Jim McCormick, 57, was convicted at the Old Bailey criminal court in London of three counts of fraud. According to detectives, he was trained at a “how to sell to the UN” seminar organised by an arms of the British government in March 2008. He also held meetings with officials at the export-promotion arm of the government.

McCormick faces up to 10 years in jail for a crime that detectives said “showed a complete disregard for the safety of those that used and relied upon the device for their own security and protection”.

The devices were compared to dowsing rods and magic wands by people who used them, although their sales in Iraq and other war zones helped make McCormick a 55 million pounds fortune, and allowed him to buy a 3.5m pound mansion in Bath formerly owned by the actor Nicolas Cage.

There is no evidence that the British government knew the devices were useless. But it ignored a warning in 2008 about the dangers of the fake detectors from a whistleblower, who said they put lives at risk.

Ian Pearson, the Labour minister who oversaw export controls at the time, was emailed a detailed dossier about McCormick entitled “Dowsing rods endanger lives” in November of that year, but his ministerial office did not reply.

The document concluded that McCormick’s fake detectors could have potentially lethal consequences: “Somebody is going to be seriously hurt or killed using or relying on these devices to detect explosives, if they haven’t already.”

It took over a year for the government to place limited export bans to Afghanistan and Iraq in Jan 2010 on the trade after officials were warned by the whistleblower that the detectors, which sold for as much as 10,000 pounds but were based on a 15-pound device, were not capable of detecting anything.

The whistleblower also wrote to the chairman of the Commons defence select committee, James Arbuthnot, in Jan 2009 that “these devices put lives at serious risk since they cannot detect explosives”. Arbuthnot passed on the complaint to Quentin Davies, the then minister for defence equipment.

Patrick Mercer MP, a former army officer, said: “It seems extraordinary that once the government knew about the nonsense of these devices that a blanket export ban was not put on the products rather than these specific ones to Iraq and Afghanistan. The government seems to have been tardy about the whole thing.”

Police warned that the bogus devices were still being used in Iraq and elsewhere. Following conviction at the end of McCormick’s six-week trial, Detective Inspector Ed Heath, of Avon and Somerset police said: “Both civilians and armed forces personnel were put at significant risk in relying upon this equipment. That device has been used and is still being used on checkpoints. People using that device believe it works. It does not.”

It is also alleged by an Iraqi whistleblower that McCormick paid millions of pounds in bribes to senior Iraqis to secure the deals. Gen Jihad al Jabiri, who ran the Baghdad bomb squad, is in prison on corruption charges relating to the contracts. Some Iraqis still believe the detectors work, while others are angry they have cost lives.

By arrangement with the Guardian

Margaret Hodge, who chairs the House of Commons committee that last year investigated tax avoidance by Google and Amazon and accused Starbucks of “immoral” behaviour, has asked ministers if they can still defend an arrangement that allows the Duchy of Cornwall not to pay corporation tax or capital gains tax on trading that last year provided Prince Charles with an GBP18.3m private income.

The public accounts committee (PAC) said it made the move after more than 30 MPs and members of the public complained about the duchy’s arrangements. A full inquiry is likely to be launched into the matter, a committee source said.

The PAC is also likely to investigate the wider royal finances including public spending on the Queen and Prince Charles’s travel and official homes.

Hodge said she has written to Greg Clark, the financial secretary to the Treasury, stating that “in view of the committee’s and the public’s concern on this matter” he should clarify “why the tax treatment of the duchy remains defensible”.

“A lot of the work we are doing is around tax collection and this is another element the taxpayer has an interest in,” said Hodge. “Taxpayers are concerned that everyone pays their fair share.”

Any change to the duchy’s tax status threatens to reduce the annual surplus paid to the prince for his private and official spending. The duchy asserts that the estate is “not a separate legal entity for tax purposes” allowing Charles to use its gross profits to fund his private and official spending including 26 valets, gardeners and farm staff. In the past five years he has received more than GBP86m from the arrangement. Clarence House strongly denies any suggestion of tax avoidance.The duchy owns 53,000 hectares of land in 23 counties, including Prince Charles’s Gloucestershire home of Highgrove. It is a major business with interests in commercial and residential property and farmland. The PAC also wants the Treasury to explain “the impact of this favourable tax position on the duchy’s competitive position in markets in which it operates”.

A Clarence House spokesperson said, “The duchy is not a company and is not therefore liable to pay corporation tax. The prince voluntarily pays income tax on income generated by the duchy. Should the prince pay corporation tax as well, this would result in double taxation.”

It also said the duchy is exempt from capital gains tax, saying Charles is not entitled to capital gains and therefore it would not be appropriate for him to pay.

Charles paid tax of GBP5m on his GBP18m income from the duchy last year, which Clarence House said was at the full 50 per cent rate after deductions for expenses.

Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state, said it welcomed the public accounts committee’s scrutiny of the duchy’s tax arrangement.

The duchy’s insistence that it should not pay corporation tax because it is indivisible from the Duke of Cornwall — currently Prince Charles — appears to have been challenged by a court ruling. In late 2011 John Angel, principal judge at the information rights tribunal, who was tasked with deciding if the duchy should publish information about its environmental impact, ruled it must be considered a separate legal body from the prince because of “the differentiation of the duchy and duke in commercial and tax matters as well as under legislation and the contractual behaviour of the duchy”. The ruling is being appealed by the palace.

