Strictly's Len Goodman has an unlikely link to the Titanic, writes Sam Wollaston

There's an awful lot of Titanic around in the next couple of weeks. Well, it was a big ship, a bigger disaster, and this is a big anniversary. Weirdest of all offerings, surely, is this one: Titanic with Len Goodman (BBC1). What is this, Strictly Come Drowning? Ah, but there's something I didn't know about the Strictly judge: he used to be a welder at shipbuilders Harland and Wolff. Not actually in Belfast where Titanic was built, but at the docks in London. That's good enough for me: take it away, Len.

In any case it's a lovely programme; programmes, in fact, because there are two more to come. He goes to Belfast, stands on the slipway, and in the dry dock, a vast void that echoes to the cries of 1,514 lost souls and, perhaps louder still, the eight workers who were killed here during construction, before the ship even reached the water. That's what Len's doing here – focusing on some of the lesser-known stories. They're human stories, like what Titanic meant to the people of Belfast and Southampton, and how utterly crap the White Star line was at looking after the employees who survived. Of course, he takes a special interest in his own two professional areas of expertise: the entertainment on board, the band that famously kept playing, and also the construction of the ship, essentially how bits of metal were joined together. Riveting.

The first series of Twenty Twelve (BBC2), which went out on BBC4 last year, was underwhelming; "nibbling satire", I think I said – rather brilliantly, if I may say so – rather than biting satire. The fact that real Olympic overlord Seb Coe was happy to take part is not a good sign (and he appears here again). I doubt he'd agree to be in The Thick of It. Its transfer to BBC2 hasn't changed things much: it hasn't become more off-message or less gentle. But Jessica Hynes, who plays the hopeless head of brands, is still fabulous. And the final scene, a disastrous video conference with the Algerian representative, is wonderful. Literally LOL.

UK politics has been governed by Thatcherism for decades. Galloway's triumph should force people to rethink their passivity

George Galloway's stunning electoral triumph in the Bradford by-election has shaken the petrified world of English politics. It was unexpected, and for that reason the Respect campaign was treated by much of the media (Helen Pidd of the Guardian being an honourable exception) as a loony fringe show. A BBC toady, an obviously partisan compere on a local TV election show, who tried to mock and insult Galloway, should be made to eat his excremental words. The Bradford seat, a Labour fiefdom since 1973, was considered safe and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had been planning a celebratory visit to the city till the news seeped through at 2 am. He is now once again focused on his own future. Labour has paid the price for its failure to act as an opposition, having imagined that all it had to do was wait and the prize would come its way. Scottish politics should have forced a rethink. Perhaps the latest development in English politics now will, though I doubt it. Galloway has effectively urinated on all three parties. The Lib Dems and Tories explain their decline by the fact that too many people voted!

Thousands of young people infected with apathy, contempt, despair and a disgust with mainstream politics were dynamised by the Respect campaign. Galloway is tireless on these occasions. Nobody else in the political field comes even close to competing with him – not simply because he is an effective orator, though this skill should not be underestimated. It comes almost as a shock these days to a generation used to the bland untruths that are mouthed every day by government and opposition politicians. It was the political content of the campaign that galvanised the youth: Respect campaigners and their candidate stressed the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war criminal, and that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan without further delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labour party for the austerity measures targeting the less well off, the poor and the infirm, and the new privatisations of education, health and the Post Office. It was all this that gave him a majority of 10,000.

How did we get here? Following the collapse of communism in 1991, Edmund Burke's notion that "In all societies, consisting of different classes, certain classes must necessarily be uppermost," and that "The apostles of equality only change and pervert the natural order of things," became the commonsense wisdom of the age. Money corrupted politics, and big money corrupted it absolutely. Throughout the heartlands of capital, we witnessed the emergence of effective coalitions: as ever, the Republicans and Democrats in the United States; New Labour and Tories in the vassal state of Britain; socialists and conservatives in France; the German coalitions of one variety or another, with the greens differentiating themselves largely as ultra-Atlanticists; and the Scandinavian centre-right and centre-left with few differences, competing in cravenness before the empire. In virtually every case the two- or three-party system morphed into an effective national government. A new market extremism came into play. The entry of capital into the most hallowed domains of social provision was regarded as a necessary reform. Private financial initiatives that punished the public sector became the norm and countries (such as France and Germany) that were seen as not proceeding fast enough in the direction of the neoliberal paradise were regularly denounced in the Economist and the Financial Times.

To question this turn, to defend the public sector, to argue in favour of state ownership of utilities or to challenge the fire sale of public housing was to be regarded as a dinosaur.

British politics has been governed by the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher during the locust decades of the 80s and 90s, since New Labour accepted the basic tenets of Thatcherism (its model was the New Democrats' embrace of Reaganism). Those were the roots of the extreme centre, which encompasses both centre-left and centre-right and exercises power, promoting austerity measures that privilege the wealthy, and backing wars and occupations abroad. President Obama is far from isolated within the Euro-American political sphere. New movements are now springing up at home, challenging political orthodoxies without offering one of their own. They're little more than a scream for help.

Respect is different. It puts forward a leftist social-democratic programme that challenges the status quo and is loud in its condemnation of imperial misdeeds. In other words, it is not frightened by politics. Its triumph in Bradford should force some to rethink their passivity and others to realise that there are ways in which the Occupiers of yesteryear can help to break the political impasse.

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Unpaid contributors knew position, rules judge as plaintiff says bloggers need to 'set standard for future' in dealings with media

Bloggers hoping to put themselves on a more robust financial footing and close the gap between them and fully paid journalists are vowing to fight on after a New York court dismissed their multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the Huffington Post calling for compensation for exploitation of its army of unpaid commentators.

The ruling, slipped out relatively unnoticed at the end of last week, dismisses the argument made by a group of bloggers that their unremunerated contributions had provided a substantial part of the value of the Huffington Post and that they should therefore be entitled to some of the spoils of the site's sale to AOL for $315m. The bloggers demanded a third of the sale price, $105m, in compensation.

John Koeltl, who presides over a US district court in New York, rejected the argument outright. He ruled that the bloggers had been fully aware that their work was to be unpaid when they signed up for it, and so any compensation would be to rewrite the terms of their engagement retrospectively.

The lawsuit was launched last April by a labour activist and writer, Jonathan Tasini, who posted more than 200 unpaid columns for the HuffPo before the AOL deal went through. He framed the suit as a class action on behalf of an estimated 9,000 bloggers for the website. Now living in Sydney, where he is writing a book and blogging at www.workinglife.org, Tasini told the Australian newspaper that he planned to keep up the fight for compensation. "We're using the lawsuit to spark a movement and an organising effort among bloggers to set a standard for the future because this idea that all individual creators should work for free is like a cancer spreading through every media property on the globe."

In his ruling, Koeltl writes: "No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to the Huffington Post for publication and the plaintiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation.

"The plaintiffs entered into their transactions with the defendants with full knowledge of the facts and no expectation of compensation other than exposure. In such circumstances, equity and good conscience counsel against retroactively altering the parties' clear agreements."

Since its founding by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer in 2005, the HuffPo has vehemently resisted criticisms that it was abusing the goodwill of liberal commentators and activists to run a current affairs commentary and aggregation site on the cheap.

