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- US debt ceiling deal hopes push markets higher - live
- Plan to use hidden cameras to monitor care homes
- More than 30 dead in Philippines earthquake - video
- Angela Ahrendts leaves Burberry for new job at Apple
- Cameron launches plan to cut EU red tape: Politics live blog
- London zoo's newborn Sumatran tiger cub dies
- Yasser Arafat's belongings have traces of polonium-210, say scientists
- Tony Abbott on carbon tax repeal legislation – video
- Germany blocks EU car emissions law
- Fifty Shades of Grey movie enters crisis mode as new lead actor sought
- Human Brain Project: Henry Markram plans to spend €1bn building a perfect model of the human brain
- Baghdad mosque bombing targets Sunni worshippers celebrating Eid
- Aaarrr, dim lad! Pirate run to ground with film sting | Media Monkey
- Tony Abbott insists carbon tax will end on 1 July – even if Senate blocks repeal
- Missiles for milk: how Russia offered NZ military hardware to settle dairy bill
- Putting the HER in Hero: why we need more tech superwomen
- Beijing airport bomber sentenced to six years
- Tamil refugee tried to hang himself in detention, asylum advocates say
- Victorian MP Geoff Shaw reportedly assaults protester
- Afghan mosque bomb kills governor of Logar province
- Australia's billionaires: how much do you know?
- 'Overwhelming' response to Madeleine McCann appeal, say police
- Anna Burke defends previous minority parliament to new MPs
- Anna Friel and Stephen Poliakoff back WWF fight to save Virunga national park – video
- Rural fire service rejects Port Stephens mayor's hazard reduction claim
| US debt ceiling deal hopes push markets higher - live Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:29 AM PDT Agreement to raise US borrowing limit could be close, but many experts warn that trust in America has already been eroded by the events of the last two weeks       |
| Plan to use hidden cameras to monitor care homes Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:28 AM PDT  Cameras and 'mystery shoppers' could be used to monitor services provided to elderly and mentally ill people Hidden cameras could be used to monitor the services provided by care homes under plans being considered by the health and social care watchdog in England. Other ideas include the use of so-called mystery shoppers who would pose as customers of care homes in order to test the quality of service provided. The proposals were unveiled by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which said it would hold discussions over "the potential use of hidden surveillance". The CQC's new chief inspector of adult social care, Andrea Sutcliffe, outlined her priorities in a document published ahead of a public consultation next spring, part of a process of changing the way the watchdog monitors providers. The document, entitled A Fresh Start for the Regulation and Inspection of Adult Social Care, states: "We would … like to have an open conversation with people about the use of mystery shoppers and hidden cameras, and whether they would contribute to promoting a culture of safety and quality, while respecting people's rights to privacy and dignity." A spokesman for the CQC said that the idea related to potentially using hidden cameras in targeted circumstances where traditional inspections were not appropriate. "We are not talking here about putting a camera in every care home because that would break all sorts of rules around people's rights," he said. "If we were to do it, it could be in situations such as, for example, if there were questions about carers not turning up at people's homes or not turning up on time. There is the potential for using cameras there, obviously with the consent of those being cared for and their families." There was a mixed initial reaction to the ideas, with the Alzheimer's Society welcoming plans to overhaul adult social care inspections at a time when it said public confidence in the care sector is at an all-time low. "With most adults in the UK scared of moving into a home and care in the community often failing to meet people's needs, we desperately need to restore faith in services," a spokesman added. However, Davina Ludlow, director of care home directory carehome.co.uk, warned about the possible impact on care users and staff, adding: "Whilst safeguarding is vital, so too is dignity and privacy." "We urge full and meaningful consultation before digital spies infiltrate the care sector. Not only will covert surveillance impact on residents' freedom, it may also have a knock-on effect on the motivation of staff. We need to train, support and inspire the next generation of carers, not create a big brother culture where people are afraid to do this vital job." Other proposals include awarding ratings to every care home and adult social care service by March 2016 to help people make informed decisions about their care. Sutcliffe, who started last week as one of three chief inspectors appointed by the CQC, also wants to recruit members of the public with personal experience of the care system to help carry out inspections. She said: "This is a fresh start for how care homes, home care, and other adult social care services are inspected and regulated across the country. I will be leading CQC's new approach by making more use of people's views and by using expert inspection teams involving people who have personal experience of care. "We will always be on the side of the people who use care services. For every care service we look at, I want us to ask: 'Is this good enough for my mum?'