Women: 60m: J Maduaka (Woodford Green & Essex Ladies), M Richardson (Windsor, Slough & Eton) 200m: C Bloomfield (Woodford Green & Essex Ladies) 60m hurdles: D Allahgreen (Liverpool Harriers) Pole Vault: J Whitlock (Trafford) Long jump: J Johnson (Herne Hill Harriers). 60m hurdles: D Greaves (Newham & Essex Beagles), A Jarrett (Enfield & Haringey) Triple jump: J Golley (Thames Valley Harriers). He won the 60m hurdles title a decade ago and captured only his second AAA title with the Welshman absent at the weekend.At 31, Jarrett is, so far, the oldest male member of the squad, although Judy Oakes, the 1979 European indoor bronze medallist, will be the oldest competitor at 41. The squad could be increased to around 30 when the final list is announced on 14 February.Two years ago Britain won three gold medals, but Jonathan Edwards and Ashia Hansen have both declined to defend their triple jump titles.BRITISH EUROPEAN INDOOR CHAMPIONSHIPS TEAM: Men: 60m: J Gardener (Bath & Wessex) 200m: C Malcolm (Cardiff) 400m: D Caines (Birchfield). Both have already been installed as favourites to win gold medals in the three-day meeting, which starts on 25 February in Ghent, Belgium.Having finished runner-up two years ago in Valencia and taken the bronze medal behind the Americans Maurice Greene and Tim Harding in last year's World Indoor Championships, Gardener will be treading on familiar territory.In contrast it will be Malcolm's Championships debut, but after equalling his own Welsh record when winning his first national senior title on Sunday in 20.74sec, the 20-year-old reigning world junior 100m and 200m gold medallist will be equally confident.With Colin Jackson, the world champion and record holder, deciding not to compete, Tony Jarrett will also fancy his chances of coming home with a gold medal. The sprinters Jason Gardener and Christian Malcolm led the list of likely gold medal-winners when the selectors announced the first names for Britain's team for the European Indoor Championships yesterday. Gardener and Malcolm went to the top of the world 60 metres and 200m ranking lists with victories in last weekend's CGU AAA Indoor Championships in Birmingham.

The sprinters Jason Gardener and Christian Malcolm led the list of likely gold medal-winners when the selectors announced the first names for Britain's team for the European Indoor Championships yesterday. They include Alexandra Meissnitzer of Austria, last season's overall World Cup champion, Pernilla Wiberg of Sweden, a former Olympic and World Cup champion, and Janica Kostelic, the rising Croatian star.Gerg's injury was another blow to the slumping German team, which has been struggling following the retirement of two-time Olympic downhill champion Katja Seizinger.The Germans are still winless this season, after being among the top nations in the past few years."This is a very bitter and hard setback for us," said chief women's coach Wolfgang Maier."Hilde's injury weakens the team a lot, of course," said Alpine chief Walter Vogel.Gerg, who had finished second last season in overall World Cup standings, had three runner-up finishes this season.The German team was also shaken last month by the unexpected resignation of Wolfgang Grassl, one of the coaches and Gerg's boyfriend.Relations between Gerg and Martina Ertl, the second German star, have cooled considerably this season, after Ertl hired a personal coach, saying she felt neglected by Grassl.Gerg also won the bronze medal in the combination at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan.. She is expected to be out of skiing for at least five months.Gerg joined a growing list of prominent skiers who have suffered season-ending injuries. Hilde Gerg of Germany, the Olympic slalom champion, broke her left shin bone in a spill during practice today and will miss the rest of the skiing World Cup season, her team said. Gerg fell in Austria, where she was practicing for a comeback after damaging her knee tendons at the beginning of January while playing volleyball for fun.The 24-year-old German skier was airlifted to a hospital in Zell am See and later flown to Germany for surgery. Hilde Gerg of Germany, the Olympic slalom champion, broke her left shin bone in a spill during practice today and will miss the rest of the skiing World Cup season, her team said. But Mr Saint-Josse is demanding a lengthy, blanket exemption for French hunters from EU law.The note of menace in the hunters' campaign has annoyed many rural people and some chasseurs. There have been reports of physical threats against hunters and local politicians who refuse to accept that eight weeks lopped off the hunting season would destroy France's rural way of life..

