeated every day on television."
One of those who has sought support from Colau's Platform for People Affected by Mortgages is Ermina Pacheco. As we walk to her flat past high rises and convenience stores, she tells me she began working at the age of 10 when her mother got her a job in a restaurant. Once inside I admire her collection of ceramic dolls and she shows me her wedding pictures. Ermina has been married three times and thought she'd finally found her soul mate. But two years ago the couple's mortgage payments more than doubled from 800 to nearly 2000 euros a month.
Young Spanish couples and immigrants are the two groups worst affected
After the sudden price hike her husband became increasingly worried and couldn't sleep at night. He became so depressed that he overdosed on painkillers and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. "He stayed for a month but that didn't help," says Ermina. "He tried to commit suicide several times after that."
She blames the banks and the government for destroying his peace of mind and eventually the marriage. "They pushed us to buy, saying why waste 100 euros in rent when you can have your own property? Now I feel that we were tricked."
Ermina thinks her husband is still alive though she has no idea where he is today.
But many heavily indebted Spaniards have killed themselves. It was a wave of eviction-related suicides which prompted Ada to set up the Platform five years ago.
When the housing bubble burst, migrant workers in the construction industry and low-income families were the hardest hit. Today people from many different backgrounds have been sucked into the mortgage crisis.
The Platform runs a network of local assemblies across the country
With unemployment at 26% - the highest rate in Europe except for Greece - people live in fear of losing their jobs. On top of that, many lose their homes.
"It is a real social emergency," says Gerardo Pisarello a Barcelona based law professor and mortgage expert. "Spain has one of the worst housing policies in Europe."
Unlike Germany, he says, there is no rent control to govern the private market and only 2% of housing is social housing - state subsidised homes for low-income families. This compares with about 20 or 30% in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, France and the UK.
Spain also has some of the toughest mortgage laws. People must continue to pay off their mortgages, complete with interest and penalty charges, even after they have been evicted and their home - whose value is appraised by the bank itself - has been repossessed. Since mortgage defaulters are disqualified from filing for bankruptcy, many are saddled with debts they can never escape.
Colau's group has collected more than a million signatures calling for change
Colau's platform has collected one and half million signatures calling for changes in these laws which make it virtually impossible for debtors to wipe the slate clean and start again.
Last March, the European Court of Justice ruled that Spain's legislation was in breach of EU consumer protection laws because it did not allow judges to halt evictions, even if mortgage contracts contained unfair terms. These abusive terms, referred to by the court ruling, include high penalties for late interest payments and eviction for missing just one or two payments on a 30-year mortgage.
Apart from lobbying the government, the Platform runs a network of local assemblies where people can come for help. There are 65 in Catalonia alone and 150 across the country.
I go along to a packed out meeting in a large garage in a run-down part of Barcelona. Desperate and defeated looking people listen intently to the speakers and scribble notes.
As the microphone is handed around and person after person gets up to tell his or her story, the scale of Spain's housing crisis becomes apparent.
A woman with a tear-stained face tells the meeting that her bank had initially promised she would pay no interest on the loan. Now she has been confronted with a steep bill and she is in a panic. "I will have to go back to Ecuador," she says between sobs. "How can I pay thousands of euros worth of interest on a cleaner's wages?"
The Platform's activists chairing the meeting tell her not to give up and explain how she can get detailed legal advice.
Police have been deployed to ensure evictions are carried out peacefully
Suddenly one of the activists reads a note handed to her and grabs the microphone. "Listen everybody! This is urgent," she says. "There's a family here that's going to be evicted on Wednesday morning at 8am and we have to be there to stop that happening."
Then she asks for a show of hands to see how many will support the direct action. There's a noisy discussion about bus routes and the best way to reach the property under threat.
Most of the people here tonight are first-timers. They are encouraged to become members and stand outside endangered homes when the bailiffs turn up. These demonstrations staged by the Platform have already stopped around 1,000 evictions.