. If it is, this should be celebrated. If not, then as the regulator we will do something about it."Adult social care is the largest and fastest growing sector that CQC regulates and so it is imperative that we get it right." The development came as a leading authority on elderly care warned that the fine print in the government's plans would mean that thousands of pensioners will be forced to sell their homes to pay for care. A former member of the royal commission on long-term care of the elderly, Lord Lipsey, said that thousands of elderly people with modest assets would have to run down their savings and assets to below £23,250 before they could qualify for a flagship scheme that would stop anyone having to sell their property while they are still alive to pay for care in either a residential or their own home. Lipsey levelled the charge during report stage debate on wide-ranging reform of the care system under the care bill. He was fiercely critical of ministers' role over deferred payments. Under a deferred payment agreement, the care charges are repaid from the estate at a later date, helping people to delay the need to sell their home or possessions. But Lord Lipsey said the bill did not provide a "universal" deferred payments scheme – only one for people with less than £23,250 in assets. "This has been done in a back-door manner which disgraces the government," he complained. "The government has welched on the deal." Lord Lipsey told peers: "The original scheme as put forward by the Dilnot commission [on funding social care] has had its balls cut off by the government. "There is now a huge restriction which will mean that very few people will take advantage of the deferred payment scheme. "You are only eligible for a deferred payment loan if your other assets in total come to less than £23,250." theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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| More than 30 dead in Philippines earthquake - video Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:24 AM PDT More than 30 people have died in the Philippines after an earthquake struck causing widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure  |
| Angela Ahrendts leaves Burberry for new job at Apple Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:24 AM PDT  Move to take up role overseeing expansion of Apple retail stores leaves just two women in charge of FTSE 100 companies Angela Ahrendts, the chief executive who rescued Burberry, is leaving the fashion house for a new job at Apple, in a move that further depletes the ranks of female chief executives of FTSE 100 firms. Ahrendts joins Apple in spring 2014 to take up a newly created role overseeing the expansion of Apple's retail stores. She is being replaced at Burberry by Christopher Bailey, who will also keep his current post as chief creative officer. Her departure comes amid growing concern about the small number of female executives at the top of British business, and leaves just two women in charge of the largest UK-listed companies: Alison Cooper at Imperial Tobacco and Carolyn McCall of easyJet. Their number has been depleted by the departure of Marjorie Scardino from Pearson and Cynthia Carroll from Anglo American. Ahrendts, who was the highest paid chief executive in the FTSE last year with a total package worth £16.9m, said she was honoured to be joining Apple. She also paid tribute to colleagues, describing Burberry as a truly great company: "Burberry is in brilliant shape, having built the industry's most powerful management team, converted the business to a dynamic digital global retailer, created a world-class supply chain, state of the art technology infrastructure, sensational brand momentum and one of the most closely connected creative cultures in the world today." Bailey said he was moved and humbled to take on the CEO role. "Whilst I am sad no longer to have the inspirational leadership of Angela, who has been an absolute joy to work with, I feel more than confident that part of her legacy is an enormously strong team in all of our areas." Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, said he was thrilled that Ahrendts would be joining his team. "She has shown herself to be an extraordinary leader throughout her career and has a proven track record." Shares in Burberry fell 5.5% at the start of trading, down 93p to £14.92. Ahrendts is not the first fashion executive to join the ranks of the iPhone maker. Paul Deneve, the former chief executive officer of Yves St Laurent, was hired recently to work on special projects. The announcement of her departure came as Burberry announced a 17% rise in revenues to £694m over the six months to the end of September. Sales in Burberry shops rose 13% on last year, driven by spending in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, and the Americas. The company also reported high single-digit growth in mainland China, pleasing investors after last year's shock profit warning on the back of flagging spending from Chinese consumers. Chancellor George Osborne name-checked Burberry this week, along with Rolls Royce, as he talked up British brands on a visit to China. Burberry's global success is a far cry from when Ahrendts joined the board in 2006, when the fashion house's signature check had become ubiquitous among celebrities, while cheap fakes flooded the market. One of Ahrendts' first acts when she took over in 2006 was to scale back use of the Burberry check, cutting dozens of lines. She also took the 157-year-old fashion house into new products from animal print scarves to own-brand cosmetics, as well as expanding its presence in the United States. Bailey, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, has been at Burberry since 2001. He is credited with overseeing a canny social media strategy that has seen the company become the first big fashion house to stream its catwalk shows live over the internet, as well as launching the Art of the Trench website for fans of Burberry macs. The firm has said it has no plans to bring in a new creative director to work with Bailey. Richard Hunter at Hargreaves Lansdown stockbrokers said Ahrendts was leaving the company in good shape. "The shares have had a rocky ride yet have still managed to outperform the market strongly. Over the last year Burberry has added 41% to its price, as compared to a 12% hike for the wider FTSE 100." theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Cameron launches plan to cut EU red tape: Politics live blog Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:22 AM PDT Rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen, including David Cameron publishing a "Cut EU Red Tape" report and Theresa May giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee       |
