NEW YORK: Subways future and subways past seemed to collide on a recent morning at the Jefferson Street station on the L line in Bushwick, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. New electronic signs on the platforms showed how many minutes a person would have to wait until the next train: at this moment it was eight minutes for a Canarsie-bound train and four minutes for a Manhattan- bound train.

But the recorded female voice on the public address system that was supposed to work in tandem with the signs was showing signs of a breakdown: “Ladies and gentlemen, the next L, the next L …,” it said over and over, like a scratchy recording.

The signs and the recording are part of a new system being tested on the L line that will, for the first time, give riders accurate information about the arrival time of trains, coupled with clear announcements Д both things that seem as foreign to New Yorks subway as a man offering a woman a seat on a crowded train.

On this day, however, the signs worked like a charm. A stopwatch revealed that the trains came and went as predicted. It was almost unnerving.

But any straphangers who might have wondered if they had passed through some time-space continuum into a parallel subway universe would have instantly been set right by the bizarre sound effects. At least the announcements were as garbled as ever. As ever. As ever.

Of course, it would be unfair to hold that bit of normalcy against New Yorks Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The system, after all, is still being tested.

Farther down the line, at the L station at Myrtle and Wyckoff Avenues, the illuminated signs said the next Manhattan-bound train was seven minutes away Д and sure enough, the train came in seven minutes. And the display counted down the time in between.

The announcements, too, were smooth and clear, informing anyone who might not have seen one of the signs hung above the platform how long they had to wait until the next train.

“It doesnt get you that anxious because you dont know when the trains coming and you think its going to come in an hour but its really five minutes away,” said Damian Scipio, 13, an eighth grader at Philippa Schuyler Middle School for the Gifted and Talented on Greene Avenue.

Kevin Campble, a construction worker, also found something soothing in the electronic signs. “If youre late to work,” he said, “you can look at the time and it can ease your mind.”

The signs are possible on the L line because it is the only line that operates with a computerized system that knows exactly where each train is as it moves through the subway. That is what makes it possible to post accurate arrival times.

As other lines become computerized, the transportation authority plans to add electronic signs. The signs are to be installed next in the 156 stations on the numbered lines and are scheduled to be in full operation there by early 2009.

It is worth noting, however, that the installation of the system on the L line, which cost $17.6 million, was dogged by software problems and long delays.

And there are still a number of glitches to overcome. At the Union Square station, some trains came as predicted, but others came several minutes early or late. A train could be pulling into the station in front of a sign that said it was still five minutes away.

Back at Jefferson Street in Brooklyn, a sign at the turnstiles lets passengers know whether they must hurry to catch a train that is about to arrive or, alternately, how long they will have to wait. It may, however, be the kind of change that New Yorkers take a while to get used to. Or maybe it is a matter of trust.

The clerk in the booth said that even when the sign shows that there will be a wait for a train, people often dash through the turnstile and down the stairs anyway.

“Thats New York,” the clerk said. “You could put a timetable big as day out here, the same time every day the train comes through. People are still going to run. Its the good part of New York. The hustle and bustle.”

E-mail: freeflow@iht.com

SHE embraced an ideal of revolution spawned out of an idealistic student fantasy. She would bury the bourgeois, money worshipping, Nazi-forgiving state she was born into along with its bankers and lawyers, industrialists and prosecutors.

Out of the struggle, dreamed Brigitte Mohnhaupt, would come a world of socialist equality, peace and love. And like so many revolutionaries, Mohnhaupt believed murder, terror, robbery and kidnapping were there to be used as necessary.

Now, nearly a quarter of a century after she was jailed, she is to be freed, to live in an alien world of mobile phones, iPods, the euro and an entirely new brand of terrorism, that of radical Islam.

Mohnhaupt, 57, has voiced no word of regret for the blood she shed as a member of the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, after its founders. But after 24 years in jail judges in Stuttgart, acting on advice from the government in Berlin, yesterday agreed to free her from her sentence of five life terms plus 15 years.

Her co-conspirator, Christian Klar, 54, will have to wait two more years before he can be considered for release unless he is granted a special pardon by the German president, Horst Khler.

Polls for magazines and newspapers have shown a majority of Germans opposed freeing her while several murders she is believed to be implicated in, or have knowledge of, remain unsolved.