Across Spain, though, some 350,000 families have been forced out of their homes since the property market crashed in 2008.
Word about the Platform spread, together with Ada Colau's popularity, when she appeared before a parliamentary committee on the mortgage. She reacted to a remark by a representative of the AEB, the Spanish Banking Association, by calling him a criminal.
The video went viral. Colau's twitter followers leapt to one hundred thousand and the Platform's website crashed. Her remark tapped into popular resentment about the role played by the banks which is deeply felt across the country.
Spain's property market crashed nearly six years ago
"He boasted that Spain has got the best mortgage system in the whole world," she recalls. "I couldn't believe it when it has caused so much suffering. It was an instinctive reaction but calling him a criminal was the least I could do!"
Juan Jose Toribio, an adviser to the Spanish Banking Association, says Colau's attack on his colleague was unjustified.
He says the banks stopped evicting the most vulnerable families in 2012. That change in policy came after a 53-year woman died jumping from her fourth-floor apartment in northern Spain, hours before she was due to be forced out of her home.
This new policy only suspends evictions for two years but the Platform says thousands of vulnerable families are still being made homeless. According to the Bank of Spain, evictions accelerated in the first half of last year when more than 35,000 Spanish homes were seized by banks for non-payment.
Toribio denies that the banks are to blame for the evictions crisis.
"Maybe the central bank set interest rates too low but people behaved irresponsibly when they borrowed too much. Some banks or certain bank employees may have been at fault for lending to people who couldn't repay. But we only realised that afterwards, when the recession came. Before that it wasn't so clear."
Such arguments cut no ice with Ada. The platform has gone on to stage demonstrations outside the homes of politicians and bankers, and to occupy empty apartment blocks owned by the banks.
I visit one in the city of Sabadel, an hour from Barcelona. It is owned by Sareb, a financial entity created by the Spanish government and 40% funded by the taxpayer which allows private banks to get rid of property they cannot sell.
The building, now home to several families, has both water and electricity. As Juan Mente, one of the new residents, shows me his sleek kitchen, I wonder if it is fair that he pays no rent?
"These flats were partly paid for with taxpayers' money, so we have a right to be here," he says. "Anyway it makes no sense to have thousands of empty flats while people, including sick people and children, are living on the street."
He and his wife would be willing to pay a fair rent calculated according to household income, he says, but the banks and Sareb refuse to negotiate.
Ada Colau, who has been called a "Nazi" by some members of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party, and "an angel" by her supporters, says she fits neither description.
"I'm not particularly intelligent, I'm not powerful. I'm just a normal person and that's what worries them most. It just shows how much power normal citizens can have," she says.
When I ask if she is a thorn in the side of the government, she gives a throaty laugh. "In Spain we have another expression - a grain of sand in the bum! But we will never give up our fight for justice - that is absolutely certain."
North Korea's leaders are often thought of as ruthless, secretive autocrats but rarely as popular children's authors. However, between issuing instructions about prison camps and the development of nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-un's father and grandfather apparently found time to write stories for the young.
"At last the left cyst burst, emitting fierce flames and the captain fell down, dejectedly dropping his club. At that moment a loud battle cry was heard from outside. Villagers killed the rest of the bandits."
This is an extract from Boys Wipe Out Bandits by Kim Jong-il - North Korea's "Dear Leader" who died in 2011.
Kim Jong-il and his father, Kim Il-sung, recognised the power of books and they are both credited with writing children's stories.
This one is "an extraordinarily violent and exuberant tale," says Christopher Richardson, who is researching North Korean children's literature at Sydney University.
Illustration from Boys Wipe Out Bandits
It is a story "of reactionaries and bandits and gluttons lurking in the hills of North Korea, predating on the pure-hearted and virtuous villagers who incarnate all of the traditional virtues of the North Korean revolution," he says.
The heroes are a group of brave youngsters who stand up to the bandits. Despite its political message, Richardson thinks it would be wrong to dismiss tales like this simply as propaganda.