| London zoo's newborn Sumatran tiger cub dies Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:21 AM PDT  Postmortem shows the cub, who was born two weeks ago, drowned in the enclosure's pool London zoo's newborn Sumatran tiger cub has died, it emerged on Tuesday. The cub, not yet named or sexed as it was so young, was born two weeks ago, and the birth captured on hidden cameras in the den. It was the first tiger to be born at the zoo for 17 years. In the early hours of Saturday morning, keepers noticed that they could not see the cub on the den cameras, and raised the alarm. The cub was discovered on the edge of the pool. A postmortem conducted on Sunday confirmed the cub had drowned. It is thought that the mother, Melati, carried the cub outside but keepers are unclear as to how the cub got into the pool as there are no cameras in the wider enclosure. Keepers are reviewing the situation as it was not envisaged that the mother would take the cub outside so early. Curator Malcolm Fitzpatrick said: "We're heartbroken by what's happened. To go from the excitement of the birth to this in three weeks is just devastating. "Melati can be a very nervous animal and we didn't want to risk putting her on edge by changing her surroundings or routines, in case she abandoned or attacked the cub. At the time we thought it was in the best interests of Melati and her cub to allow her continued access to the full enclosure as normal. "We would do anything to turn back the clock, and nobody could be more upset about what's happened than the keepers who work with the tigers every day. They are devoted to those tigers and are distraught." London zoo's Tiger Territory opened in March 2013 and was designed to encourage breeding of the critically endangered sub-species of tiger. The cub is the grandchild of the zoo's last tiger cub, Hari, the father of Melati. The cub's father is five-year-old Jae Jae, who is playing no part in taking care of the new arrival. A spokeswoman for the zoo said the mood was very sad and sombre, and that staff had been told, but not visitors. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Yasser Arafat's belongings have traces of polonium-210, say scientists Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:15 AM PDT  Swiss scientists say discovery supports possibility that Palestinian leader was poisoned with radioactive substance Swiss scientists have given details of their suspicious findings of traces of the radioactive substance polonium-210 on personal items belonging to the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, which fuelled claims that he was poisoned by Israel in 2004. The discovery of polonium-210 on Arafat's effects was first made public last year. His body was exhumed from its mausoleum in the West Bank city of Ramallah last November for tests, but no results have been disclosed. In a paper in the Lancet, toxicologists said they had examined 38 items belonging to the late Palestinian leader, including underwear and a toothbrush, and compared them with a control group of 37 items of Arafat's that had been in storage for some time before his death. They found traces of the substance that "support the possibility of Arafat's poisoning with polonium-210", the scientists reported. They added: "Although the absence of myelosuppression [bone marrow deficiency] and hair loss does not favour acute radiation syndrome, symptoms of nausea, vomiting, fatigue, diarrhoea, and anorexia, followed by hepatic and renal failures, might suggest radioactive poisoning." Arafat died at the age of 75 in a hospital near Paris in November 2004 after falling ill while holed up under Israeli military siege at his presidential compound, the Muqata, in Ramallah. Doctors could not conclusively identify the cause of death. Claims that he had been poisoned by Israel swiftly took hold among Palestinians, who revered Arafat as an iconic resistance leader. No postmortem was conducted on his body, but after al-Jazeera aired the polonium-210 suspicions last year, the Palestinian Authority agreed to a request by Arafat's widow, Suha, and French judicial investigators to exhume his body for further tests. The Swiss scientists said: "An autopsy would have been useful in this case because although potential polonium poisoning might not have been identified during that procedure, body samples could have been kept and tested afterwards." Polonium-210 was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian KGB agent, who died in London in 2006. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Tony Abbott on carbon tax repeal legislation – video Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:14 AM PDT Tony Abbott announced today the first bill to be considered by parliament will be a bill to repeal the carbon tax       |
| Germany blocks EU car emissions law Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:10 AM PDT Lobbying from Germany carmakers leads EU ministers to reopen deal to limit average new car emissions to 95g CO2 per km       |
| Fifty Shades of Grey movie enters crisis mode as new lead actor sought Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:05 AM PDT  After Charlie Hunnam drops out, EL James adaptation looking at Alexander Skarsgard and Jamie Dornan as release date looms Alexander Skarsgard of the supernatural-themed HBO television series True Blood and Jamie Dornan of Belfast-set BBC drama The Fall are the new frontrunners to replace Charlie Hunnam in Sam Taylor-Johnson's Fifty Shades of Grey, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Hunnam, star of the TV show Sons of Anarchy and action blockbuster Pacific Rim, quit the mega-hyped adaptation of EL James' bestselling literary sensation at the weekend, citing scheduling conflicts. His departure has thrown the project, which is due for release in just nine months time, into crisis territory. Skarsgard, son of Stellan, plays vampire Eric Northman in True Blood. Dornan stars as serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall. Both are up for the role of Christian Grey, the kinky billionaire who recruits blushing virgin Anastasia Steele to be his well-remunerated sex-slave in James' novels. Reports have suggested Hunnam was overwhelmed with the attention he received from being cast in the