It claims that its bloggers use the site as a "platform to connect and ensure that their ideas and views are seen by as many people as possible".

The suit also goes to the heart of a long-term question hanging over the blogosphere. As journalism opens up to a vastly larger pool of writers and commentators, how can the distinction between paid media employees and unpaid bloggers be sustained?

Nobody has the answer to that question, which will continue to be a talking point for years to come. Koeltl is firm on the matter, however: he rejected the lawsuit "with prejudice" – meaning that the bloggers who brought it will not have a second chance to argue the point.

But Tasini told the Australian there was a central principle at stake. "The fundamental question is: how are individual creators going to make a living, and how are they going to create new content that is the basis of culture, democracy and knowledge?"

Why not merge the London Evening Standard and the Independent to create a single, 24-hour newspaper?

Evgeny Lebedev gets all the best jobs. First he gets to appoint a new editor of the Independent – Chris Blackhurst; now, after an interesting month behind the scenes, Sarah Sands has become editor of the London Evening Standard. One might have thought this was an easy bit of elevation, but it seems Sands, underwhelmed with Evgeny's desire to take his time, told him she would quit and join the Standard's outgoing editor, Geordie Greig, at the Mail on Sunday. Suddenly the younger Lebedev had to move more quickly, although he was still eager to contact some influential Londoners to see what they thought, which is either admirably consultative, or leaves the proprietor open to suggestions of external manipulation.

It is five weeks before a mayoral election, so the fact that the London mayor, Boris Johnson, is an unashamed Sands fan could not have gone unnoticed. He had the chance, on a visit to the paper's office on 7 March, to press his case in person; Sands is close to his wife, Marina, and used to edit, or handle, Johnson's column at the Daily Telegraph. This sort of closeness might attract the interest of Lord Justice Leveson's third module (the juicy one with Cameron and Blair), although it does not give Sands's long experience as a senior editor and journalist much credit if you simply believe that friendship with the mayor makes her his stooge. Sands is clearly qualified, and nobody should assume that Johnson has been a great hit with the Lebedevs. An ill-judged joke he made about the KGB is not understood to have helped relations.

Increasingly, party politics can be overrated in journalism: the future for newspapers lies less in slavish loyalty than in getting closer to readers and developing fresh commercial and digital strategies. The decision to take the Standard free after acquiring it from the Rothermeres was a near masterstroke, turning a title that lost north of £20m a year into a paper that is almost profitable. But this is not the moment to sit back, even if there is Olympics gold coming: nearly profitable may not be enough for the owners in 2013 because there are losses elsewhere.

No doubt the Lebedevs have deep pockets, with their mix of Aeroflot stakes and potato farms, but the Independent is running up losses of £20m a year. Its full-rate sales hover at 70,000 in a sharply declining quality print market, and while the i provides a second outlet, its 20p price means its 207,000 sales generate modest revenues. That may not matter if the family want to write cheques, but losing money is not always fun.

One dismal (but perhaps necessary) option could be to more tightly integrate the Standard and the Independent. A merger of sorts has been tried with the sports and the business desks, and this appears to be working. Why not go further, rationalising operations in news? Why not create a single 24-hour paper: paid-for in the morning but free in the afternoon? Or does the appointment of a new editor mean this sort of thinking is off the agenda? We shall see.

Digital, too, can't be ducked. Perhaps it is too late, but it seems extraordinary that no low-cost, scrappy new entrant type operation has turned up and taken on old Fleet Street. Surely the Mail (in the No 1 spot), Guardian (2), Telegraph (3) pattern is not perpetually entrenched. Certainly both the Independent (622,000 daily uniques) and above all the Standard (160,000 daily uniques) could do something different, maybe with a heavy emphasis on liveblogs, which is where the readers are.

Editorial clearly matters (well, you are reading this still) but having the best stories and the most gregarious editors is simply not enough in the next decade. Whenever the Standard or Independent has done well, it is by upending conventional thinking. Sympathy, or otherwise, from mayors is barely relevant.

Our critics' picks of this week's openings, plus your last chance to see and what to book now

• Which cultural events are in your diary this week? Tell us in the comments below

Opening this week

Theatre

In a Garden
The Ustinov's ambitious season of modern American plays continues with the British premiere of Howard Korder's play about an American architect summoned to a Middle Eastern country to fulfil an impossible commission. Richard Beecham directs a tale of dangerous misunderstandings. Ustinov, Bath (01225 448844), Wednesday until 5 May.

Film

Into the Abyss (dir. Werner Herzog)
Werner Herzog probes the dark heart of humanity with his death-row interviews. Why do people kill?

Dance

The Royal Ballet: Mixed Bill
The Royal at their adventurous best, with new works by Liam Scarlett and Wayne McGregor, plus a revival of Wheeldon's classy, intelligent Polophonia. Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), Thursday until 23 April.

The Eifman Ballet: Anna Karenina (Tue-Weds) Onegin (Fri)
Big, passionate storytelling from this St Petersburg-based company. London Coliseum, WC2 (0871 911 0200), Tuesday until 7 April.

Classical

St John Passion
Stephen Layton's performances with his choir Polyphony and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are regularly among the best of the annual crop of Easter passions; Ian Bostridge takes the role of the Evangelist this time. St John's, Smith Square, London SW1 (020-7222 1061), Friday.

Aldeburgh Easter Weekend
Beethoven is this year's focus; Elisabeth Leonskaja's performances of the last three piano sonatas are flanked by performances of the Ninth Symphony, with the Britten-Pears Orchestra conducted by Ben Parry, and Schoenberg's rarely heard choral piece Friede auf Erden providing the prologue. Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh (01728 687110), Friday to Sunday.

Jazz

Oxford Jazz festival

Lively, week-long international festival, including Swedish jazz singer Cecilia Stalin (exploring new vocal settings for classic John Coltrane themes) at the Ashmolean Dining Room on Thursday, innovative young guitarist Kristian Borring at COPA on Friday, and a full Easter weekend programme – headlined by bass star Michael Janisch's international group, the New York Standards Quartet at Oxford Playhouse on 7 April. Various venues, Oxford, 1-7 April.

Pop

The Futureheads
In the wake of their a cappella album, Rant – a pretty bold move by anyone's standards – the Futureheads embark on an acoustic and a cappella tour. Tour begins Monday, Komedia Brighton (01273 647100).

Orbital
There's something rather pleasing about the way the reformed Orbital have gone from providing a night out for disco dads to a genuine musical force once more: new album Wonky may actually be their best. Tour begins Thursday, Manchester Academy (0161-832 1111).

Visual art

Remote Control
Exploring the impact television has had on culture, this is more than just artists on the box. This huge group show channel-surfs Richard Hamilton and Richard Serra, Adrian Piper, Taryn Simon, Mark Leckey and many others, from the 60s to the present. ICA, London SW1 (020-7930 3647), Tuesday to 10 June.

Last chance to see

Theatre

Romeo and Juliet
Young, fresh, vibrant and completely heartbreaking, and you can't often say that about Shakespeare's over-familiar tale of star-crossed lovers. A memorable revival from director Robert Icke and Headlong. Hull Truck (01482 323638), until Saturday.

Film

Michael (dir. Markus Schleinzer)
This brilliant and bizarre drama, inspired by the Fritzl and Kampusch cases, shows the banal life of a paedophile. The suspense is unbearable.

