Maxine Carr has served her prison sentence for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and will walk free from custody today. She should be left to pick up the pieces of a life already blighted by her past as the girlfriend of the Soham murderer Ian Huntley. Hours before her release, we learned of farcical scenes on Hampstead Heath, as police scoured the undergrowth for stolen Home Office documents about the protection of her identity. Worrying though it is that elaborate plans for Carr's release may be compromised, it is far more disturbing that the lynch mob climate surrounding her case has necessitated such extreme measures to guarantee her safety.

IT WAS only in September 1955, three weeks before the start of Independent Television News, that Tahu Hole, the BBC News Editor, reluctantly agreed that the newsreaders' faces might be shown. Robert Dougall, with Kenneth Kendal and Richard Baker, constituted the original BBC team. He had long been a newsreader in the Overseas Service.

Out on Stage: lesbian and gay theatre in the twentieth century

I'VE BEEN sad thinking about how much worse the weather will get before it improves. The last leaves will go, nights will start at three in the afternoon, and the earth will harden so that it'll be inconceivable that anything ever grew from it - that there were once flowers and kisses and picnics in the meadows.

YOU CAN use it as a shampoo, stun fish with it or wear it as underwear. In the first of a new series on herbs and their properties, Miranda Seymour marvels at the rich history of `Verbascum thapsus'

Life modelling is one of those jobs that blurs the distinction between the personal and the professional. Tom Lubbock observes the delicate drama played out between model and artist

THE 94-YEAR-OLD mother of Hollywood film directors Tony and Ridley Scott has been attacked by burglars who broke into one of her sons' homes and snatched a pounds 6,000 Rolex from her wrist.

Mark Wallinger: Sculptor of Trafalgar Square's new statue of Christ

Birth of the bikini

Gemini will enable scientists to look back to events that happened billions of years ago

If your idea of a hike is a stroll across Hampstead Heath, the thought of climbing Aconcagua - the highest mountain in the world outside Asia - will make you need to lie down. By Justin Rowlatt