movie and got cold feet about carrying such a high-profile project. Studio Universal has now drafted in the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Patrick Marber (Closer, Notes on a Scandal) to rewrite the script, with speculation rife that TV writer Kelly Marcel's screenplay may also have contributed to Hunnam's disquiet. The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which has sold more than 70m copies worldwide, is not exactly known for its pitch perfect prose. But the appointment of Taylor-Johnson, the artist turned film-maker best known for her acclaimed John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, raised hopes that the big screen adaptation might prove an artistically credible film. Universal may also return to previous candidates for the role of Christian. Theo James, Christian Cooke and Garrett Hedlund may all be in the running. Dakota Johnson, best known for small roles in the Oscar-winning The Social Network and comedy The Five Year Engagement, remains in the lead female role of Anastasia. Fifty Shades of Grey, which was published in 2011, is expected to be the first of a trilogy based on James' three novels. Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, which were published last year, are expected to follow into production. • Fifty Shades of Grey fans launch online petition protesting film casting theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Human Brain Project: Henry Markram plans to spend €1bn building a perfect model of the human brain Posted: 15 Oct 2013 01:00 AM PDT  Henry Markram tells how his son's autism fired his ambition to unlock the secrets of consciousness by using 'big data' to trace the electronic signals that zing between neurons In a spartan office looking across Lake Geneva to the French Alps, Henry Markram is searching for a suitably big metaphor to describe his latest project. "It's going to be the Higgs boson of the brain, a Noah's archive of the mind," he says. "No, it's like a telescope that can span all the way across the universe of the brain from the micro the macro level." We are talking about the Human Brain Project, Markram's audacious plan to build a working model of the human brain – from neuron to hemisphere level – and simulate it on a supercomputer within the next 10 years. When Markram first unveiled his idea at a TEDGlobal conference in Oxford four years ago, few of his peers took him seriously. The brain was too complex, they said, and in any case there was no computer fast enough. Even last year when he presented a more detailed plan at a scientific meeting in Bern, showing how the requisite computer power would be available by 2020, many neuroscientists continued to insist it could not be done and dismissed his claims as hype. Today, thanks to the largesse of the European Union, which awarded Markram €1bn last year to make his dream a reality, many of those naysayers are being forced to take him seriously. The gift, which comes on top of a state-of-the-art IBM Blue Gene computer from the Swiss government, makes Markram's unit at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne the biggest dog on the neuro block. It also gives Markram a headstart on brain-mapping projects in Japan and the US, where Barack Obama is hoping to persuade Congress to award $3bn to a similar initiative called Brain (so far Obama has pledged $100m). The timing of Obama's initiative and the EU's award, the largest in its history, has led to talk of an international "brain race". But Markram argues that a better parallel is the Human Genome Project. Just as the decade-long effort to map the 3.3 billion base pairs that make up the 23 chromosomes in the human genome required close co-ordination between scientists worldwide, so Markram argues mapping the human brain in all its neural complexity will take a similarly co-operative international research effort. The problem, as he sees it, is that neuroscience has become hopelessly fragmented. Each year sees the publication of about 100,000 papers, but neuroscientists are so specialised they have trouble understanding each other. We know a lot about the organisation and interaction of individual neurons and there have been countless studies, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), of brain regions at the scale of tens of millions of neurons, but we have little information about the scales in between. Nor do we have an integrated understanding of how events at the level of genes, proteins and synapses cascade through the brain to produce behaviour and cognition. Markram points out that, using conventional approaches, it takes 20,000 experiments to map a neural circuit. Yet, in all, the brain contains 86 billion neurons. On top of that, to fully understand the operation of every synapse and how they interact with neurons in other parts of the neo-cortex, scientists would need to trace all of the 100 trillion connections between them – something that is impossible to do experimentally. But what if, instead of trying to map these neural structures piece by piece, we could tease out some underlying principles governing their morphology and architecture? What if we could use a supercomputer to run thousands of statistical simulations so as to predict the way that those neurons are likely to combine and then check the resulting models against real data from biology? Then in theory we could predict those structures and use them to reverse-engineer the human brain. That, in a nutshell, is the principle behind the Human Brain Project and the vision that drives Markram. "The fact is we are never going to experimentally map the human brain and people who think otherwise are deluding themselves," he says. "Instead, we have to search for the fundamental principles and then use those principles to construct a hypothesis of the bits of the brain no human has ever seen and no human will ever see. Then we have to test those hypotheses and refine the principles until our model gets better. Otherwise, we are just stabbing in the dark." When Markram speaks this way, it is easy to see how he raises other scientists' hackles. Markram's belief in the ability of computing technology to solve the big questions of neuroscience is