“The RAF terrorists murdered ten police officers,” said Konrad Freiberg, the head of Germany’s police union. “Although the ruling needs to be accepted, we will not forget these murders. ”

Mohnhaupt and Klar were not bit players in the ruthlessly murderous Red Army Faction, but senior figures. Like most members of the group, they were middle class, privileged youngsters, disaffected with a Germany they saw as too materialistic and unwilling to atone for wartime guilt. A state not worthy of the democracy that had been foisted on it while a majority of Nazi war criminals went unpunished. Their goal was the overthrow of capitalist West Germany to be replaced with a Communist regime. The group leaders, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, committed suicide in jail in the 1970s. Mohnhaupt and Klar are two of four Red Army Faction members still in prison.

Brigitte Margret Ida Mohnhaupt, born 24 June, 1949, morphed from the bright high school student into bloodthirsty terrorist as an act of rebellion. In France in 1968 the students were content to throw stones; in West Germany, the hatred went much deeper against a nation which Mohnhaupt and others thought was burying the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust.

In 1967, Mohnhaupt enrolled with the philosophy department at the University of Munich.

She was originally a member of the Socialist Patients Collective, the SPK, a left-wing German patients’ group fighting against medicine and doctors as enemies of the “patients’ class”, blaming capitalism for illness. During their group therapy sessions, the SPK were supposed to be discussing Marxism, religion, education and sexuality, but in reality their working groups were based on explosives, radio transmission, photography, judo and karate.

In the early 1970s this mish-mash of Hamburg collective hippies and free-love students from Munich and Stuttgart had gravitated to the Marxist cadre known as the Red Army Faction, which was soon to fall under the command of the psychotic Andreas Baader.

Soon the Kripo - West Germany’s CID - trailing him and his bloodthirsty compadres would give them the moniker “The Crazy Gang”.

On 22 October, 1971, police in Hamburg spotted Margrit Schiller, a former SPK member, outside a train station where she met two comrades. Officers Helmut Schmid and Heinrich Lemke chased them into a park but the three were heavily armed. Schmid died with six bullets in him, Lemke was lucky to escape with only a leg wound.

Later that night, the killers were smuggled to a safe house by Mohnhaupt.

On 22 December, 1971, another policeman, Herbert Schner, was shot dead in a Rhineland bank raid. Mohnhaupt was understood to have been in on it. Police think she may also have been involved in the murder the same year of Ingeborg Barz, a 19-year-old typist who wanted to leave the gang. She was executed by Baader at a remote gravel pit near Aachen.

On 9 June, 1972, Mohnhaupt was arrested in Berlin in connection with the RAF and later jailed. She was released in February 1977, and immediately went back underground.

Mohnhaupt was a major player in the so-called “German Autumn,” when the killing reached its zenith. Branded by investigators as Germany’s “most evil and dangerous woman”, Mohnhaupt presented Dresdner Bank boss Jrgen Ponto with a bouquet of roses before shooting him five times on his doorstep in 1977.

Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the West German employers’ federation, was also one of her victims, murdered after being kidnapped and held for 44 days in 1977 in an operation she masterminded. She was also implicated in the murder of prosecutor-general Siegfried Buback.

In May 1978, Mohnhaupt was rearrested in Yugoslavia with others. However, in November 1978 she was allowed to leave to a country of her choice.

On 11 November, 1982, Mohnhaupt, along with Adelheid Schulz, was caught entering an RAF arms cache in the woods near Frankfurt that had been staked out by GSG9, the German counter-terrorist police. Mohnhaupt was sentenced to five times life in prison, with a 24-year minimum tariff.

Historians of the RAF state that Klar and Mohnhaupt lost sight of their socialist ideals and were more interested in an all-out war on the state. But for all its savagery, the RAF did not set not out to indiscriminately kill large numbers of civilians - though neither were its members the high-minded revolutionaries their admirers wanted them to be.

Waltrude Schleyer, the 90-year-old widow of Hanns Martin, said : “I am disappointed and upset that they will set my husband’s murderer free. She showed no mercy to my husband, why should she receive mercy from a state she tried to destroy?”

