Now the small Dutch town of Leeuwarden, where she was born, is planning to buy the childhood home of the exotic dancer as a tribute to its most controversial citizen.Born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in 1876, the daughter of a shopkeeper and his Javanese wife, she was orphaned in her teens and married and divorced by 26. She then went to Paris where she launched her career as a naked dancer under the stage name Mata Hari, which means “Eye of the day” in Malay.Famous for her nudity and her off-stage affairs, Mata Hari became the stuff of legend At the start of the war she spied for the Germans She was later hired by the French to pass on secrets. They executed her in 1917, saying her treachery had led to the deaths of thousands of Allied soldiers.In recent years Mata Hari has been seen more as a scapegoat. Gerk Koopmans, director of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, argues: “Things were going badly. A lot of soldiers were dying and the French had to divert the public’s attention from their failings. Who better to use and blame than a famous person and a wicked lady?”Despite the interest in a new museum, there may be a problem in filling it. Mata Hari’s short and eventful life left little by way of memorabilia.

The current exhibition relies on a handful of photographs, a few letters and two scrapbooks she made of her career. When she was executed Mata Hari left debts so vast that everything she owned had to be sold to pay creditors. Mr Koopmans concedes: “There is very little sign of her life left We are truly dealing with a myth.”. Stephen Jay Gould, the outspoken evolutionary biologist whose views on Darwinism made him a bestselling if controversial author, died yesterday aged 60 at his home in New York He had had cancer for more than 20 years. Professor Gould, a Harvard University academic for 35 years, greatly influenced his field for many decades, delighting and dividing his colleagues with equal passion. With Niles Eldredge, a fellow palaeontologist from the New York Museum of Natural History, he developed an evolutionary theory called “punctuated equilibrium”, which postulates that long periods of evolutionary stability are broken by shorter spurts of evolutionary change, perhaps sparked by events such as climate change or a comet impact.

The theory contrasts sharply with more traditional evolutionists, who believe evolution is a steady process.His ability to write plainly on such difficult subjects that helped him to reach seamlessly from the world of academia to that of popular publishing. He wrote a series of witty and engaging best-selling essay collections, including “Ever Since Darwin”, “The Panda’s Thumb”, and “The Mismeasure of Man,” a study of intelligence testing.Andrew Knoll, a colleague at Harvard University, said: “Most of us just appreciated that in Steve we had someone who put this very positive public face on palaeontology, who was able to reach an audience that most of us would never reach and not nearly so effectively. He really was palaeontology’s public intellectual.”Professor Gould analysed evolutionary theory with comparisons to a range of disciplines, including popular culture and sports. But it was his belief in “punctuated equilibria” that set him at odds with traditional Darwinists, among them the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins.The row was seized upon by creationists, particularly in America, where Professor Gould was intimately involved with the fight against creationist teaching during the 1970s and 1980s in the Deep South.Fundamentalist teaching ­ which disputes the theory of evolution ­ reached its height in the US in the 1920s and culminated in the Scopes “monkey” trial in Tennessee in 1925, when John Scopes, a biology teacher, was arrested for teaching evolution in contravention of state law. A second creationist surge occurred in the 1970s, which led to the “equal time” laws for the teaching of creationism and evolution in two states The rule was later overturned. Professor Gould accused creationists of distorting his theories to undermine Darwinism.

“Such inane and basically harmless perorations may boil the blood but creationist attempts to use punctuated equilibrium in their campaigns for suppressing the teaching of evolution raise genuine worries,” he said at the time.His most recent book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published earlier this year, is a 1,433-page opus that took more than 20 years to complete and in which he outlines his criticism of the creationists. At a reading at the Harvard Museum of Natural History soon after it was published, he said that when he was diagnosed with cancer in 1982 he believed he had “almost zero chance of finishing it”.Professor Gould leaves his second wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer He also leaves two sons from his first marriage.. President George Bush is challenging the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to hold independent elections and release all political prisoners, warning that America’s 40-year-old trade embargo will not be lifted until he does so. At the same time he announced several initiatives, including the start of a direct mail service, which he said would make life easier for ordinary Cubans.”Full normalisation of relations with Cuba ­ diplomatic recognition, open trade and a robust aid programme ­ will only be possible when Cuba has a new government that is fully democratic, when the rule of law is respected and when the human rights of all Cubans are fully protected,” he said.The message of Mr Bush’s speech in Washington was repeated to America’s Cuban exile community in the Little Havana district of Miami.The former president Jimmy Carter visited Cuba last week and called for a return to democracy but also for an end to the trade embargo. There are increasingly active moves afoot on Capitol Hill to end the sanctions, which most Americans believe are counter-productive.* Amnesty International has welcomed a fall in the number of political prisoners in Cuba in the past year, but noted a rise in other “violations” of human rights It identified six detainees as “prisoners of conscience”.. Should children conceived through artificial insemination have the right to know the identity of their biological fathers? As debate rages in Britain about the desirability of releasing information about sperm donors to their offspring, one Californian teenager is about to come face to face with the man who made her mother’s pregnancy possible. Since turning 18 at the end of last year, she has had his name, his driving licence number, his date and place of birth, his e-mail, telephone number and street address She even has a photograph.