Robbie Fowler could be in trouble with the football authorities after he became the strikers’ striker with a show of solidarity for 500 sacked Liverpool dockers during a European Cup-Winners’ Cup match on Thursday. Fowler, 21, reported to have recently signed a new contract worth pounds 20,000 per week, lifted his Liverpool shirt after scoring his second goal in the 3-0 victory against Norwegian team Brann Bergen, to reveal a T-Shirt underneath which read: “500 Liverpool dockers sacked since 1995.” The slogan refers to dock workers sacked in industrial disputes by the Mersey Ports and Harbours Authority.
Rules laid down by Uefa, the sport’s governing body in Europe, prohibit players from wearing political slogans or logos and a spokeswoman said yesterday: “We are waiting on the reports from the match officials, and then the matter will be discussed on Tuesday to see if there will be any further action.”In Liverpool yesterday, Fowler and team-mate Steve McManaman, who provided the shirt, were being hailed as heroes by dock workers.Bobby Morton, a spokesman for Merseyside Port shop stewards, said: “Our reaction to Robbie Fowler’s display was one of delight as we’ve suffered an effective media blackout on this issue, and now it’s in the news.”He added: “Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman are both local lads, they both come from working class families, and we’re glad of their support.”Mr Morton also said Fowler and McManaman had made financial donations to the sacked workers’ hardship fund.However, Fowler’s employers took a dim view of politics on the pitch. “We will be pointing out to all our players that comments on matters outside of football are not acceptable on the field of play,” a statement by Liverpool Football Club said. “While players are free to have their own opinions, Uefa rules discourage any show of support during matches.”There is little precedent in such cases, although the Swiss national side were cautioned by Uefa in 1995 after wearing a small flag on their kits saying “Stop Jacques Chirac”, in protest at France’s policy on the testing of nuclear weapons No fine or further disciplinary action was taken..

A British teenager who got a D grade in A-level computer science was fined yesterday for hacking into United States defence and missile systems and removing files on artificial intelligence and battle management. Richard Pryce, was only 16 when he used a basic pounds 750 computer from his bedroom in north London to infiltrate some of America’s top security establishments.
Codenamed Datastream Cowboy, Pryce, now 18, was the subject of allegations in the United States Senate, where the unknown “spy” was accused of “causing more harm than the KGB” He has also been described as “The number one threat to US security”.But his solicitor insisted yesterday that it was a “schoolboy prank” and that the teenager with just six months experience had used information taken off the Internet to break into the US networks. Lawyers believe the case shows the extraordinary lax security deployed within US military systems.Pryce was fined pounds 1,200 plus pounds 250 cost yesterday after pleading guilty to 12 charges of gaining unauthorised access to computer systems in March and April 1994. He has now dropped his interest in computers in favour of a double bass which he studies at the Royal College of Music in London.The first that Pryce’s parents, Nick and Alison, knew of their son’s activities was when members of Scotland Yard’s Computer Crime Unit arrived at the home in Colindale, north London, to arrest him.Bow Street Magistrates’ Court heard that Pryce managed to hack into the Grifiss Air Force Base in New York, where it is alleged he downloaded material about artificial intelligence and battlefield management systems. He also broke into the Lockheed Space and Missile Company, in California.The systems he was said to have obtained access to included those for ballistic weapons research, and aircraft design, payroll, procurement, personnel records and electronic mail. The infiltration led to allegations that a spy had managed to infiltrate secret intelligence data.His hacking was described as an example of a growing and serious threat to US national security in reports and testimony to a Senate committee by the US General Accounting Office.Some of the more outlandish allegations about the effects of Pryce’s hacking exploits were later seen as an attempt to obtain extra funding. Indeed, US officials later insisted that Pryce had been unable to access any secret information.Despite these claims, it is understood that the British authorities were considering using a Public Immunity Certificate, a gagging order, to cover part of the hearing, but decided not to bother after the more serious charges were dropped.Geoffrey Robertson QC, for the defence, said that what the Pentagon had at first suspected was a European spy-ring, it later discovered was a 16-year-old in north London “He was riding, rather than surfing, the Internet.

