West End: Odeon Marble Arch Virgin Trocadero Warner Village West End

West End: Odeon Marble Arch, Virgin Trocadero, Warner Village West End. And local cinemasTHIS YEAR’S LOVE (18)Director: David KaneStarring: Douglas Henshall, Kathy Burke,Jennifer Ehle, Ian Hart, Emily Woof,Catherine McCormackA cast of Britain’s finest (Kathy Burke, Ian Hart, Doug Henshall et al) weave to and fro through David Kane’s Camden-set essay on urban romance. The plot is airy and simple: six disparate middle-youth types criss-cross each other over a period of three years; their bungled bed-hopping and snatched moments of human contact scored to a voguish pop soundtrack (Garbage, Morcheeba, Mercury Rev). Hart excels as a nerdish outcast, Burke as a nurturing, rough-diamond pub singer. All are well-served by Kane’s generally witty and well-observed screenplay. It’s just that This Year’s Love doesn’t quite know when to quit, cranking what might have been a sublime one-hour teleplay into double its natural length Still, that’s modern romance for you You can’t fit it into tidy little boxes.

West End: Barbican Screen, Clapham Picture House, Odeon Camden Town, Odeon Kensington, Odeon Marble Arch, Odeon Swiss Cottage, Odeon West End, Ritzy Cinema, UCI Whiteleys, Virgin Chelsea And local cinemasXan Brooks. HOPES OF a Kosovo peace deal by today’s deadline were fading last night as diplomats, aid workers and peace monitors left Yugoslavia, and Slobodan Milosevic refused to meet the chief mediator, the American envoy Christopher Hill. The prospect of imminent Nato raids against Serbia is looming large “Nato is ready to take whatever measures are necessary … these include air-strikes,” the secretary-general of the alliance, Javier Solana, said.
Mr Hill went to Belgrade for a last-ditch effort to persuade the Yugoslav president to allow Nato peace-keepers into the Serbian province and thus remove the main obstacle to a settlement at the Rambouillet talks by thedeadline of 11am GMT.If Mr Milosevic does not relent, strikes against military targets could be launched in days, conceivably hours – a message conveyed in a personal telephone call by the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, on Thursday. But Mr Milosevic showed no sign of blinking, telling a Cypriot delegation that Belgrade would not give up Kosovo “even if we are bombed”.President Bill Clinton said yesterday that he saw no option but to use force against Yugoslavia if it fails to embrace a peace agreement on Kosovo, and he rejected extending today’s deadline to reach an accord “We … stand united in our determination to use force if Serbia fails to meet its previous commitment to withdraw forces from Kosovo, and if it fails to accept the peace agreement,” Mr Clinton said at a news conference in Washington with the French President, Jacques Chirac.Mr Chirac urged Mr Milosevic to “choose the path of wisdom and not the path of war”.While Nato has drawn up plans for raids, planners recognise that conflict with Belgrade would be fraught with danger. Some 430 warplanes, including 260 US aircraft – among them F-117 Stealth bombers, B-52s and B-2 bombers, are massed, on 48-hour standby, to attack in Nato’s Operation Noble Anvil.Mr Milosevic has tried to exploit divisions within the Contact Group of countries in the negotiations, and Russia, his traditional friend in the six-nation body, has been voicing ever louder its opposition not only to air strikes, but also to the presence of Nato peace-keepers.As Mr Milosevic spoke, thebrinkmanship intensified, with foreign missions in Belgrade withdrawing non-essential staff.