Jazz

Get the Blessing
Vivacious jazz-rock band driven by Portishead's rhythm section plays mix of Ornette Coleman-influenced jazz, Morricone-like atmospherics and old-school twangy guitar rock from new OC DC album. Ronnie Scott's, London W1 (020-7439 0747), Tuesday.

Pop

Le Beat Bespoke Weekender
The Pretty Things, the Sorrows, July, the Poets and the Trashmen: if these are the kind of vintage names that excite you, then this mammoth annual mod/psych event offers nirvana. 229, London W1 (020-7323 7229), Thursday to Sunday.

Kylie Minogue
Who would have thought, 25 years ago, that Kylie Minogue might celebrate her silver jubilee by playing gigs consisting entirely of B-sides, demos and rarities? Tour ends Monday, Manchester Academy (0161-832 1111).

Visual art

Thomas Demand Model Studies
Demand photographs models of real and imagined places – this time working with rediscovered architectural models by celebrated US architect John Lautner (1911-94). Images of haunting, mysterious, decaying places. Nottingham Contemporary (0115-948 9750), until 15 April.

Book now

Theatre

Professor Vanessa's Wondershow
The era of the 1930s and 40s circus sideshow is recreated in a show that will take over the Roundhouse's main space and invite audiences to step back in time. Gawp at the headless lady and the electrifying 27,000-volt girl, and marvel at the human insect circus performers. Roundhouse, London NW1 (0844 482 8008), 23-29 April.

Wonderland
Alice gets a makeover, in an adults-only new piece from the ever-inventive Vanishing Point, which looks at what happens when a young girl leaves home in search of fame and stardom. A tale of dreams, temptations and curiosity. Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (0131-473 2000), 29 August to 1 September.

The Sunshine Boys
It's not so much Neil Simon's tale of a legendary vaudevillian double act that is the draw here as the casting, which is very tasty indeed. Thea Sharrock directs Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths in this tale of showbiz rivalries. Savoy, London WC2 (0844 871 7687), 27 April until 28 July.

Film

This Must Be the Place (dir. Paolo Sorrentino)
Paolo Sorrentino's English-language debut has Sean Penn as a retired Goth rocker living in Dublin. News about his father sends him on an American quest.

Dance

International Dance Festival Birmingham
Birmingham's month-long dance programme brings UK revivals for hit shows like Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant's Push, a solo for Louise LeCavalier created by Nigel Charnock, and the premiere of a new work featuring the disabled dance virtuoso David Toole. Various venues, from 23 April until 19 May.

Classical

Einstein on the Beach
Some seats still available for the UK premiere of Philip Glass's groundbreaking stage work, in a recreation of Robert Wilson's original 1976 production. Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), 4-13 May.

Jazz

Esperanza Spalding

Charismatic young Grammy-winning vocalist/bassist Spalding brings her 12-piece band to London, showcasing songs from her April album release, Radio Music Society. With her stage presence, acoustic-bass virtuosity, graceful vocals and seamless fusion of jazz, pop and classical chamber music, Spalding has star power written all over her. Koko, London, NW1 (0870 432 5527), 28 May.

Pop

Madonna

Whether you think MDNA represents a return to classic form or a more modest achievement, Madonna's UK tour is bound to be one of the summer's biggest musical events. Tour begins 17 July, Hyde Park, London (0844 576 5483).

Visual art

Glasgow international festival of visual art
Interactive art by Jeremy Deller, Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, Richard Wright drawings, LA-based installationist Kelly Nipper at Tramway, a new film co-commissioned with Scottish Ballet by Rosalind Nashashibi, and much more, at venues throughout Scotland's funkiest city. What's not to like? Various venues, 20 April to 7 May.

Brixton Academy, London

Myth has it that, when This Is Spinal Tap was released, some people thought the titular hair-metal dorks were a real band. California quartet Steel Panther have obviously taken the film as the starting point for their own odyssey into 1980s hard-rock excess. Though their act is supposedly a sendup, they've parlayed it into a fulltime career, with each UK tour visiting bigger venues. Tonight's end-of-tour sellout is notable for the number of male fans wearing wigs – at least, you hope they're wigs – and Lycra leggings, in joyous homage to the men who call themselves Michael Starr, Satchel, Lexxi Foxxx and Stix Zadinia.

Eighties-style glam-metal hardly needs parodying, given that Mötley Crüe and Poison still do it adequately themselves, but Steel Panther, plugging the album Balls Out, take it a step further. Their speciality subject is sex, and every song tonight, along with the banter, is about doing it, recovering from it, and doing it again. But they evidently believe calling it satire gives them license to go where even the Crüe wouldn't nowadays. It's not just that a matter of playing tunes entitled Asian Hooker, Gold Digging Whore and Fat Girl; Starr and Satchel also fill the gaps between songs by asking "slutty girls" to "show us your vagina", and rewarding them by inviting them on stage.

The whole thing seems to be Steel Panther's howl of protest against political correctness, with a comedy veneer as an excuse. The dozen girls on stage clearly don't feel demeaned; if anything, they probably can't wait to tweet that they've just been up there, wriggling to the song It Won't Suck Itself. But the band – who, incidentally, are tight and economical players – are just too enthusiastic for this to be purely satirical.

Rating: 2/5

Singer from Harlem, New York, goes straight to top of UK chart with his debut album

A tenor singer from Harlem, New York, who used to be a receptionist at the city's famous Carnegie Hall, has become the first black singer to top the UK classical album chart in its 25-year history, his record company has said.

Noah Stewart, 31, who completed his debut run at London's Royal Opera House in Judith Weir's Miss Fortune last week, went straight to the No 1 slot with his debut album Noah.

The 31-year-old, who was supported financially as a young singer by the actor and producer Bill Cosby, said: "I'm very proud to be the first black musician to top the classical charts. It's both an honour and privilege."

Legendary singers, including American sopranos Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman – plus Willard White, the Jamaican-born baritone – helped establish black artists in the classical music field.

Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company, said there had been no other black artist at No 1 since the classical album chart launched in the late 1980s.

One of the highlights of Stewart's career so far has been appearing in Mozart's Requiem at Carnegie Hall where earlier, as a struggling singer working an assortment of jobs, he answered phones on reception.

His musical development began in Harlem, where he studied classical music at the Harlem School of the Arts.

At the age of 12, his choir teacher encouraged him to pursue a music career; he began doing voiceovers for Sesame Street and TV school specials and won first place in the New England music competition in Boston, before gaining a full scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York.

Perceived lapses in usage can ignite real anger in readers but getting the Guardian's facts right must always be our priority

We all know English is the vampire amoeba that never sleeps. That is, our reasoning brains know this; just as they know all languages absorb and mutate over time.

What seems harder is coping with individual changes in practice. When we watch a word lose the precision of meaning we were taught (decimate), or the fall into disuse of a supposed iron rule (compare with v compare to), perspective can fly out of the window and emotion rush in, often under the banner of Defending Civilised Values as We Were Taught Them at an Impressionable Age. Possibly by someone rather given – breakfast table? schoolroom? – to fulminations of a superior sort.