Gerhart Baum, a former interior minister of Germany at the height of the Red Army Faction terror, backed freeing Mohnhaupt . He said: “We have to be clear on the point that, according to German law, remorse isn’t demanded. It’s desirable, but it isn’t necessary. What we need is renewed proof that the German constitutional state is capable of showing mercy.” MAJOR ATTACKS:

7 April, 1977 - Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback assassinated in hail of bullets in Karlsruhe.

30 July, 1977 - Banker Juergen Ponto shot dead at his home near Frankfurt during a kidnap attempt.

5 September, 1977 - RAF guerrillas kidnap West German employer’s association chief Hanns Martin Schleyer.

13 October, 1977 - Hijackers seize Lufthansa airliner and demand release of RAF leaders. Five days later, West German commandos storm plane in Mogadishu and free hostages. Hours later Baader and two other RAF leaders commit suicide in jail and Schleyer is killed by his kidnappers.

9 July, 1986 - Siemens board member Karl Heinz Beckurts killed in bomb attack.

30 November, 1989 - Alfred Herrhausen, Deutsche Bank chief killed in car bombing.

1 April, 1991 - Detlev Rohwedder, the head of the Treuhand agency which was privatising the former East Germany’s state-owned industries murdered.

His was the last killing attributed to the RAF. WHO THEY ARE

HORST MAHLER: Now 71, a neo-Nazi committed to the destruction of Judaism and a leading figure in the far-right NPD. Once served time for RAF bank robberies.

IRMGARD MOELLER. Now 59, living with her partner in southern Germany. Killer of three soldiers at the United States Military Intelligence (G-2) Headquarters at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg in 1972. In July that year she was arrested and given a lengthy prison sentence.

ASTRID PROLL: Now 59, Astrid Proll was a bank robber and expert getaway driver and car thief for the group. She fled to England after arrest where she worked at a number of jobs. Proll was discovered and arrested by Special Branch in 1978 and returned to West Germany in 1979. She was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment for bank robbery and falsifying documents. Because she had already spent two-thirds of that time in German and English prisons she was released immediately.

MONIKA BERBERICH: Now 65, was a junior lawyer, sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment in 1974 (of which she had already served four years) for bank robbery and membership of a criminal association.

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The government missed its target to deport failed asylum seekers in the final quarter of last year, figures showed today.

Ministers were 10% behind their public performance target to remove more failed applicants than the number of “unfounded” cases arriving in the same period, according to Home Office figures.

But taking 2006 as a whole, the government met its target because it removed larger numbers in the first six months.

In the last year, 18,235 failed asylum seekers were deported, compared with 17,780 “unfounded” cases.

From October to December 2006, there were 4,085 deportations compared with 4,560 arrivals - a shortfall of 475.

The much-trumpeted “tipping point” target was announced in 2005 by the prime minister, Tony Blair. When John Reid was promoted to Home Secretary in May, Mr Blair ordered him to make the tipping point one of his top priorities.

The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, said of the annual figure: “This is a substantial achievement and shows how far we have come since asylum applications were at their peak in 2002.

“There are now fewer people than ever coming to the UK and making unfounded claims for asylum, and we are removing more failed asylum seekers than ever before.

“The rise in removals is all the more impressive when considered against the temporary drop in available detention capacity caused by the disturbance at Harmondsworth removal centre in November, and our need to remove 2,240 foreign national prisoners since April 2006.”

The announcement came as separate figures showed the number of immigrants from the eight former communist countries, which joined the EU in 2004 has reached 579,000.

There were 63,000 applications to work in Britain by the so-called “A8″ immigrants in the final three months of last year.

Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in May 2004.

Poles make up 65% of the total number who have come to Britain. The 579,000 figure - equal to the combined populations of Cardiff and Bradford - does not include A8 immigrants who are self-employed.

This group is thought to include a sizeable number involved in the construction industry. The Anglia region has the largest number of A8 workers, followed by the Midlands and London.

A total of 9,557 applied for income-related benefits, of which 1,795 were allowed to go ahead. Another 45,252 are claiming child benefit, and 22,685 are receiving tax credits.

Other details from asylum figures published today showed applications fell to their lowest level since 1993, to 23,710.

Iranians formed the largest group of applicants in the final three months of the year, with 735 applications, up 30%.