messianic. It is a messianism he combines with the tousled good looks of an ageing matinée idol and an undeniable charisma that at TED in Oxford four years ago had some members of the audience spellbound. In a field dominated by big brains and even bigger egos, each mining their own esoteric field, Markram's big data approach to experimental neuroscience represents a cultural revolution. "We're saying look, if you think you're going to understand the brain on your own forget about it. We're going to have to work very differently. We're going to have to work in teams, in swarms. To someone who is used to deciding what experiment they should do I can see how that might come across as antagonistic." Markram's belief in the need for teamwork is rooted in his own experience as a brain researcher and his conviction that only neuroscience is capable of solving the deeper mysteries of how the electrical signals zinging between neurons produce consciousness and how interferences or malfunctions in those electrical channels produce disordered or "diseased" thinking. Markram credits the awakening of his interest in these subjects to a Latin teacher at the boarding school in Durban where, at the age of 13, he was sent from the rural South African farm where he was raised. Within a term, he had changed from a rugby playing jock with little interest in schooling to being obsessed with biology and trying to understand how a slight alteration in the biochemistry of the brain could lead to conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. This interest in biology led him to an undergraduate degree in medicine at the University of Cape Town where he hoped to specialise in psychiatry. But he quickly became disillusioned with what he saw as the discipline's lack of scientific rigour. "Psychiatry completely shocked me. The idea that you could write a computer programme to classify mental diseases and on that basis prescribe a medicine struck me as crazy." Instead, Markram switched to experimental neuroscience and in 1985 joined a Cape Town laboratory directed by a young researcher named Rodney Douglas. It was Douglas, now an emeritus professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who first fired Markram's enthusiasm for lab work and, with his exceptionally steady hands – useful when stitching together neurons smaller than a pinhead, Markram was soon enjoying a meteoric rise. A PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, one of the leading research universities in Israel, was followed by postdoctorates at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Then, in 1995, Markram was lured back to the Weizmann as an associate professor. There he earned a formidable reputation as an experimenter, becoming the first researcher to patch two connected neurons simultaneously. This put him in a position to see how they interacted in response to differently timed electrical signals. A fundamental postulate of neuroscience is Hebb's rule – that neurons that fire together wire together. However, Markram discovered that the strength of these connections varies according to when impulses arrive and leave. If an input spike of electrical current occurs before an output spike and within a certain time window, on average the input connection was strengthened. However, if the input occurred after the output spike within the same time window, then the connection was weakened. In other words, the wiring of the brain was plastic. Markram's papers on synaptic plasticity and the microcircuitry of the neural cortex were enough to earn him a full professorship at the age of 40, but his discoveries left him restless and dissatisfied. "The first time I reconstructed an axon and saw that it was touching [dendrites belonging to other neurons] all over, I thought God, how did it decide to put a contact here and there? That's when I realised the scale and complexity of the challenge. I thought this is impossible, how am I ever going to work out how a neuron made a decision to put all those synapses there?" This professional epiphany was mirrored by a challenge to his family life when his son Kai (Markram has five children from two marriages) was diagnosed with Asperger's, an autism spectrum disorder. The discovery came while Markram was doing his postdoctorate in Germany and led him to consult specialists all over the world and, eventually, to embark on his own study of autism. "At the time, psychiatrists were saying that autistic children had no empathy, that they were unable to form a theory of mind. But actually I found that Kai could be intensely emotional about certain things and that he seemed to know things about what you are thinking that most people don't know." Instead, Markram and his wife Kamila, a neuroscientist, performed a series of experiments on rats to test a new theory. Using an anti-epilepsy medicine, valproic acid, that causes birth defects that mimic autism, the Markrams found that certain networks of brain cells in the acid-treated rats were much more sensitive than normal. They also found that the brain cells in autistic rats had notably more connections: their brains were "hyperconnected", enhancing the flow of information. Finally, they discovered that the amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for fear processing, had a tendency to form new connections, possibly explaining the intense fear the autistic rats developed. The Markrams' hypothesis is that the brains of autistic individuals are similarly hyperconnected and "hyperexcitable". Rather than suffering from a deficit in perceptual abilities, autists experience the world too intensely and so take refuge by turning inward, hence his phrase "intense world theory" to explain the disorder. '"People like Kai have jacked-up brains," he says. "They have to withdraw to protect themselves." For Markram, using predictive neuroinformatics to reverse-engineer the parts of the brain for which we have little experimental information is only the first stage of his grand scheme. The second is to marry his brain simulation with a medical informatics platform and suck up all the available data on mental diseases from public hospitals and the proprietary databases of pharmaceutical