Stardust touches this year's Fringe as Hollywood actors Julian Sands and John Malkovich collaborate on A Celebration of Harold Pinter at the Pleasance. But even big stars have to slum it sometimes; Air France lost Malkovich's bags, so he was forced to wash the clothes he was wearing when he arrived for rehearsals with Sands, whom he is directing. Their publicist walked into the kitchen of the flat that the duo are sharing to find the 57-year-old American stripped to the waist and elbow-deep in soap suds. "He is," she said through her blushes, "still a fine figure of a man."

Q. I am visiting my daughter in New Zealand for two months during this winter. As a requirement of our household insurance policy with Churchill, we are required to turn off all services – gas, electricity and water. This would disable our burglar alarms and the central heating, risking frozen pipes. MB, by email.

French air crash investigators were accused yesterday of "protecting" Airbus after it emerged that implicit criticism of the plane-maker was sliced from last week's report on the Rio-Paris disaster.

Inadequate pilot training by Air France and mistakes by a young co-pilot contributed to a mid-Atlantic Airbus disaster in June 2009, an official report indicated yesterday.

An error by a junior pilot may have sent an Air France airbus into a three and a half minute spiral into the South Atlantic which killed all 228 aboard in June 2009.

The flight recorders from an Air France plane that crashed nearly two years ago show that the captain only arrived in the cockpit after the plane had begun its fateful 3 1/2-minute descent, officials said today.

Pilot error is emerging as the most likely cause of the crash of the Air France Rio-Paris airbus which plunged into the South Atlantic in June 2009, killing all 228 people on board.

Investigators have managed to extract data from the black boxes of an Air France jet which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, raising the prospect of determining what caused the disaster, which killed all 228 people on board.

Attempts by a French team to recover up to 60 bodies from a crashed airliner three miles below the South Atlantic have deepened a rift among the victims' families, who are torn over the final resting place of loved ones.

The father of a passenger who died in an Air France plane crash in 2009 said the removal of a body from the sea provided some relief.

The cockpit voice recorder from an Air France airliner that crashed into the Atlantic two years ago was found yesterday. The jet's flight data recorder was recovered on Sunday.

Investigators have located and recovered the missing memory unit of the flight data recorder of a 2009 Air France flight – a remarkable deep-sea discovery they hope will explain why the aircraft went down in a remote area of the mid-Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board.

Deep sea search teams have found part of the black box assembly of the Air France plane that crashed off Brazil, but without the memory unit that could provide crucial clues.