The launch of India's longest-range missile able to fly1900 miles was said to be a routine

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The launch of India's longest-range missile, able to fly1,900 miles, was said to be a routine test.. Standard Life policyholders saw the value of their newly-held shares rise today after the insurer made a bright start to life on the stock market. The shares opened at 230p and quickly rose to 245p before settling at 241p, a rise of 5%. Today's dealings end a two-year process for Standard Life which culminated in members voting in May to end more than 80 years as a mutual company. The group, which was valued at £4.65 billion at the start of trading today, will earn a place in the FTSE 100 Index through the flotation. The average value of shares issued to Standard's 2.4 million policyholders was set at £1,475 on Friday night. The 230p placing was much lower than the range of 240p to 290p indicated by Standard Life in the spring. The environmental lobby, deeply worried about nuclear safety standards in Russia, will also protest.Iran is likely to top the G8 agenda when the leaders gather on Saturday, amid growing impatience over Tehran's apparent stalling over its response to the package of incentives offered by European negotiators to persuade the Islamic regime to abandon its uranium enrichment activities - which the West suspects are aimed at developing a nuclear bomb.Russia has refused to back either sanctions, or a strong United Nations Security Council resolution that could pave the way for US military strikes.

But the Bush administration believes a lucrative civilian deal will make Moscow more amenable. If completed, however, a deal could see Russia earning billions of dollars as a leading storage centre for spent nuclear fuel from US-built reactors. The discussions, first disclosed by The Washington Post on Saturday, should help smooth ties between America and its one-time superpower rival ruffled by US accusations of a clampdown on democracy and free speech by Mr Putin, and by anger over Moscow's unwillingness to back punitive sanctions against Iran and North Korea.But they are bound to generate controversy in the US, where some conservatives were already calling on President Bush to boycott the St Petersburg meeting as a sign of his displeasure. But during his lifetime his research, too tantalising for others to ignore, was often pounced upon by fellow electronics engineers to forward their own inventions The radio is a prime example. Officially invented by Guglielmo Marconi at the turn of the 20th century, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1943 - the year of Tesla's death - that it had been the work of the Croatian-born scientist, and that he should be credited with its invention.Such posterity would have been unimaginable for Tesla's humble parents, who wanted him to be a priest and never once imagined he would make a living out of something as abstract as science. Despite their warnings, the young Tesla left Croatia for Graz in 1877 to study engineering; he moved to Prague afterwards, and then Budapest, where he worked briefly as an engineer for a telephone company He soon found out the job was limiting and non-creative. As usual, his friends said, his head was buzzing with ideas and a constant craving for creativity, which, to his frustration, he was unable to share with others.The US, with its relatively progressive scientific culture, seemed the right place to go, and Tesla went to New York in 1884. Five years later he became a US citizen and began working with the inventor Thomas Edison and, later, the American industrialist George Westinghouse.

The latter bought and successfully developed Tesla's patents, the most prominent being the introduction of alternating current for power transmission.While in the US, Tesla became known by many as the quintessential "mad scientist." He had few close friends, among them the writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain and Francis Marion Crawford, and worked alone in his Colorado laboratory for hours on end, often through the night and with little or no sleep. Most people were driven away from the eccentric genius by his obsessive streak and intense, often disturbing, outbursts. Although tall and strikingly handsome, he never married; some claimed he was afraid of women, others that his inventions were his loves and that he could never have given himself so devotedly to a wife as he did to his ideas. "There is no bigger joy or pleasure of soul than the one when an inventor sees the creation of his brain turn to life," he wrote.Or maybe it was just that he was repulsed by modern women, reacting with horror at their pearls and, in particular, earrings.