The readers' editor's postbag, reader@guardian.co.uk, testifies to the anger any lapse in Guardian usage can ignite. Not just outright misspellings but use of refute instead of rebut, disinterested instead of uninterested, hung instead of hanged. And yet... refute, disinterested, hanged, all three are visibly and audibly changing in daily use. In a few years, it's quite possible people will use them interchangeably with rebut, uninterested and hung. Losing much sleep over "inflammable", anyone?

This is not to advocate a free-for-all but to argue for balance, and a recognition that rules coexist with change.

Only a small minority of our incoming emails are about spelling and grammar – off the top of my head, well under 5% – and this makes sense, because the Guardian's error rate in these areas is statistically infinitesimal set against daily wordage published.

But these emails can be among the most abusive. "Stupid" and "ignorant" and "uneducated" are terms to be heard; an echo of how the present-day emailers were once addressed by the fulminators, I wonder? Some such emails also carry a not-so-veiled suggestion that shoddy writing typifies younger people; in our case, younger reporters and subeditors presumably. How all this sits with civilised values I'm not quite sure.

Yes, it's a subject that generates heat. So in this, the third of an informal set of Open door columns – 24 October 2011, 5 March and 2 April – reflecting aloud on how the corrections system works and what its priorities are, it's worth looking at where usage fits in the pecking order.

On a day-to-day basis, far less time is given to dealing with usage than in the late 1990s, when the corrections system was new and built around a newspaper instead of a giant website. Even in those days, fact came first. But today, factual errors are not thrown out with the day's paper, they live on digitally; putting them right is where most of our time and wo/manpower is focused. This is also the priority of readers who write in. Every newspaper prizes its fine stylists, yet also knows the bedrock of its journalistic reputation is factual reliability. (When it comes to use of English, the Guardian's Mind your language blog devotes itself to this subject exclusively and engrossingly at guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language).

Where we do aim to correct spelling errors in online pages is in headlines, or the names of people, places and organisations. We don't pretend to have the resources for micro-fixing every their and they're, or it's and its, or led and lead. When it comes to grammar, we try to correct if the error or imprecision has made the meaning very unclear.

In the corrections and clarifications column itself, a sense of proportion weighs strongly with me in highlighting poor usage. Noting repeat offences – principle v principal, say – seems worth doing from time to time. But I would almost never print a correction along these lines: "In a story about a targeted arson attack – Former spouse convicted in house fire that killed three children, page 3 – we said inferred when we meant implied." It would just seem a robotic denigration of the subject matter, not to mention the reporter's overall achievement (though we might well try to repair the online version).

Occasionally in such cases I have written explaining the absence of a published correction to any readers who complained; and occasionally a reply has come back along these lines: "Of course, I do understand. I saw the mistake, I just saw red. In fact, I thought the story was excellent. I forgot to say so." Spoken like a true Graunista.

Gold rush on hold as Olympics' neighbours in Stratford find few takers for £4,000-a-week home lets

Like plenty of their neighbours, Kate Greenslade and Gary Seabrook had heard the rumours. "There was a lot of talk that you could rent your place for £10,000 a week, that kind of figure," says Seabrook. "We thought we'd like to do a round-the-world trip, and this was an ideal opportunity."

The couple, who run a video production company together, have a bright, two-bedroom parkside flat a little over a mile from the Olympic stadium. But seven months after first putting the flat on a number of Olympic rentals websites, the couple this week dropped their price, from £3,000 a week, a figure arrived at by "pure guesswork", to £2,500. Despite plenty of inquiries about stays of two or three nights, and a booking for the week before the Olympics begin, no one has yet wanted to block book the property for the entire Games period – the only deal they will consider at present.

With the opening ceremony fast approaching, many homeowners are realising that the sublet bonanza promised by the Games may not be quite as lucrative as they expected.

"There has been so much hype about Olympic rentals," says Camilla Shaughnessy, owner of EventfulStays.com, which offers rentals for sporting and cultural fixtures around the country and regards the Olympics, she says, as "just another event". "Yes, they are happening, but it's not the big boom-time that everyone thinks. As it gets closer, yes it will get busier. But some people are being incredibly greedy when they are looking to rent their properties, and visitors are canny."

The problem, Seabrook thinks, is that compared to previous Olympics, many more people live close to London's site, "and it seems that since we put our house up, a lot of other people have jumped on the bandwagon". The result, he says, is that "pretty much all of London is up for rent at the moment".

Look on the internet and it can certainly feel that way. Specialist Olympics rentals sites – rentduringthegames.com, rentals4olympics.com, accommodationforthegames.com, London-property-rental-2012.com – have mushroomed over the past year, while estate agents report a surge in inquiries from property owners seeking to cash in on the Games goldrush.

A search on gumtree.co.uk for "Olympics and rent" in London reveals almost 3,500 private adverts; the company has said that asking prices for July 2012 were 445% up on last year. The property website Findaproperty.com last month estimated the total Olympics market for private sublets at £314m.

Gary Clark, director of London2012rentals.com, agrees that expectations are often wildly unrealistic. "The guide is that you can expect to get around three, four times normal rental rates. People are trying for seven, eight times that amount. If you are going to ask £3,000 for a small two-bed which is not great in terms of décor, you're a bit out of your depth. I keep saying, 'Look, there's money to be made here, but you're not going to retire on a week's rental.'" Some landlords in Stratford have been offering properties at 20 times their normal rental value, the Estates Gazette reported last week.

Many have underestimated how well supplied London and many of the other Olympic venues already are in terms of accommodation, according to David Leslie of VisitBritain.

"The homestay aspect is intriguing as a new offer to visitors, but we estimate that there are around 140,000 rooms available in London already, which is pretty hefty to be honest."

Even at peak times summer occupancy rates in recent years has hovered around 82%, he says. Olympics or no Olympics, total visitor numbers are expected to be down by 2-3 million compared to 2007.

Experts also point out that subletting your property may be forbidden under the terms of your mortgage, and might invalidate your home insurance. Some local authorities forbid holiday subletting without a costly "change of use" licence, which can take several months to acquire. Any rental income, in addition, is also subject to tax.

For well-priced properties, however, the demand is there, insists Clark. More than 1,000 people a day are currently visiting his site, he says – last week alone they registered traffic from 62 different countries. "We're anticipating a last minute rush of people waiting for the prices to start coming down.

"I still think this is really a once in a lifetime opportunity. There's never going to be such demand in such a short period of time."

Some are detecting a change in mindset among homeowners, that could survive long after the Olympics are over.

"People visit London all the time," says Candida Cook, co-founder of thevictoriaparkhousecompany.com, set up to offer an Olympic property management service for higher end homeowners around the leafier parts of east London.

"We've decided to carry on after the Olympics, because the demand appears to be there. We have quite a few properties that are available now, and will remain so after the Games have finished."

Meanwhile, thousands of homeowners wait and hope that they too can pocket some Olympic gold. On the outskirts of Stratford, 20 minutes from the stadium, Frank Alum's four-bedroom house is now on Gumtree – but no one has nibbled yet.

"It's not in the best state, decor-wise", he admits – there are brown striped curtains and a scuffed tan sofa in the living room, and in one of the bedrooms a chest of drawers has only five of its eight handles – but it's spacious and very clean.

"A mate of mine said, 'You live in Stratford, that's going to be a good earner,'" says Alum. "It's worth a try. If you don't try, you don't get." It's yours for £4,000 a week.