“There is no justification for the duchy to be avoiding this tax,” said Graham Smith, Republic’s chief executive. “The duchy is a trading body and major land owner. Like all other trading bodies it should pay its fair share of tax. Instead it keeps ducking and diving, changing its excuses each time in a desperate bid to justify its position.”

Parliamentary scrutiny over tax — which this week returned to the political centre stage with redistributive “Robin Hood” plans from Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition Labour party — could prove embarrassing for the palace. Starbucks faced protests outside its coffee shops following cross-examination by the PAC and was forced to volunteer to pay HM Revenue & Customs GBP10m extra in tax.

The committee’s report into tax avoidance concluded, “The UK government needs to get a grip on large corporations which generate significant income in the UK but pay little or no tax.”

In December anti-monarchy campaigners asked HMRC to investigate what they alleged was “a well-entrenched tax avoidance scheme” being run by the Duchy.

By arrangement with the Guardian

The language-speaking figures recorded for the first time from a survey of 56.1 million residents of England and Wales show 546,000 speak Polish. It is now the second main language in England. There are still slightly more Welsh speakers in Wales at 562,000.

The next biggest main languages are the south Asian languages of Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati, followed by Arabic, French, Chinese and Portuguese. The statisticians said they recorded over 100 different languages and 49 main languages with more than 15,000 users. English was the biggest of that group and Swedish the smallest.

Chinese people alone listed 67 different languages or dialects, although a minority of those were different spellings of the same language. All but three of the London boroughs, excluding the City, Richmond and Havering, have residents speaking more than 100 main languages, the ONS said. Hillingdon is the most linguistically diverse, with 107 languages listed, followed by Newham, with 103.

Some of the languages are in a tiny minority. For example, there was only one person in Barnet who said they spoke Caribbean creole and one person in Bexley.

Fifty-eight people speak Scottish Gaelic, 33 speak Manx Gaelic and 629 speak Romany.

Ealing in west London is the nation’s hotspot for Polish speaking, the town of Slough for Punjabi/Urdu, the city of Leicester for Gujarati, Kensington in central London for French and Manchester for Cantonese and Mandarin.

One million households have no residents with English as a main language, although most had some proficiency in English, the ONS said.

Only 138,000 people could not speak English at all.

“The West Midlands is the region with the lowest percentage of people that can speak English very well or well at 72 per cent,” said Roma Chappell, census director. It was the region that also had the highest number of people who can’t speak English at all.

The latest figures from the 2011 census also revealed how people in England and Wales get to work. The university cities of Cambridge and Oxford were the cycling capitals with 18 per cent and 10 per cent of their populations commuting on two wheels but London had the most cyclists, with the number more than doubling from 77,000 in 2001 to 161,000 in 2011.

Half of London residents travel using public transport but two per cent now use bikes and nine per cent of the people of Hackney in east London cycle to work.
— The Guardian, London

The discovery of the Higgs boson by physicists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was named breakthrough of the year by Science magazine, with runners-up including the pin-sharp DNA sequencing of a Siberian cave girl who lived 50,000 years ago and a delicate brain implant in a Pennsylvania woman paralysed from the neck down that allowed her to use thought to manipulate a robotic arm to grasp a bottle and take a sip of coffee.

The discovery of the Higgs boson proves there is an energy field all around us that gives mass to the fundamental particles that make up our world. The announcement of its discovery in Geneva was met by cheers usually heard at football matches or rock concerts.

The result of the 43-year-long hunt for the Higgs boson was not the only exercise in exploring the world’s very smallest particles to make the shortlist. A team of Chinese physicists won plaudits for describing how elusive particles called neutrinos morph into one another as they zip along at near-light speed. The discovery is likely to open up the field of neutrino physics and may help solve a puzzle that has long vexed scientists: how the universe evolved after its creation to contain so much matter and so little anti-matter.

Researchers believe there could be some as-yet-unknown differences between the two types of particles or else the laws of physics might need to be modified.

In genetics, the results of a £180 million decade-long study to create an encyclopedia of DNA elements, known as Encode, were published to wild acclaim with this newspaper describing it as “the most significant shift in scientists’ understanding of the way our DNA operates since the sequencing of the human genome”.

The portrait of DNA helps explain how genes are controlled and researchers have already used the insights to clarify genetic risk factors for diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease.

From the tiny to the vast, Science’s shortlist celebrated the eight-month trip through space of the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in August using a crane “festooned with retro-rockets”. It went on to explore the Gale crater and the successful landing reassured Nasa that it can send a rover to collect samples from Mars and land a second mission to pick up the samples and lift them into Mars’ orbit for eventual return to earth.

The journal also highlighted a global controversy over the safety of research into bird flu, amid fears over which studies were safe and which could lead to even more devastating strains of the virus that could fall into the hands of terrorists. Fears grew when a Rotterdam-based virologist, Ron Fouchier, said his team had engineered a version of the bird flu virus that could be transmittable between humans.

The journal has also predicted next year’s breakthroughs, including the most precise map yet of the afterglow of the Big Bang, when the universe is thought to have been born, and the exploration of a mysterious subglacial lake four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, which is likely to have been cut off from life on the rest of the planet for millions of years. — The Guardian, London