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Judy Gross said that in the letter, which Castro read but did not respond to, she pleaded with him to free her husband Alan because their daughter has been diagnosed with breast cancer and he is needed at home.

Alan Gross, 61, who worked for a Washington-area company contracted under a US Agency for International Development programme to promote democracy in Cuba, was arrested at the Havana airport on December 3 and has been held on suspicion of espionage and subversion.

In an interview, his wife denied he was a spy and said he went to Cuba five times last year to help Havana’s Jewish community gain internet access to Jews worldwide.

Cuban officials say Gross committed “serious crimes” by giving restricted satellite communications equipment to local dissidents, but no legal charges have been filed.

His detention has stalled efforts by Washington to improve ties with the communist-led island.

Judy Gross criticised the White House for not doing enough to seek release of her husband, whom she called a “pawn” caught up in a decades-old ideological feud between the US and Cuba. She said she has heard nothing from President Obama.

The White House said it shared her “concern and frustration with the continued unwarranted detention of her husband.”

“Administration officials have repeatedly made clear to Cuban authorities that Alan Gross should be released immediately to be able to rejoin his wife and family — and we will continue to do so,” National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement.

In an Aug. 4 letter to Castro, she wrote, “I recognize today that the Cuban government may not like the type of work that Alan was doing in Cuba.”

“But I want you to know that Alan loves the people of Cuba, and he only wanted to help them. He never intended them, or your government, any harm,” she said.

“To the extent his work may have offended you or your government, he and I are genuinely remorseful,” she wrote.

She told Castro her family needed Gross home since his 26-year-old daughter, whose name she asked not be used, was diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy.

The only response came at a meeting this month with Jorge Alberto Bolanos, head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, who offered mother and daughter visas to visit Gross in Cuba. He said President Castro had read her letter.

‘Caged lion’
Cuba allowed Judy Gross to visit her husband in late July at Havana’s Finlay Military Hospital where he shares a cell with two Cubans. They met during the day for three days in an improvised visiting room.

“He looked like walking death,” she said of her first sight of her burly 6-foot (1.9 metre) husband, who in almost 11 months of detention has lost 86 pounds (39 kilos).

“His pants and shirt were too big. It was a shock.”

Gross was dragging his right foot due to a disk problem that will need surgery, suffers from arthritis, has gout and developed an ulcer from the stress and diet, she said.

“For a long time they kept the lights on all night. The heat was unbearable,” she said. Following complaints by US diplomats, his cell now has air conditioning and a television set on which he watches lots of baseball.

But she returned home to news of her daughter’s illness and when it was passed on to her husband, he was devastated.

“He felt totally impotent, unable to do anything for a daughter in need. He feels like a caged lion. He cannot relax. He feels he has to get out of there,” said his wife.

White house absent
She has met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and praised US State Department efforts on her husband’s behalf.

But Judy Gross expressed disappointment with Obama for failing to weigh in, even though her husband spent five weeks campaigning in rural Virginia for Obama’s election.

“Not a call, not even an email,” she said. Alan Gross’s 88-year-old mother Evelyn wrote to Obama and got no response.

While the Cuban government has not stated its conditions for releasing Gross, a source close to the case said it likely wants Washington to end its Cuba aid programmes, which Cuban leaders view as attempts to subvert the communist government.

“I think they want a recognition that their sovereignty was violated. They see USAID’s ‘Cuban Democratization Program’ as intended to undermine their authority, and one would expect  they want that policy changed,” the source said.

Meanwhile, the Cubans are holding Gross hostage as an example of a foreigner who broke their laws, his wife said.

“If Alan thought something was going to happen to him in Cuba, he would not have done this. I feel he was not clearly told the risks,” she said.

It will invest €150m ($210.6m) until 2014 and base the global headquarters of its offshore division in London, Gamesa said.

More than 1,000 people will be directly employed at the facilities and another 800 jobs could be created for local suppliers.

“The commitment shown by companies like Gamesa who want to come to the UK and invest is good news for jobs and growth and good news for our clean energy future,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said.

Britain plans to build up to 32 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity to meet legally binding renewable energy goals.

“The United Kingdom’s resolute decision to enact an ambitious offshore plan, along with the country’s support for foreign investment and the availability of large ports – which are essential in this business – convinced us to make the decision to base the global headquarters of our offshore activity in the UK,” Gamesa Chairman Jorge Calvet said.

Gamesa will operate its port logistics and turbine maintenance services from different ports in Britain.

The company’s new type of 5-megawatts (MW) offshore wind turbines will be rolled out to the market in 2013, with first tests due in the fourth quarter of 2012, Gamesa said.

The 6-7-MW model will potentially follow in 2014.

The group had targeted about 40 firms as part of an international conspiracy to force the closure of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), an animal research laboratory based near Cambridge. The members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) posted hoax parcel bombs to staff and offices, carried out criminal damage, threatened violence and made abusive phone calls, Winchester Crown Court was told.

The campaign also used tactics such as false allegations of paedophilia against managers of the supply companies, and posting sanitary towels to their homes saying the blood was contaminated with the AIDS virus.

Some employees from firms in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland had “puppy killer” and “scum” daubed on their houses.

The cost of the damage and increased security measures amounted to £12.6m, the court heard.

Sarah Whitehead, 53, Nicole Vosper, 22, and Thomas Harris, 27, admitted conspiracy to blackmail companies and suppliers linked to HLS between 2001 and 2008, the Press Association reported.

Jason Mullan, 32, Nicola Tapping, 29 and Alfie Fitzpatrick, 21, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to harm the firm.

All received jail terms of between 15 months and six years except Fitzpatrick who was given a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years and ordered to do community work.

Last year, seven other members of SHAC, including its three leaders, were jailed for their role in the six-year campaign which started in 2001.

Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs — by producing them in China, importing them as “small heating devices” and selling them as “heatballs”.

To improve energy efficiency, the EU has banned the sale of bulbs of over 60 watts – to the annoyance of the mechanical engineer from the western city of Essen.

Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realised that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light – he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just five percent – they could be sold legally as heaters.

On their website, the two engineers describe the heatballs as “action art” and as “resistance against legislation which is implemented without recourse to democratic and parliamentary processes.”

Costing €1.69 each ($2.38), the heatballs are going down well – the first batch of 4,000 sold out in three days.

Rotthaeuser has pledged to donate 30 cents of every heatball sold to saving the rainforest, which the 49-year-old sees as a better way of protecting the environment than investing in energy-saving lamps, which contain toxic mercury.

And as their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the “New Physics” on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.

“Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions… These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments.”

As particles are collided in the vast underground LHC complex at increasingly high energies, what the Bulletin article referred to informally as the “universe’s extra bits” – if they do exist as predicted – should be brought into computerised, if ephemeral, view, the theorists say.

Optimism among the hundreds of scientists working at CERN – in the foothills of the Jura mountains along the border of France and Switzerland – has grown as the initially troubled $10 billion experiment hit its targets this year.

Proton collisions
By mid-October, Director-General Rolf Heuer told staff, protons were being collided along the 27-km (16.8 mile) subterranean ring at the rate of five million a second – two weeks earlier than the target date for that total.

By next year, collisions will be occurring – if all continues to go well – at a rate producing what physicists call one “inverse femtobarn”, best described as a colossal amount, of information for analysts to ponder. The head-on collisions, at all but the speed of light, recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the primeval “Big Bang” 13.7 billion years ago which brought the known universe and everything in it into being.

Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet earth, only four percent of that universe is known – because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy.

Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors – and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe – to establish when and how they come together and what shapes they take.

The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing – presumably into them – and then back into the classical four.

Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated – a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.