• Unsettled forward joins former club with immediate effect
• 'He needs to play regularly and we wish him well' says Mancini

Robinho has joined his former club Santos on a six-month loan deal, Manchester City have confirmed. The Brazil forward, who arrived at Eastlands for a British record fee of £32.5m in September 2008, is heading back to his homeland with immediate effect.

Santos, whom Robinho left for Real Madrid in 2005, will assume control of the player's contract terms, including wages and bonuses. He will travel to the club on Sunday.

"Robinho is someone who needs to be playing regularly and we wish him well for the period of his loan," said Roberto Mancini, the City manager, of a player who has failed to settle in England and was at one point heavily linked with a move to Barcelona.

He did end last season as the club's top scorer with 15 goals but, partly due to injury, he has struggled badly this campaign. The low point came earlier this month when, having come on as a second-half substitute, the 26-year-old was then replaced during City's 2-0 defeat at Everton.

Robinho, the first signing of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan's ownership of City, has also left City to ensure he makes Brazil's squad for this summer's World Cup.

Barry Glendenning, Paul Doyle and special guest Ben Clissitt join James to wrap up a busy midweek of football.

While the red half of Manchester celebrate victory over the blues, the pod discuss the coin-throwing incident and disgraceful chants directed at Emmanuel Adebayor. No one wants to see these in football, but how do you stop them?

Arsenal are next up for United, which should be good news for Wayne Rooney if Sol Campbell continues at the back for the Gunners. Has Richard Dunne ever beaten his man so easily?

Paul gives his verdict on the standard of the Africa Cup of Nations so far and explains why Algeria shouldn't be taken lightly by England in the summer.

The pod also wonder why on earth Juventus would want Rafael Benítez as their new manager, discuss the Salvador Cabañas shooting and preview the Premier League fixtures at the weekend.

Got anything to say? You know the score, leave messages on blog below, and find us on iTunes, Facebook, and Twitter.

Barcelona's passionate dancers invoke the traditions of the Catalan gypsies

General Medical Council finds Andrew Wakefield, who linked MMR with autism, failed in duties as responsible consultant
• Datablog: what's happened to MMR vaccinations - and how do we compare to the rest of the world?
• From the Lancet to the GMC: How Andrew Wakefield fell from grace

Dr Andrew Wakefield, the expert at the centre of the MMR controversy, "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant" and showed a "callous disregard" for the suffering of children involved in his research, the General Medical Council (GMC) has ruled.

Wakefield also acted dishonestly and was misleading and irresponsible in the way he described research that was later published in the Lancet medical journal, the GMC said. He had gone against the interests of children in his care, and his conduct brought the medical profession "into disrepute" after he took blood samples from youngsters at his son's birthday party in return for payments of £5.

The doctor, who was absent from today's GMC hearing, faces being struck off the medical register. The panel decided the allegations against him could amount to serious professional misconduct, an issue to be decided at a later date.

Wakefield said he was dismayed at the panel's decision. "The allegations against me and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust ... and I invite anyone to examine the contents of these proceedings and come to their own conclusion."

The panel chairman, Dr Surendra Kumar, was heckled by parents who support Wakefield as he delivered the verdicts.

One woman shouted: "These doctors have not failed our children. You are outrageous." She called the panel of experts "bastards" and accused the GMC of being a "kangaroo court". Another shouted: "This is a set-up."

In the late 1990s Wakefield and two other doctors said they believed they had uncovered a link between the MMR jab, bowel disease and autism. The research caused a big drop in the number of children given the triple jab for measles, mumps and rubella.

The hearing has sat for 148 days over two and a half years and reportedly cost more than £1m. Thirty-six witnesses gave evidence at the hearing.

The accusations relate to investigations for the study, based on 12 youngsters with bowel disorders, carried out between 1996 and 1998. At the time all three doctors were employed at the Royal Free hospital's medical school in London, with honorary clinical contracts hospital itself.

The GMC heard that vulnerable children were subjected to "inappropriate and invasive" tests by the doctors, who breached of "some of the most fundamental rules in medicine".

Wakefield did not have paediatric qualifications and had not worked as a clinical doctor for several years when he ordered the tests, the panel was told.

One of the key claims was that Wakefield accepted more than £50,000 from the Legal Aid Board for research to support a group of parents' attempts to fight for compensation.

It was alleged Wakefield applied for money so that five children and their families could stay in hospital during tests and for MRI scans for each child.

The money was paid into an account at the Royal Free for Wakefield's research, but, the GMC alleged, the cost of scans and hospital stays would have been met by the NHS.

Wakefield was accused of paying children £5 for blood samples at his son's birthday party, then joking about it afterwards.

All three doctors denied the allegations against them.

Government joins with English Heritage to put nuclear bunkers at RAF Upper Heyford on list of protected national monuments

Some of the most sinister historic monuments in Britain, a set of hardened concrete bunkers built to shelter American nuclear bombers, are to be protected and preserved, it has been announced.

A planning inquiry into the future development of Upper Heyford, near Bicester, has accepted the English Heritage argument that the site is one of the best preserved Cold War landscapes in Britain. The government has now agreed that the heart of the complex, which is on the Schedule of Monuments with sites such as Stonehenge, should be protected from development.

Andy Brown, regional director of English Heritage, who gave evidence at the enquiry, said: "The decision to safeguard these structures brings England's cold war heritage into the mainstream, alongside the Georgian and Victorian buildings that people more often think of as our architectural heritage.

"I hope this is a conservation milestone, which will mark the cold war being embraced as a legitimate part of our heritage."

Simon Thurley, the chief executive, agreed: "To anyone over 50, the cold war is too recent to feel like history, but to 17-year-olds it is just as historic as Napoleon," he said. "Within one minute [of the alert] planes could have been fired up; in six minutes they could be bombing Moscow."

In the late 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the cold war, the old first world war airstrip at Upper Heyford was expanded. The runway was first strengthened, then extended to 2.5 miles to take B52 Bombers. The hardened aircraft shelters, were added in 1967, after the Six Day War, when Israel destroyed much of the Egyptian airforce on the ground. The hangars were protected by motorised 85-tonne doors, and were designed so that at least one nuclear bomber could be kept running inside, night and day. One technician who forgot to wear his ear protectors as an F111 ignited its engines lost his hearing permanently.

A small American town grew up around the base, marked out by US-style hydrants on every street corner, complete with a supermarket – almost unheard-of in Britain at the time – selling delicacies such as Hersey bars and Oreo biscuits.

Most of the equipment and fittings, and anything regarded as sensitive, was stripped out when the Americans finally handed the base back to the British in 1994. But the command rooms survive, protected by six inch thick steel doors, with the names of the last crews written up in chinagraph pencil, and an American style burger bar complete with the last menu specials. A more grim sight also remains: the outdoor showers designed to wash off nuclear fallout.

Some of the buildings will continue in light industrial use; others will be preserved as a museum; and there will be some housing development away from the most sensitive part of the site. Schoolgroups are already frequent visitors, eager to examine the structures that could have ended the world in a matter of minutes.

The black poplar tree, thought to be Britain's most endangered native timber tree, has been in decline for the past 200 years