companies. This clinical data, which would include both healthy subjects and patients with widely varying conditions, could then be systematically "mined" to identify clusters of patients with similar changes in the brain. Once these changes have been identified, Markram argues neuroscientists will be in a better position to draw up hypotheses about the underlying biological causes and test the hypotheses in his brain simulation. For instance, one patient diagnosed with schizophrenia and another diagnosed with depression might share the same mutated gene. Conversely, two patients diagnosed with schizophrenia might be found to have different gene mutations. In either case, the goal is to do away with the current classification system based on the subjective ordering of symptoms and syndromes and replace it with one that adheres more closely to biological signatures. "We're not interested in getting more data on mental diseases," says Markram. "We are going to put all the diseases on the table and start working out mathematically how they are related to each other. There are going to be no names, just clusters. "The final stage would be to use this new biologically grounded classification system to develop new diagnostic tools and suggest strategies for drug development and treatment. For Markram's critics, such statements strain credulity. There is no such thing as a "normal" brain, they say. Every brain is different – the serendipitous product of evolution and personal experience. Moreover, neural circuitry not only differs from one individual to another, it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Even if you could simulate one brain in all its complexity – and at Bern many of Markram's critics doubted that he would ever have sufficient computing power to run his simulation – there is no reason to believe that this model would be equivalent to a real, biological brain. But perhaps the biggest criticism of the Human Brain Project is the idea that a computer model can ever be a substitute for hard empirical research. What neuroscience needs is diversity and a multiplicity of approaches by creative young researchers, not integrated top-down science, argues Markram's former mentor, Rodney Douglas. By betting the bank on the Human Brain Project, there is a danger that other, innovative approaches will be ignored for lack of funding. As Kevan Martin, the co-director of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich, who works closely with Douglas, pointed out in an email: "If you dump $1bn on any research some good will come of it, but its a strange way of spending taxpayers' money … so whatever your take is on Big Neuro, do not expect them to make good on all their promises to find causes, let alone cures, for any of the big neuro diseases they list in 10 years and as for new computing technologies? They are pulling your leg." Markram's response to this is that he has never said his brain simulation is a replacement for animal experimentation; the point is to use the simulation to suggest lines of research that are likely to be most profitable. For proof his reverse-engineering methods work he points me to his Blue Brain wet lab, a short walk from his office on the other side of the Lausanne campus. The lab, which consists of a series of partitioned workstations manned by enthusiastic young researchers, is a far cry from his inner sanctum. Patch clamps and pipettes line the desks, while the walls are decorated with vivid images of rat synapses and posters demonstrating the firing patterns of different neuron types. It was here that in 2002 Markram began accumulating data on a section of the rat neocortex no larger than a pinhead. The column consists of about 30,000 neurons and thousands of synaptic pathways between neurons, only a small percentage of which have been measured experimentally. However, by accumulating data on different cell types and the genes that encode for the expression of particular proteins and ion channels, Markram was able to model the electrical prosperities of the synapses and a form a picture of how they communicated and formed links with synapses in other parts of the column. Using his Blue Gene computer, he then ran statistical simulations to predict structures in parts of the column for which there was no experimental data. The final stage was to compare his model to the brains of real rats in his wet lab. To date, Markram's team have simulated 100 interconnected columns and every week, Blue Gene "runs" a new model of the cortical column, incorporating the latest data from experiments, as well as the data on ion channels. This ion channel data is automatically uploaded to channelpedia.net – a user-editable website that collates similar data from papers published across PubMed. The site is a model for the open-source team approach to sharing data that Markram would like to see become standard across neuroscience. Markram is now busily recruiting PhDs with the aim of having his neuroinformatics and brain simulation platforms up and running within 30 months. In addition, he says he will work closely with researchers in the US, including those at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, who are mapping the correlation between specific genes and structures in human and mouse brains and the spinal cord, and the Human Connectome Project, which is using non-invasive imaging to map the neural circuitry of human brains, integrating their data into his platform as it becomes available. "I'm very happy Obama launched the human brain initiative," he says. "We will use any data coming out of the US and run it on our model." Indeed, Markram believes data from other brain projects will go a long way to validating his own approach. The Human Brain Project is primarily "an integration project" not a data generation project, he says. "We will do a little bit of data generation but our choices will be very strategic, studies that other people are not going to do and which are key to discovering underlying principles." Whatever you think about Markram's vision, one thing is certain: simulating a human brain will require epic computing power, which is why one of the key sub-goals of the project is to stimulate