He made no profit and there was no subversion of defence systems,” he said.. The Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry, who created Thomas the Tank Engine, died yesterday aged 85, more than half a century after his first stories graced bookstores. Despite the disappearance of steam from the national train set, his books about talking, puffing locomotives still entrance millions of children and have ended up on the stock market in a company worth pounds 30m.
The author died at his modest Edwardian terrace in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where he had been bed-ridden for some time. He retired from writing in 1972 after the first 26 books in the series and the role was taken over by his son Christopher.Thomas was his most famous creation.

But his book The Three Railway Engines centred on three engines, Edward, Gordon and Henry and their trundlings over the Island of Sodor – a mythical construct situated near Barrow-in- Furness. The 40 books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and been broadcast in Japanese and German.In an age where children could blast aliens or surf the Internet, many still choose to turn the pages of the books and tune in to the televised version of World of Thomas the Tank Engine, narrated by the former Beatle Ringo Starr.”It is a great tribute to Awdry, how popular his books still are. We had a Thomas the Tank Engine event in February and we had more than 40,000 people turn up,” said Dieter Hopkin, head of library and archive collections at the National Railway Museum in York.Perhaps the reason for the books’ success can be found in their origins. The first tales were meant to entertain his son, Christopher, during a bout of measles. When Mr Awdry’s wife noticed the stories scribbled on the backs of Mother’s Union circulars, she got them sent to a literary agent. Overnight in 1945, Thomas steamed up the publishing express line to a runaway success.And so Henry the Green Engine, Gordon the Blue Engine, Thomas, the Fat (and Thin) Controller came to life. The slim blue volumes were eagerly snapped up for children deprived of fresh publishing and writing during the war years.The delight of millions of parents and children did not escape criticism and controversy.The books were accused of racism, with references to the sooty black engines, and of sexual stereotyping, with macho hero engines and passive (or argumentative) carriages named after women (Annie and Clarabel).Many experts on the modern railways saw Mr Awdry as a relic of yesterday’s network.

One spoof, written in Modern Railways, a trade magazine, was a pastiche replete with Rastafarian diesels and “socially relevant” locos enlivened with mock-medieval phrases.The criticism was not always fair. The more recent books – written by Christopher Awdry – did incorporate British Rail engines and featured the express 125s in later stories.And Mr Awdry’s influence was acknowledged by Lord Lloyd-Webber as important in the creation of his Starlight Express show.Mr Awdry remained a keen railway enthusiast and eventually became president of the Dean Forest Railway Company. The group, which reopened a line in Gloucestershire, named one of its three steam locomotives Wilbert after the author. The train became the subject of the 38th book in the Thomas the Tank Engine series, Wilbert the Forest Engine, written by Christopher Awdry.A spokesman for the group said: “He used to come down here to sign his books, and he seemed to be involved with almost every rail-preservation group going.”He’d been a long-standing enthusiast of the railways and it seemed quite a common thing for men of the cloth to be interested in that sort of thing. It’s a great shame and a sad loss.” Asked why rail and church, an odd coupling, were his passions, Mr Awdry said: “Both had their heyday in the mid-nineteenth century; both own a great deal of Gothic-style architecture, which is expensive to maintain; both are regularly assailed by critics; and both are firmly convinced they are the best means of getting man to his ultimate destination.”Obituary, page 22. The Tories last night were accused of giving a “pay-off” to the tobacco industry by concluding a voluntary ten-year deal on additives which campaigners said would help to keep smokers hooked on the habit. The tobacco industry is one of the big backers of the Tory Party election fund, and Ian Greer Associates – at the centre of the cash-for-questions scandal – acted as one of the lobbyists in the past.
The deal threatens to reopen the controversy over the relationship between the Conservative Party and the tobacco barons during the election.The deal, allowing the industry to continue putting around 600 additives in tobacco products, was slipped out in a written Commons answer hours before the House rose on Thursday night for the election recess, although officials said it had been signed on 7 March.”The additives can release the nicotine in the tobacco which makes it more easily absorbable.