"They can be quite fun to read and they're actually quite good yarns, and I imagine children aren't even that aware of the ideological content," he says.
"If you made a cartoon of Boys Wipe Out Bandits and showed it to a bunch of Western six-year-olds or eight-year-olds they'd go nuts for it. They'd love it because it's the same kind of silly violent nonsense that boys everywhere tend to like."
Kim Jong-il also wrote a treatise on literature dedicating a chapter to children's books - he favoured the use of parables and satire to criticise enemies of the state.
The villains in the stories vary - in Boys Wipe Out Bandits they are wayward Koreans behaving like feudal landlords, not thinking of the collective, out of touch with the revolution and Juche culture.
The Juche ideology, developed and promoted by Kim Il-sung, sees man as the master of everything with the power and responsibility to make the revolution a success. It values North Korean self-reliance and independence from foreign powers.
There are plenty of anti-American tales reflecting this philosophy, such as The Butterfly and The Cock, a fable ostensibly first told by Kim Il-sung and later written down.
It tells how a cockerel - symbolising the US - tries to ruin an idyllic garden and bully the other animals but a plucky young butterfly - representing North Korea - stands up to the invader and saves the day.
Foreign marauders from an earlier age feature in another of Kim Il-sung's tales, A Winged Horse. The book recalls a time when the country was threatened by Japanese invaders and pokes fun at samurai with unflattering descriptions and illustrations.
This time a cherubic child comes to the rescue riding a flying horse, willing to sacrifice his own life for his village.
Richardson questions whether the leaders really wrote these books themselves. His scepticism is echoed by Lee Hyeon-seo who grew up in North Korea but left when she was 17. She has clear memories of the books she and her schoolmates were given when they were young.
The tales she remembers most clearly recounted Kim Il-sung's heroic battles against the Japanese "and some ridiculous stories about Kim Jong-il... when he was five he killed some enemies - he just shot them down," she says.
Kim Il-sung (left) led North Korea from 1948 to 1994 - he was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il (right)
"It's impossible but we just believed as children because for us they are not human beings, they are like our Gods."
The books "don't usually tell the truth, they usually tell all the fake things," says Lee. She was taught that the US had colonised South Korea and executed students, South Koreans were begging, couldn't afford to go to school and that healthcare in the south was so expensive patients died outside hospitals.
Some books by state approved authors are based on real events - Dean Captured recounts how a US officer was caught in the Korean War
When she was very young, Lee was allowed to read foreign picture books such as Cinderella. As she grew up, though, she found that some books were restricted - texts about Lenin and Marx were banned, for example, as they discussed an alternative approach to communism.
The current leader, Kim Jong-un, is aware that he needs to find a way to keep today's children and teenagers loyal to the state his grandfather created. He has invested in a new water park and cinemas.
Western influences have occasionally crept in. State television has shown the odd Western movie, such as Madagascar, and two years ago Disney characters danced on stage at a concert by the Moranbong band - a girl group put together by Kim Jong-un himself.
Richardson says this decision not to quarantine foreign culture was revolutionary - but short-lived.
"Since then, there has been a swing more or less back in the other direction," he says. The state is "very paranoid about the corrosive effect of foreign children's culture," and is hoping that giving people a small taste of the West will be enough to keep them satisfied.
Christopher Richardson spoke to World Update on the BBC World Service.
Can online pound shops recreate the bargain-hunting experience of the High Street?
Selling triple packs of Mars Bars, kitchen sponge scourers, Elvis calendars and multipacks of marble-effect party balloons, pound shops have done well out of the UK's recession.
While retailers like Woolworths, Comet and Jessops went to the wall, names like Poundland, Pound World and 99p Stores took over the UK High Street, stacking cheap and cheerful goods high and flogging them to Britain's growing army of austerity-hit bargain hunters.
99p Stores started as a single shop in Holloway, north London, in 2001 and now has more than 200 outlets turning over £270m a year.