Still available

Four bedroom house, Stratford, £4,000 per week

Described as an "Olympic rental" in a quiet street, 20-minutes' walk of the stadium. The ad offers "a full personal guide of Central Stratford and the Olympic areas of attraction if requested".

Five bedroom house, Stratford, £4,000 per month

The newly refurbished end-of-terrace house is described as being within a 15-minute walk of the Olympic park. "As we get closer to the Olympics the price may increase," the advertisement warns.

One bedroom flat, Wanstead ,£950 per week

Described as a "fantastic Olympic let", the "spacious" one-bedroom flat near Epping Forest is north-east of the Olympic stadium and within walking distance of Wanstead underground station.

London 2012 Olympics are an opportunity to 'redress a great wrong' and give back Parthenon sculptures, says British actor

Greek campaigners seeking the return of the Parthenon marbles have renewed their efforts with an open letter imploring David Cameron to back the restitution of the classical carvings "to their historic home in Athens".

Stephen Fry is lending his support for the return of what are also known as the Elgin marbles.

Weighing in to one of the world's most controversial cultural disputes, the actor proposed that Britain "redress a great wrong" by using the occasion of the 2012 London Olympics to give up the fifth-century masterpieces. Nearly 200 years after the sculptures were acquired by the British Museum their return would not only be "classy", he argued, but a much-needed morale booster for a country mired in crisis.

"Stephen Fry knows more about this issue than most Greeks," said Alexis Mantheakis, who chairs the International Parthenon Sculptures Action Committee. "He makes the superb point that the London Olympics would be a perfect opportunity for Britain to magnanimously put an end to what Greeks and the majority of people in the EU, including the UK, see as a historical wrongdoing."

In the letter, the campaigning group cites a lengthy essay, Greece is the Word, that Fry recently penned on the issue.

"The Hellenic republic today is in heart-rending turmoil, a humiliating sovereign debt crisis has brought Greece to the brink of absolute ruin. This proud, beautiful nation for which Byron laid down his life is in a condition much like the one for which he mourned when they [the Greeks] were under the Ottoman yoke in the early 19th century," the actor wrote.

In its darkest hour, he said, Greece was now "owed" by Britain.

"What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its appalling finance distress? An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy."

Global advocates of the antiquities' repatriation have pledged to step up pressure on the British government ahead of the July 27 opening of the Olympic Games.

In Sydney at the weekend, activists launched a new push to reinvigorate the campaign. Committees from around the world, including Australia and the US, announced they will meet in London in June to decide how best to promote the "noble cause."

Designed by Pericles's master sculptor, Phidias, the marbles were part of a monumental frieze that adorned the Parthenon. In 1801, they were removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman empire.

More than 60% of the frieze is now on display in Bloomsbury, while an ultra-modern museum, custom-built to exhibit the artworks at the foot of the Acropolis, has had to make do with giant plaster-cast copies.

With the Greek government noticeably abstaining from the dispute in recent years – with officials invariably citing Athens's dire financial straits – citizens exploiting social media have stepped into the breach. Mantheakis's own group has attracted 215,000 members worldwide since its foundation in 2009.

"Prime minister, history and future generations will honour you, as will Greece, if you take that one small but monumental step of amending the 1933 Museums Act to allow for the return of the Parthenon sculptures," said his open letter.

"If Britain could give back India, then surely the emptying of one room of a London museum is a small price to pay to right a historical wrong."

Lyric, Belfast

Dramatising the story of the Titanic is this year's test of ingenuity for playwrights. Rosemary Jenkinson takes the lead in Belfast's forthcoming Titanic commemorations in an ambitious family saga that brings together two historical events: the ship's maiden voyage in 1912 and the signing of the Ulster Covenant by thousands of Northern Irish Unionists in opposition to Home Rule.

A widowed Protestant doctor, Robert Massey, has two motives when he decides to uproot his children from Belfast to America on board the Titanic: to save his daughter from depression and heartbreak and to extricate his teenage son Crawford from involvement in violent sectarian politics. Robert believes in benign political progress, while dabbling in Jungian dream interpretation and self-medicating with opium. An attractive but implausible character, played skittishly by Ruairi Conaghan, his scenes dominate the first hour of the play, introducing multiple themes – class conflict, religious discrimination, feminism – that hamper momentum, while the tone veers from comedy to heavy polemic.

With the shift in setting to the Titanic, Crawford emerges as the central character. Andrew Simpson sensitively portrays him as a lost soul, suffering the guilt of the survivor when he escapes from the sinking vessel on a lifeboat intended for women and children. Vilified for cowardice, he returns home to a city that now regards the Titanic as "Belfast's burning shame".

This is a complex and under-explored history that becomes dramatically unwieldy. Despite the light touch of director Des Kennedy and the abstract clarity of Ciaran Bagnall's stage set, the action and focus are clogged by Jenkinson's extensive research, much of which should have been thrown overboard.

Rating: 2/5

Sub-Saharan states need to move to renewable energy sources as $15bn in aid is outstripped by $18bn in oil imports, says IEA

Developing countries in Africa received less in overseas aid last year than they paid for oil imports, new figures show.

Sub-Saharan Africa received about $15.6bn (£9.7bn) in overseas development aid last year, but this was outweighed by the $18bn cost of importing oil, according to the figures compiled by the International Energy Agency and seen by the Guardian.

A decade of soaring oil prices has created huge problems for development efforts in countries whose attempts to industrialise have left them heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Even though overseas aid has increased, poor nations are effectively "running to stand still" in development terms, because they are paying so much for energy imports.

With oil prices likely to remain high, the only answer is for developing countries to move to cleaner renewable sources of energy, Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, told the Guardian.

"If you diversify the sources of energy, that is a good thing and clean energy means using free, homegrown resources so that will bring down the import bills," he said.

When industrialised economies were developing, oil was the equivalent of $13 a barrel, but now developing countries must pay $120 to $130, noted Birol, which leaves developing countries "hamstrung" – so if more people are to be lifted out of poverty, clean energy must be an imperative.

The data from the IEA, widely regarded as the gold standard for energy analysis, rang alarm bells for campaigners, and is likely to be closely examined by donor governments, which have not tended to prioritise clean energy in the past.

A DFID spokesperson said: "The whole world is affected by rising oil prices, but no country can pull itself out of poverty until it has a decent and reliable energy service. British aid is helping to improve the health, education and welfare of millions of the poorest, including providing cleaner, greener energy such as solar power to help grow their economies. Renewable and efficient energy can reduce dependency on fossil fuels, as well as helping to create new jobs in emerging low carbon sectors."

Ruth Davis, chief policy adviser at Greenpeace UK, said: "People in poorer countries are being hit twice by the oil industry. They are the first to suffer the impacts of climate change, while their economies are blighted by the rising cost of imported fuel. Instead of giving taxpayer handouts to the fossil fuel industry through World Bank aid programmes and Export Credit Guarantee schemes, countries like the UK should be investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in developing countries, which will improve access to energy for the poor and help build stronger economies."

While rapidly emerging economies such as China and India are forging ahead on wind and solar power, little has been invested in Africa. This is not because of a lack of renewable energy resources, but because private sector investors see the continent as a riskier proposition.

Under the United Nations scheme to give poor countries access to low-carbon technology – the clean development mechanism – the lion's share of the billions of investment has gone to China, followed by India and other big emerging economies, but a paltry sum has gone to build projects in Africa.