research into an alternative approach known as neuromorphic computing. Conventional computers are very good at complex calculations involving the parsing of large amounts of data but are very poor at performing several small tasks at once. This is because conventional computers rely on a central clock to manage data. By contrast, asynchronous signalling, the principle behind neuromorphic computing, does not use a central clock. Instead, the computer's processors are designed to spit out lots of tiny bundles of information as and when it suits them, much as a neuron spikes in response to a certain threshold of electrical activity. One such project is SpiNNaker, short for spiking neural architecture. The idea of a team at the University of Manchester, it combines the best of analogue and digital computing and replaces neurons with custom-designed microchips powered by low wattage ARM processors designed to mimic the spiking patterns seen in the human brain. One of the limitations of using microchips is that you cannot possibly wire them with the same complexity as neurons and dendrons. But what you can do is exploit the fact that an electronic wire is much faster than a biological wire and can carry several signals sequentially, one after another. As Professor Steve Furber, who heads SpiNNaker, explains: "The solution we came up with was basically when a neuron goes 'ping' this is represented as a very small packet in an electronic communication network. We then move that packet very quickly around the system to many different places and keep the size of the packets very small compared with, say, a supercomputer." Just as in a real brain, communications are initiated whenever a sender wants to send, and signals arrive at the receiver unheralded and must be handled, ready or not. Using this method, Furber, a division co-leader on the Human Brain Project, eventually hopes to be able to move 10 billion packets a second around his network. The problem is this will still only be equivalent to modelling about one billion neurons, or 1% of a human brain, in real time. Furber is not the only neuromorphic engineer whose approach Markram hopes will one day pay dividends. Another is Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at the University of Heidelberg and a member of Markram's executive committee, who is building a comparable machine called Spikey. If these approaches are successful the result could be a computer capable of running a thousand times faster than a biological brain but with energy costs many times lower than a conventional supercomputer. The possibilities do not end there, however. Markram also envisages connecting his brain simulation to a robot equipped with sensors and simultaneously recording what the robot is seeing and hearing as it explores a physical environment. By correlating the auditory and visual signals with the simulated brain activity as the robot learns about the world, researchers could then introduce distortions to the simulation – so as, say, to mimic the wiring of an autistic brain – and then hit the replay button. In theory, it should then be possible step inside a 3D hologram of the simulation and experience the world as an autist experiences it and, at the same, watch what is going on in the autist's mind. Indeed, speaking to Markram, you get the impression that this is his real ambition and the source of his drive. "To be able to dial up everything, the colours, the sounds – that's what motivates me," he says. "To be able to step inside a simulation of my son's brain and see the world as he sees it. At the moment, I can use fMRI and ECG [electrocardiogram] to see how the brain processes information and which regions are activated during different tasks but I can't see what it is perceiving, I can't see what it sees." To his critics, this is simply wishful thinking, the sort of statement one would expect from a sci-fi enthusiast rather than a serious neuroscientist. At TED in 2009 Markram even seemed to hold out the prospect that such a simulation might be capable of consciousness, ending his talk with the promise that if he succeeded in building his brain, then in 10 years he would "send a hologram to talk to you". This is not the first time a scientist has made such a promise – in 1946 Alan Turing predicted that "in 30 years it would be as easy to ask a computer a question as a human being" – and since his TED talk Markram has learned to be more circumspect. When I ask him whether his simulation would be conscious for once he hesitates. "That we are not sure about," he replies eventually. "We will see a lot of neural correlates to complex cognitive behaviour but whether this is going to lead to consciousness I don't know and I don't think anybody knows." Scientists will get a chance to grill Markram about this and other questions as his project takes shape in the months ahead. At the inaugural meeting of the Human Brain Project earlier this month, researchers from more than 80 European institutions converged on the Lausanne campus to thrash out who would contribute to what platform. Presumably, €1bn buys you more friends than enemies and Markram is likely to be inundated with suggestions for how to divvy up the research pie. Markram is the first to admit that his 10-year time frame may be optimistic but he insists that unless we set a goal we are never going to get there. "It's like going to the moon, you need to have a mission statement." Following several years of exploratory discussions, it took a similar formal declaration of intent in 1991 to launch the Human Genome Project. At the time, it was thought the genome might be comprised as many as 140,000 genes and it could take 15 years to sequence them all. In the event, there were only 23,000 and the sequencing took only 10 years. However, to date the effort has yet to deliver the revolution in personalised medicine that was promised at the project's inception and geneticists have begun to realise that the relationship between disease and heredity is far more complex, and environment-dependent, than they first thought. So far, there is little sign of similar hubris at the Human Brain Project, a far more complex undertaking, but perhaps for the moment Markram's ambition is precisely what is needed. "The thing that I admire about Henry is that he is a great believer that when problem reaches a certain point the only way to make progress is to industrialise the research process," says Furber, before adding that: "Whether the project will yield the big goal of giving us a clear conception of how the brain works is bound to be speculative because we have no way of knowing if we're capturing enough data or not, but it will almost certainly tell us a lot about the biology of the brain and advance computational neuroscience." In other words, Furber concludes, it's "very unlikely not to yield a lot of useful results". theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds  |
