The grey suits of old-fashioned British diplomacy gathered yesterday to confess to the errors of the Cold War

The grey suits of old-fashioned British diplomacy gathered yesterday to confess to the errors of the Cold War. Louise Jury heard the Russian ambassador add his voice to the discussion. The names were the names of a bygone era, an era so different from today it seemed like a history lesson to the younger participants. Lord Callaghan, once British prime minister, spoke of the former Soviet leaders Brezhnev and Khrushchev. Lord Healey, former defence secretary recalled sharing jokes with the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. The ageing cast of British Cold War diplomacy gathered yesterday in the grand and gilded surroundings of the Foreign Office for the launch of two volumes revealing the behind-the-scenes discussions of the late 60s and early 70s. Certain general factors were quite evident - older people tend to claim less, primarily because they are more careful, and young unmarrieds tend to make the most claims.Prospero's safest streets with the lowest risks, not ranked, are: Newburgh Road, Aberdeen; Mapperton, Wincanton, Somerset; Felleview Drive, Egremont, Cumbria; Davies Close, Silverton, Exeter; Burnham Close, Ipswich; Abbey Court, Denbigh; Hubbard Close, Buckingham; Larson Road, Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire; Bellmans Grove, Peterborough; Hawkesmore Drive, Stafford.The least safe streets, again not in ranked order, are: Myddleton Road, London N22; Nitshale Road, Glasgow; Wenlock Road, Edgeware, London; Ford Lane, Liverpool; Scotland Road, Liverpool; St George's Avenue, Manchester; Bradgate Close, Manchester; Monday Crescent, Newcastle; Dormers Rise, Southall, London.. Risk is assessed on the likelihood of a claim being made and its predicted size.Mr Longstaff said : "We tried to make our study as detailed as possible.

It can, according to a firm of insurers, affect the way you live from your health to your wallet. Prospero Direct, part of Axa Global, the world's second biggest insurance conglomerate, used 19 different assessment criteria ranging across volume of claims, age, sex, marital status and crime statistics to deduce what the highest and lowest risk streets across the country.Altogether, more than 250,000 home and motor insurance policies were analysed by insurance manager Peter Longstaff and Mike Brockman, from English Matthews Brockman, one of the leading actuary firms in the UK.Streets in Aberdeen, Wincanton, Exeter and Ipswich have very low risk, while others in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Manchester are among the highest. An insurance company has drawn up a league table of the safest and the most dangerous streets to live in Britain. Kim Sengupta examines the risk factor involved in a postcode. Living on the right or wrong side of the track is not merely a matter of social cachet. Later this year it plans to launch "Windows98", which will incorporate the IE browser so tightly into the operating system that the two will be impossible to separate.. And forcing manufacturers to take a relatively unsuccessful package, as IE was, as a condition of getting the Windows95 operating system is what Microsoft may not do.However, the sand is exactly where such a decision might as well be written, for the tide of the software world moves so fast that the Redmond-based company is effectively the winner from this suit. The software company wants its products to run on any and every computer; the US government has drawn a line in the sand, saying what it may and may not do.

Earlier this month Netscape announced that it was laying off staff, after losing money steadily in the past financial quarter, to the tune, in fact, of $1m per day since about mid-October. Today's announcement could give Netscape the chance to make itself visible again on PCs: manufacturers can choose or reject it on the basis of quality or price, rather than coercion.Coincidentally, it was October when the Department of Justice sued the cyber-giant, claiming a breach of a "consent decree", essentially part of a promise to not to bully its commercial rivals, that the two sides first signed in 1994, and then updated in 1995.Yesterday's announcement sounds like a ringing success for the Department of Justice in reining in the vaunting ambition of Microsoft and its chief, Bill Gates. But the wider world of computing still sleeps uneasily.The announcement yesterday was that PC manufacturers may delete the icon and program for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser from their computer screens. Earlier, in the court hearings, computer manufacturers had testified how in 1995 Microsoft began to make them offers they could not refuse: include the relatively untried IE product in your systems, or you don't get Windows95.The move by Microsoft has gouged profits at Netscape, which since 1994 has offered the Navigator browser, and until mid-1996 had had an overwhelming share of the market. Soon after 10am in Washington DC, Richard Urowsky, attorney for Microsoft, and Joel Klein for the US Department of Justice, announced that the company had, in effect, sidestepped a contempt of court judgment that would have cost it $1m for every day since early October. It has agreed not to "bundle" its present Internet browser and its current operating system, Windows95 The Internet is safe for competition - briefly.

The software giant Microsoft finally caved in yesterday and admitted, minutes before it might have been fined millions of dollars, that PC manufacturers need not buy its Internet browser to get the Windows95 operating system. Charles Arthur, Science Editor, reports on a day of victory for the US Department of Justice - or is it? The hearing was very brief. And, in case anyone remained sceptical, Boycott proclaimed himself ready to take a lie detector test - but only if ordered to by the French court, which is to hear his appeal.It was all utterly convincing, or not, as the case might be.. That does not sound to me like a woman who is seriously hurt. If she was in fear of her life, as she has said, how come we spent the next two nights together and went home on the same plane together to London?"So what on earth was Ms Moore's motivation? "She wants to destroy me," replied Boycott, adding that she had tried to enlist publicist Max Clifford to secure her pounds 1m.