Poundland, the biggest chain, opened its 450th store last year and is planning a £750m flotation on the London Stock Exchange.
Now, at least two businesses are hoping to replicate that success, but this time on the internet.
'Real challenges'
Last week Pound World, the UK's third-biggest pound shop chain, joined forces with Poundland founder Steve Smith to launch Poundshop.com, a website offering the pound shop experience on the web.
Hereforapound.com tries to mimic the experience of browsing a pound shop
That came a week after the launch of a similar site - Hereforapound.com.
But can pound shops work online? Many retail analysts are sceptical.
"It could work, but it has some real challenges to overcome," says Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at the consultancy Conlumino.
The strengths of the pound shop business model, he argues, are exactly the things that are problematic in online retail.
"A lot of shopping in pound shops is impulse - you go in looking for something, you see other things in front of you and they end up in your basket. That's difficult to replicate online," he says.
Secondly, the profit margins on pound shop merchandise are notoriously low, meaning you need to sell a large volume of goods without spending too much on things like processing, packaging and shipping that are a costly part of online retailing.
Not profitable
"It doesn't work because, once you factor in the extra costs, you erode your profit margin," Mr Saunders says. "When you translate it to online the numbers don't stack up."
Retail analysts say it is a broad misconception that online retailing is a hugely profitable business.
While clothing retailers like Asos, or those selling high-end electronics, have turned a profit, those selling lower margin goods often do not.
The food delivery company Ocado has yet to deliver a profit, despite huge levels of investment. and budget clothing firm Primark has pulled out after a failed online trial. Even Amazon, Mr Saunders points out, while fast-growing, is not a particularly profitable company.
"Most online grocery stores don't make money," says David Gray, a retail analyst at Planet Retail. "With non-food you can make money but it depends on the product."
He argues retailers are rushing to establish an online presence because they believe in the importance of having an internet presence - a notion that has been "exaggerated".
"It's cyclical," he says. "At the moment the internet is a big thing, but it's not going to take over all of retail.
"You do need an online presence to promote your business, but it's not necessarily something you're going to make money out of."
Browsing experience
This has not dissuaded Donna Baker, the managing director of Hereforapound.com.
Poundland has seen huge expansion on the High Street, but has yet to move online
In the first week of trading she says the company brought in £28,000 worth of orders - ahead of its own expectations - and says feedback from customers has been positive.
"Shipping is a great convenience to our customers," she says. "Especially some who are housebound or disabled."
The company charges a flat fee of £3.50 for delivery, but offers free delivery for orders over £20.
Ms Baker says around a third of customers so far have bought enough items to get the free delivery.
Furthermore, she says they tend to buy a range of products from around the site, rather than buying one or two things in bulk volumes, suggesting they are mimicking the experience of browsing around a real pound shop.
The site is designed to encourage that. "It's crucial to get as many products on the page as possible at the same time," Ms Baker says.
"People are able to scroll through as many products as possible, and it's quick and easy to add items to the basket, like shopping in a High Street shop."
But Planet Retail's David Gray fears that the pound shop model is simply not suited to making money online.
"I'm not convinced," he says.
"It doesn't make business sense if you don't make money on the sales. The lifeblood of pound shops is passing trade - and you don't get passing trade online."
The British architects who tried to change the world
Many of the world's most striking modern buildings from the past 60 years have been created by a single generation of six British architects - each known for their distinctive high-tech style.
Sir Michael Hopkins, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Lord (Norman) Foster, Lady Patricia Hopkins, Lord (Richard) Rogers and Sir Terry Farrell have designed bustling international airports, futuristic financial headquarters and cultural centres which draw visitors from across the globe.
Now - to mark the opening of a brand new gallery at the Royal Institute of British Architects in central London - their achievements are being celebrated in a new exhibition. Take a look with Hugh Pearman - editor of the Riba Journal and Sunday Times architecture critic.
In the wider economy too, women are paid less than men 
Gloria De Piero said Labour could have done better in the past 