Birol, one of the world's foremost authorities on energy economics, added that the problem of oil addiction was compounded by distorting subsidies for fossil fuels, common in many developing countries. These subsidies will reach a record $630bn this year, according to the IEA's latest data, which Birol said represented not only a market distortion that would exacerbate climate change, but a drain on the Treasuries of poor countries, which could better spend the money on social projects such as in education or health.

Although such subsidies are supposed to protect poor people from the impact of rising energy prices, in fact they usually disproportionately benefit the better-off, and in some cases are hijacked by profiteers.

Birol also warned that putting off renewable energy investment because of the financial crisis and recession was "a false economy". Many countries have scaled back their investment in low-carbon energy – the UK, Spain and Germany have slashed support for renewables, for instance. But Birol's analysis shows that for every $1 that countries do not spend on cleaner fuel, they will have to spend $4.3 within the next two decades to make up, for their reliance on fossil fuels.

Developed countries are far from immune to the problems of oil dependence – Birol noted that last year's bill to the EU for oil imports topped $500bn for the first time, and that these payouts were a substantial drain on European economic resources.

"That is the equivalent of a Greek crisis – every year," he warned.

The Ben Dover case shows how bizarre copyright and piracy battles have become

Filth, abuse, defamation, libel, harassment, racism, hatred, stolen property – how we deal with the dross is the big question of the digital age, and one that we are no closer to answering. The past month alone has thrown up three court cases that highlight the seemingly impossible contradictions of policing the internet.

The first was the sentencing of Liam Stacey to 56 days in jail, as a result of his drunken, racist tweets promted by Fabrice Muamba's collapse. The judge explicitly said the custodial sentence was designed to "reflect public outrage" at his crime. He was not jailed, then, just because he broke the law, but because his tweet stood out and made people cross. The internet is awash with racist opinions of all hues – but when are prosecutions worth pursuing?

Similar forces are at play when internet users infringe owners of copyright. Jonathan Klein, chief executive of Getty Images, recently said he was "comfortable" with users of Pinterest, the new social media wonder-site, posting pictures owned by Getty. Until, that is, Pinterest starts trying to monetise its site. At which point, according to an interview with TechCrunch Klein and Getty get distinctly less comfortable. It's a problem for Pinterest.

Anyway, neither libel nor copyright theft is a new phenomenon. As Adrian Johns makes clear in his book Piracy, the current piecemeal intellectual property laws exist precisely because of a tradition of piracy going back at least to the invention of the printing presses. The laws are reactive, not absolutes. He argues convincingly that intellectual property exists "only insofar as it is recognised, defended and acted upon". If we stop trying to enforce intellectual property, then it no longer exists.

But enforcement is the problem. Few individual transgressions of civil law on the internet are worth the costs of fighting them: lawyers say that any claim less than £25,000 is largely pointless. Attempts to get the middlemen, such as internet service providers, to take legal responsibility have failed.

So other strategies are emerging. In the high court last month, a maker of pornographic films successfully forced O2 to hand over IP addresses of more than 9,000 users who illegally downloaded films made by Ben Dover Productions. The plan was originally to send the users letters demanding £700 to avoid the risk of being taken to court.

This highlights a paradox identified by Jones: the tactics used in the defence of intellectual property can be as distasteful as the copyright theft itself. In this case, the indefensible theft of legally made films has led to the regrettable loss of O2 customers' privacy. After all, the one who pays the bill is not always the one who watched the mucky movie. It's a morally juicy test case. I can disapprove of what Ben Dover does, yet defend his right to do it profitably.

There is a second hearing due that will set another important precedent, around what Lindsay Honey, AKA Ben Dover, can do with these personal details. The judge, Dover's lawyers and Consumer Focus, the official UK consumer body, will argue about what he can say in his letter to the O2 subscribers, and how much he can demand to make the risk of legal action disappear.

For those who decide to defy Dover's letter and accept the threat of legal action, potential bills are high. A new small claims track for copyright cases is in the pipeline, after it was suggested by the Hargreaves report last year, but the jury is out on whether it will help. The National Union of Journalists and the Creators' Rights Alliance are lining up cases to set some principles from the off.

Saskia Walzel, senior policy advocate at Consumer Focus, says that the extent of copyright infringement online can be overstated, as is the notion that a hippyish commitment to an unregulated internet drives behaviour. Research to be published this month by Consumer Focus found that 77% of internet users think that artists should receive a fair share of money paid for films, music and ebooks.

Meanwhile, the last of the legal challenges to the hastily enacted Digital Economy Act failed last month. This means Ofcom must now start trying to make the act, rushed through in the dying days of the last Labour government, actually work. The aim is to speed up the identification of infringers of copyright; and introduce sanctions such as the loss of the right to connect to the internet.

But the act has fudged the issue of people connecting in ways other than domestic IPs, such as libraries and university servers. The sanctions look badly thought-out, too. In cases of sharing child porn images, orders have long been in place forbidding offenders internet access – but these are increasingly being overturned as utterly unworkable. Again, practicalities trump ideals. The legal merry-go-round stops, and we're back where we started – with unenforceable rules and an anarchic web.

Fierce festival, Birmingham

A gaggle of us are standing together in the middle of the square. We are on a walking tour of the city. Our guide, a young, serious-faced woman (Hilary O'Shaughnessy), holds up an umbrella as if we are a group of Japanese tourists. "That is the Brandenburg Gate," she says with authority. "Look through the Gate to the end of the avenue." We crane our necks and look as we've been told. Only we are not in Berlin, we're in Birmingham, and the Brandenburg Gate is an imposing office building in Brindleyplace Square.

Irish theatre company Playgroup's dislocating and playful Berlin Love Tour is clearly no ordinary city walk. After all, most city tours don't offer intimate details of the tour guide's personal life. It is about our own maps of the heart, which we superimpose on places we know well. It is a kind of act of remembrance but also an exorcism. Most particularly for our young guide, who as the tour continues becomes more with showing us the sites where she and her lover conducted their doomed love affair.

At two hours, the show is too long, and not quite layered enough in its twin stories of a city and an individual. But in its suggestion that we play out our own lives using place and space like a massive film set, and its consideration of the things we both individually and as a society allow ourselves to remember and those we prefer to forget, it offers an intriguing meditation on the forging and forgeries of history, maps and our own personal stories.

Rating: 3/5

Police officers are increasingly trained to see the community as the enemy. They've forgotten that they are there to serve us

I felt a profound sense of frustration when I read Saturday's Guardian account of another "police racism" allegation against the Metropolitan police. The circumstances of the case, in which an officer is apparently recorded racially abusing a man he's just arrested – are still the subject of investigation. But as someone who spent most of his adult life in policing, two issues are as plain as a pikestaff. First, yet again, there seems to have been an almost total absence of leadership and supervision of junior officers; second, the impact on "real" policing will be profound.

Last Thursday, in Tottenham, I gave the 2012 Bernie Grant Memorial Lecture. To an audience still shell-shocked by the damage to their homes and livelihoods wrought by the riots and failure of policing last August, my theme was the urgent need for the police, particularly in urban communities, to rediscover a service ethos that had been sacrificed on the altar of so-called management efficiency over the past 15 years. In any liberal democracy, policing must be by consent, and you lose that consent immediately if you alienate the community and treat them as the enemy.