Several governments, including Britain, the US and Germany, advised their nationals not to go to Yugoslavia, and to leave if they were already there.At the same time, dignitaries – including Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, co-chairman of the conference, which started on 6 February – were arriving in Rambouillet for its end. But an admission of failure seemed in store rather than the announcement of a deal granting Kosovo wide autonomy and ending a year-long war that has killed 2,000 and driven 300,000 people from their homes.”It looks very tough to reach a settlement, but we will be making every effort right down to the wire,” Mr Cook said as he left for Paris, where he was to meet his French counterpart and co-chairman, Hubert Vedrine, and possibly Mrs Albright.Closing one possible avenue of compromise, the Russian mediator, the Deputy Foreign Minister, Boris Mayorsky, denied that Russia was trying to win over Mr Milosevic by offering to deploy its own troops in the planned 28,000-strong force.Complicating matters further, some negotiators for the ethnic Albanians, who constitute 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo, were criticising a deal they had earlier seemed to accept. Angry at the absence of any reference in the 60-page final draft agreement to a referendum that would lead to independence, they accused the Western mediators of excessively favouring Belgrade.If the Albanians balk at the deal, punishing Mr Milosevic alone would be much harder for Nato to justify.. GORDON BROWN is throwing his weight behind calls this week by rock stars, headed by Bono and David Bowie, and the boxing legend Muhammad Ali to cancel huge amounts of Third World debt. The Chancellor of the Exchequer will today appeal to his counterparts among the Group of Seven finance ministers to slash the burden of poor countries’ debts by $50bn (pounds 31bn) by the end of the millennium.
At the G7 meeting in Bonn, Mr Brown will table fresh proposals to speed up aid. He wants all the needy countries to be on a systematic programme of debt reduction by 2000. He will also call for a clear link between debt relief and aid to the poor to ensure that cancelled debt repayments are channelled into health, education and economic development, rather than the pockets of self-serving political elites.Mr Brown said that he would also be renewing his call for the International Monetary Fund to sell some of its gold reserves to finance the debt relief.

It has already been proposed that the IMF sell five million ounces but Mr Brown said he believed that should be higher.Bono, the lead singer of the pop group U2, and Mr Ali were in Britain earlier this week to support Jubilee 2000, a campaign calling for $371bn of debts owed by the poorest nations to be cancelled by the end of the millennium.Ann Pettifor, director of Jubilee 2000, said: “The Chancellor is responding directly to Bono and Muhammad Ali and that’s great news. $50bn to be wiped off the debt mountain of $371bn is a good start. But there is still a long way to go.”Ian Bray, a spokesman for Oxfam, which is also involved in the campaign, said: “The political train is leaving now. Politically it is important that the Chancellor is putting his head on the block.”He welcomed the Chancellor linking debt relief to where the money is spent “Debt write-off is not an end in itself It is kids in schools. Kids that get vaccinated, that is the test.”Mr Brown, speaking yesterday, admitted that the proposals fell short of the demands being made by Mr Ali’s campaign.

But he insisted that they were “practical measures” which had a real chance of being implemented.He pointed out that recently Gerhard Schroder, the German Chancellor, and Al Gore, the US Vice-President, have expressed broad support.Mr Brown and Clare Short, the Overseas Development Minister, wrote this week to the World Bank and the IMF, urging them to back his reforms.. IT COULD turn out to be the ultimate GM nightmare for a British biotechnology company, whose employees were pictured on the front of a national newspaper eating genetically modified tomatoes. The photograph in The Daily Telegraph of Dr Nigel Poole and colleagues from Zeneca Plant Science showed the scientists munching their way through whole tomatoes, seeds included. Now the company is to be reported to the Government’s health and safety watchdog for possible breach of the regulations governing the escape of GM organisms into the environment.
Officials fear that the seeds of the GM tomatoes could have passed straight through the digestive systems of the Zeneca staff and germinated in a sewage farm somewhere in deepest Berkshire.Professor John Beringer, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, said yesterday that he has no option but to report Zeneca to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which is responsible for prosecutions under the regulations governing the containment of GM plants and animals.”If they were knowingly eating the tomatoes including the seeds then they are probably bringing about a release to the environment,” Professor Beringer said. “My colleagues are uncertain whether it would be examined as a breach of the containment regulations, or whether it would be deemed a deliberate release. It’s probably a breach of containment.”Dr Poole told the newspaper that over the past 10 years about 40 staff at Zeneca have eaten fresh GM tomatoes, which have not been approved for sale in Britain except in a tomato puree where the seeds are destroyed in the process. His wife and two grown-up children have also been willing guinea pigs.