Two years ago the environment minister and Green leader, Dominique Voynet, under threat of legal action by Brussels, sought to agree new dates with the hunters. She was subjected to a campaign of personal vituperation, based largely on the fact that she is a woman, which ended with the hunters' success in the Euro poll.The Jospin government will propose a compromise (which would have to be approved by Brussels) allowing limited opening of the hunting season in August and February for certain species in some "traditional" areas. The traditional French hunting season includes the months of August and February.Successive French governments have done nothing to implement the directive. Under an EU directive agreed in 1979, hunting of a score of species of birds, mostly water-fowl, is banned during nesting and migration. The directive allows the shooting of such birds only from September to January inclusive. Jean Saint-Josse, the leader of the "Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions" party, addressed a gathering near the coastal marshes, rich in migratory birdlife at this time of year.The hunters admitted that the weather was hopeless for hunting ducks and wild geese; the wind was in the wrong direction. But they took their guns and dogs on to the marshes anyway to make their point.The government will table a draft law next month that suggests a compromise on the hunting seasons for migratory water birds and on two other explosive disputes between nature lovers, farmers and the powerful French hunting lobby.

Many Socialist and Communist MPs, alarmed by the unexpected success of a hunters' party in the European elections last June - and more direct threats - take the side of the chasseurs.The largest "armed demonstration" was in the Somme département in north France, where the hunters scored 27 per cent in the European elections (they won almost 7 per cent of the national vote). Hunters' organisations staged what they called "armed demonstrations" in every département that had ordered the season closed, claiming that French rural traditions were threatened by Eurocrats and urban ecologists.The Socialist-Communist-Green government of Lionel Jospin is deeply split on the issue Hunting is a blue-collar sport in France. The French government faced an armed insurrection yesterday - and chose to do nothing about it. Thousands of hunters took out guns and dogs to shoot migratory waterfowl, despite a European law - backed by a series of French court judgments - that closed the hunting season from midnight on Monday.Government officials and game wardens in 23 départements, or counties, had been ordered by national and local courts to enforce the EU law or face small daily fines of about £100. The French government faced an armed insurrection yesterday - and chose to do nothing about it. We don't know where the next generation is going to get its power from and we don't assess the cost properly."Good public transport is essential to progress on pollution from cars, said Sir Crispin: "You can't tell people not to use their cars until you have got a proper public transport system going, but if you want to live in a healthy city, you want to certainly reduce the amount of cars and get people to use their legs more to walk or bicycle."If you don't do this, you are going to get heavily congested cities, more and more people breathing in unpleasant fumes and everything getting much worse than it now is."That will certainly happen if you don't have an integrated transport policy.". What is the cost of using a car or doing other things?"At the moment we are using up the Earth's resources without regard to cost.

We are still increasing them by 0.4 per cent a year and that is all going to have great effect on rainfall, droughts, storms, floods, all the rest of it."Is the world going to come together in time in order to prevent some of these things from happening? I think the answer is slowly, slowly they are realising it and quickly, quickly they will have to do something about it."He added: "The Government has got to make a more careful assessment of environmental costs. It has become a mainstream concern, which it certainly wasn't six years ago."I believe that the real test is going to come with energy generation, because greenhouse gases are getting worse at the moment. The world must wake up to the dangers of global warming to prevent an increase in violent and unusual weather patterns such as floods, droughts and storms, according to a new report. Concerted action is needed to cut down car use, particularly in cities, and to counter the effects of burning fossil fuels, said Sir Crispin Tickell, chairman of an influential Government-appointed panel of scientists who produced the document.The final report of the panel on sustainable development - which is being replaced after six years by a new Commission on Sustainable Development - urges the Government to calculate the true cost for future generations of today's environmentally-damaging behaviour.Sir Crispin told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Politicians must be interested in the environment, because the way you make progress on the environment is through leadership, as has been shown with climate change."He said there were some grounds for optimism about the environment: "The positive signs are that people are now taking it much more seriously than they did before. The world must wake up to the dangers of global warming to prevent an increase in violent and unusual weather patterns such as floods, droughts and storms, according to a new report. They have provided an endorsement of Professor Bateson himself, they have endorsed his comments on [my report] but they have not read it," Professor Harris said.. "It provides the best objective evidence that is available on the degree of suffering by deer during hunts and it is to the credit of the National Trust and Forestry Commission that they have based their deer management practices on these important and carefully considered findings," said Professor Gosling, a former scientific director of the Institute of Zoology in London.But Professor Harris says he has received letters of support of his own and intends to write to each supporter of Professor Bateson, detailing his objections to the Bateson report."I'm not sure that all of them have read his report. "My own judgement is that, in the great majority of cases, Professor Bateson's scientific interpretations of the data stand up, and that the conclusions he draws from those interpretations are valid," he said.Professor Morris Gosling, of the University of Newcastle, says that the Bateson report was a major breakthrough in the scientific investigation of animal welfare.