Confrontational – yet frightened and defensive – officers are nowadays trained to see the public as a threat to their very existence. Preventive patrolling has been abandoned – notwithstanding the soothing and wholly false spin of the Met, which continually we still have "bobbies on the beat". Few such officers have been deployed for at least 10 years, and their barely visible replacement – comprised largely of police community support officers, are but a pale imitation of what people expect and deserve.

From Stephen Lawrence to Mark Duggan; from the kettling of peaceful protesters, to the riots of last year; from the manifest incompetence of the first phone-hacking inquiry to allegations of corruption at the Leveson inquiry – a path has been beaten towards the edge of a precipice, and it is time for those concerned about the vital role of policing to challenge what is happening.

In some respects we only have ourselves to blame. People too often accept what they are told by police leaders and politicians, and seldom demand policing be accountable at all times and at every level of interaction. Senior officers continually tell us policing is a complex, dangerous occupation, requiring an almost priest-like sense of vocation and superhuman courage. Hence the pseudo-military terminology applied to most activity, with reference to the "frontline", as if officers spent all their working hours in an environment comparable to the first world war trenches.

But what is missing from an environment where the police regard themselves almost as an army of occupation is any sense of community, any sense that they are part of us. This fundamental attitudinal change is a comparatively recent feature of policing and has undermined the trusted model of policing in our communities developed over many decades. Something has to change – and quickly.

For what is beyond doubt is that the people who suffer most at the hands of drug-dealers, knife crime and "gangsta" gunmen are those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Most are decent people who just want to work, bring up their children, and live their lives unmolested; yet they are regarded by the police as a dangerous underclass who can only be dealt with aggressively.

What incentive will there be for any black British mother on a sink estate to search out her local police to express concern about her son or his friends? Who can be surprised at any hard-working black member of our society taking the view that an organisation that allegedly views him or her as a "n****r" isn't worth their trust? I hope the Met commissioner has this incident at the top of his agenda as his management board meets on Monday.

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GMB union argues staff should receive 13 weeks' pay because they were not properly consulted

The new owners of care homes inherited from Southern Cross have hit back at claims by the GMB trade union that employees are owed £150m in compensation.

In a letter to MPs, NHS trusts and care home commissioners, representatives of care home operators who took over the majority of the Southern Cross estate say they will fight the GMB claim. The union is alleging that Southern Cross failed to consult employees properly when it was broken up last year, entitling staff individually to 13 weeks' pay in compensation.

"We believe that the GMB claims are unwarranted and have no merit," the letter states. "We will contest them robustly and are confident of the strength of our position."

Crippled by the consequences of an ill-judged sale-and-leaseback programme, Southern Cross collapsed last year, throwing into doubt the future of 750 homes that housed 31,000 residents and employed 44,000 people. The company was broken up and handed back to its landlords, with other operators taking over the homes and negotiating new rent terms.

The letter – sent by a public relations firm representing the operators, adds: "We must emphasise that the GMB was kept fully informed throughout the process. They were given full information. They attended the consultation meetings. They signed off on the consultations. In the light of this their current actions are surprising and particularly so, given that one outcome was the avoidance of large scale redundancies amongst care home staff and a seamless transfer of the care framework for residents in the homes."

The letter does not say whether the new owners can afford the claim if the GMB is successful, although it warns that the legal challenge could cause concern to residents, families and employees if the dispute became more widely known.

Justine Bowden, the GMB's national officer for the care sector, disputed the claim that Southern Cross's landlords had held a proper consultation with staff and unions over the company break-up.

"GMB warned them at the time that they were breaking the rules but they pressed on regardless," she said. "That is why GMB filed this claim, and we are confident we will succeed in getting it upheld."

The Southern Cross collapse sparked a political storm, largely driven by the financial engineering of its balance sheet under private equity owners. It prompted the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to label buy-out groups as "asset strippers".

Southern Cross buckled under the weight of a £250m annual rent bill, which had to be paid while fees from local councils were falling because of public spending cuts.

About a third of the former Southern Cross homes will be run as a joint venture between NHP, the company's biggest landlord, and Court Cavendish, a care consultancy run by the former head of the Priory clinics, well-known for their treatment of addictions.

Nobel laureate expected to take office for first time after landmark poll that could see end to 50 years of military rule

The streets of Rangoon echoed with cheers on Sunday after unofficial results indicated Aung San Suu Kyi had won a parliamentary seat in a landmark election that could see the Nobel laureate and former political prisoner take public office for the first time.

"We won! We won!" chanted her supporters as they crowded the pavement in their thousands outside her party's headquarters. Traffic was restricted to a thin line snaking haphazardly through the crowd, where young and old in red – the colour of Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) – sang along to a Johnny Cash-inspired anthem calling for "the return of Mother Suu".

Those who were not dancing swayed back and forth to watch numbers flash on a digital signboard that measured the NLD's victories in byelections around the country, where the party was contesting 44 of 45 open seats in Burma's 664-seat parliament.

Aung San Suu Kyi's victory, which will not be officially confirmed for another week, could mark the moment that this poverty-stricken nation, where a military junta has ruled almost exclusively for the past 50 years, takes its first genuine steps towards democracy.

The NLD was competing in its first elections since 1990, after which Aung San Suu Kyi was held under house arrest for most of the next 20 years, and the poll was notable for its unprecedented access for foreign journalists and independent observers.

According to unofficial party figures, Aung San Suu Kyi was leading the polls against her rival, former military doctor U Soe Min of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, with 65% of the vote in 82 of her Kawhmu constituency's 129 polling stations. Local observers, however, claimed on Sunday evening that she had won 90% of the vote, with the NLD said to have won a minimum of 40 of the 44 seats it contested.

Despite being the face of democracy in her native country, this would be the first time that Daw [Auntie] Suu, as she is known here, has held public office.

This election was touted as the make-or-break moment in Burma's history and a crucial test of the reforms initiated by President Thein Sein. Many are now hoping for a final end to the years of sanctions that have crippled the nation's economy and its population, one third of whom live on less than 30p a day.

Despite complaining of "rampant irregularities" in the build-up to Sunday's vote – among them harassment of NLD candidates, and deceased people said to be on the electoral roll – Aung San Suu Kyi said she did "not at all regret" taking part in the elections and that they marked "a foundation stone for the future of democracy in Burma".

Fifty-five detained as hundreds hold rally against the Kremlin

Police detained about 55 protesters on Sunday outside the gates to Red Square, which was unexpectedly closed to all visitors and tourists to prevent an anti-Kremlin demonstration. Opposition activists had called on supporters to walk around the square wearing the white ribbons that have become a symbol of the protest movement against Vladimir Putin and the stifling of democratic politics during his 12 years in power.

When police took the unusual step of closing the vast cobblestone square near the Kremlin, about 300 protesters gathered instead just outside the gates. The meeting place, communicated through social networking sites, was the "zero kilometre", the spot from where all distances from Moscow are measured.

Holding hands to form a circle, the protesters chanted "This is our city", "Russia will be free" and "Russia without Putin". Some of the protesters then demanded to be allowed onto Red Square and police rounded them up, leading or carrying them onto waiting buses.

British Pregnancy Advisory Service attacks politicisation of abortion and warns of impact on future healthcare

A new generation of doctors will be put off from becoming involved in abortion services by high-profile protest campaigns and a political "witch-hunt", providers fear.

The current climate is already causing anxiety among doctors who are concerned that their practice will be called into question, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) said, as activists behind a new campaign to demonstrate outside abortion clinics were joined at one protest in London by a Catholic bishop.

The warning comes as the BPAS and pro-choice campaigners say they feel "under siege" after the government ordered an unannounced inspection of more than 250 clinics in England, claiming as many as a fifth were pre-signing consent forms for terminations. The inspections by officials from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) were said to have found evidence of blank forms being signed in anticipation of women seeking a termination. Although doctors do not have to see the woman in person, they must certify that they are aware of her circumstances and why she wants to go ahead with the procedure.

A spokesperson for the BPAS said: "Abortion is a vital yet stigmatised area of women's healthcare which few doctors train in. The current politicisation of abortion provision is likely to make it even harder to recruit a future generation of abortion doctors who are prepared to provide the care that a third of women will need in the course of their lifetimes."

Dr Paula Franklin, medical director of Marie Stopes, which like the BPAS has contracts to provide terminations on the NHS, said she was concerned that the heightened scrutiny was having an effect on "existing clinics and on doctors and nurses who come every day to the centres, many of whom have to navigate through sometimes angry – sometimes not – protesters. That is difficult for them.It isn't easy to find doctors who will work in termination services. For some time now, relatively few of them have chosen to go into terminations. It is a problem."

On Wednesday, the Guardian published a letter from a group of senior clinicians and researchers who said they were "deeply concerned" about the way the public discussion on abortion is proceeding and about how the service will manage to carry on.

One of its signatories, Dr Kate Guthrie, clinical director with Hull and East Riding Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare Partnership, said she had concerns about the impact that increased media and political attention could have on students and younger doctors.

"Of course, there is a lot of stigma around abortion, both having them and to a much lesser extent, even doing them. But from the feedback that I have had, I really do think that the question has to be asked: what impact is this increasingly negative politicisation going to have on future providers of abortion care? Is it going to put doctors and nurses off becoming involved in this work?

"Anyone thinking of becoming involved in abortion will be aware of the recent, very intense scrutiny of services, and I hope will not be put off by uncertainty in interpretation of the law and the thought of Care Quality Commission swoops.

However, another signatory of Wednesday's letter to the Guardian said he believed that the current climate was making things more difficult in the not-for-profit sector, though not for those working in the NHS, where involvement in termination provision was seen as "quite a positive thing".

"The RCOG [Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists] has a series of special skills that they expect senior trainees to undertake before they get signed off to be fully accredited specialists and consultants, and they provide an option of a pregnancy termination module," said Dr Malcolm Griffiths, a consultant and clinical director in obstetrics and gynaecology at Luton and Dunstable hospital.

"The difficulty is with later surgical terminations," said Griffiths.

"Most people in the NHS who do terminations limit themselves to 12 or 14 weeks. Increasingly more and more of those are done medically. Once you get beyond 14 weeks then it is a very small number of people who have the skills to do the later surgical terminations.

"It's probably not a dozen people in the country who are doing the ones around 20 weeks and beyond."

The question of how to step into the shoes of the older generation of abortion practitioners weighs on the minds of future doctors like Matteo De Martino, a fifth-year student at a northern medical school.

"Someone referred to it as the greying of current providers," says De Martino, who is in the process of setting up Medical Students for Abortion Care, which will aim to encourage the involvement of medical students in the debate about abortion and campaign for more abortion-related training in the medical school curriculum.

"Without them, we lose not just technical skill but also that pool of knowledge that has experience of, and treated the potentially fatal effects of, women being forced into backstreet abortion clinics due to its illegality."

Professor Wendy Savage, the country's first female consultant gynaecologist and long-time campaigner for women's healthcare rights, said that few doctors would now see late abortions, since most are now being performed in the private charitable sector.

Few doctors are trained to carry out late terminations, yet the small minority of women who come for them (91% are carried out under 13 weeks) are in the greatest distress. "Our experience is that women who do come for late terminations are often among the most vulnerable, whose lives and domestic situations are the most difficult," she said. They included women who have been raped, cases of incest and vulnerable women with difficult relationships that can include violence.

Aung San Suu Kyi's landmark win shifts attention back to Thein Sein's military-backed government and 2015 general election

With Nobel laureate and democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi seemingly headed to public office for the first time in Burma's history, all eyes have shifted to the military-backed government in Naypyidaw, where one-quarter of the 664 parliamentary seats are reserved for the military and where many worry that change may be much harder to achieve than both locals – and the world – had hoped.

According to unofficial estimates late on Sunday night, Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), had swept to a landslide victory, winning 40 of the 45 parliamentary seats up for grabs, including four in Naypyidaw itself. No official results were expected before Monday, however, and independent verification of the vote was not possible.

Theories abound as to why president Thein Sein, a former soldier, would be keen to introduce the recent slew of reforms that are transforming Burma. From the easing of censorship laws to the legalising of trade unions and the release of political prisoners, among them Aung San Suu Kyi, the pace of change is formidable. Burma is suddenly being reintroduced to the rest of the world.

Many have questioned the veracity of Thein Sein's motives, but Aung San Suu Kyi has staunchly defended him. At a news conference at her lakeside villa on Friday, she told reporters and international election observers that she trusts Thein Sein and his "genuine wishes for democratic reform", but warned that she is unsure as to just how much backing he has from his government. In a nation where coups have occurred and her own father was assassinated by a rival politician, the threat of an end to these reforms is palpable, says Win Myo Thu of the non-government organisation Eco-DEV in Rangoon.

"This is the question: will the military step down from parliament?" he asks. "After 1988, everyone wanted change – including the military – because the social experience [of the bloody aftermath of democratic rallies] was quite bitter. But [those in government] could not agree among themselves on the approach to change. The military saw gradual change; civil society saw sudden change. The threat of status quo … [has always been] a very big challenge."

While critics say that the true test of Burma's future lies in the 2015 general elections, Sunday's polls were an important first step with some surprise endings – not least the insinuation from Khin Nyunt, the former military intelligence chief, that he had voted for the NLD. With most former government officials and military men expected to vote for the government-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, such an admission could very well foretell the shake-up of a junta that has ruled Burma for five decades.

Hla Maung Shwe, founder of the research consortium Myanmar Egress, said that Aung San Suu Kyi's success was a vote of confidence in Thein Sein's presidency, – and new parliament – but that it was just the beginning of a long road to change. "This victory shows the democratisation of this country, yes, but this is really only the first step," he said. "We in Burma have the lowest income in the [south-east Asian] region and after 50 years of military rule, we have a government and institutions of limited capacity."

An easing of sanctions and expected influx of foreign businesses and influence would help modernise Burma, said Hla Maung Shwe, who called for greater support from the international community during this transition period. "We need more experience in capacity-building and technical know-how. If we can achieve that, then our transition to democracy will go smoothly."

According to the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi's foremost priority when taking office will be to instigate constitutional reform. That would mean amending the law requiring 25% of the parliament to be reserved for the military, who may shirk the idea but must realise that "the future of this country is their future, and that reform in this country means reform for them as well", the 66-year-old said recently.