| Baghdad mosque bombing targets Sunni worshippers celebrating Eid Posted: 15 Oct 2013 12:55 AM PDT  Many dead and injured after explosion after morning prayers at mosque in northern city of Kirkuk A bomb has ripped through a crowd of Sunni worshippers coming out of a mosque in northern Iraq after prayers at the start of a major Muslim holiday, killing 12 people and wounding 24, a police official said. The bomb went off on Tuesday as worshippers were leaving the al-Qodus mosque after morning prayers for the beginning of the Eid al-Adha holiday in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 180 miles (290km) north of Baghdad. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. More than 5,000 people have been killed in Iraq since al-Qaida and other militants stepped up attacks following a deadly security crackdown against a Sunni protest camp in April. Much of the violence in Iraq is the work of the local al-Qaida branch, a Sunni extremist group. While it is possible that Sunni insurgents could be carrying out mosque attacks, hoping to stoke sectarian hatred, Shiite militias may also be behind such assaults. The latest attack came despite tight security measures imposed by security forces to prevent attacks during the four-day Eid al-Adha celebrations. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds  |
| Aaarrr, dim lad! Pirate run to ground with film sting | Media Monkey Posted: 15 Oct 2013 12:38 AM PDT  The allure of tinsel town has helped Belgian police nab one of the most notorious Somali pirate leaders, according to the Times. Mohammed Abdi Hassan – apparently known as Big Mouth – was arrested in Brussels after police lured him there with the promise of an advisory role in a film about his life of crime. Monkey is reminded of the phrase 'stupidy talks, vanity acts'. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Tony Abbott insists carbon tax will end on 1 July – even if Senate blocks repeal Posted: 15 Oct 2013 12:35 AM PDT Leading lawyers say Australian companies would still be liable and should continue to pass the tax on to customers  |
| Missiles for milk: how Russia offered NZ military hardware to settle dairy bill Posted: 15 Oct 2013 12:14 AM PDT  Former PM Jim Bolger 'absolutely stunned' to be offered a nuclear sub and two MiGs in lieu of money, new book reveals How do you settle a rather sizeable bill for your milk delivery? If you are a cash-strapped superpower the answer is, apparently, to offer up a pair of fighter jets and a nuclear submarine as payment. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds  |
| Putting the HER in Hero: why we need more tech superwomen Posted: 15 Oct 2013 12:00 AM PDT  Did a brilliant woman inspire your career choice? If we want more females in tech and science we need more female role models to show them they can do it How many 12-year-olds do you know who have any idea about their future? When I asked Lila, my niece, what she wanted to be when she grew up she confirmed that she was absolutely, definitely going to be a singer-songwriter. Unrealistic, you might say, but I wasn't much different when I was a teenager. I'd love to tell you about the brilliant women who inspired me to choose a career in technology, but there weren't any, and for most of my life I didn't have any aspirations to work in technology. Hornchurch, Essex, in the early 80s was not a place that celebrated technology. High-technology was defined by colour TV and the landline telephone. My mum considered herself to be something of a technophile – she was able to look up listings on Ceefax and program the Betamax VCR. The computer revolution came … and whooshed past my suburban home. In the early 90s, my mum complained bitterly about the new computers that had just been installed in the council office where she worked. These new-fangled devices had upset a world where shorthand and basic literacy were the essential skills of office life. Even she relented, and by the middle of that decade we'd acquired an Amstrad PCW, a computer that was only capable of performing the most basic letter-writing. It used a floppy-disk, which was completely incompatible with just about any other computer and was already out of date by the time we got it. For most of my life I lived without technological inspiration; sadly I cannot say that a single person ever became my tech hero. My entrance into the business came more as a slow realisation that I'd been missing out on something big and world-changing rather than a single Damascene conversion. Now I know first-hand that technology is one of the most creative careers out there and is one of the top-paid jobs for women. Technology gives girls the tools to change the world from their bedroom. It's hardly surprising that I never saw myself as a technologist. My 12-year-old niece might live in a higher-tech age than I grew up in, but there are still surprisingly few inspiring female technologists in her life. And that's the problem I'm determined to fix. Currently, the UK's tech workforce is only 17% female, and over the last 10 years this has been dropping by 0.5% each year. If the UK continues at this rate, by 2043 there will be fewer than 1% women working in technology despite more women being big consumers of technology. On Ada Lovelace day today, Little Miss Geek is celebrating the HER in Hero and shining a light on those women, like Ada, who have had a significant impact on our world but who are often in the shadows of their celebrated male counterparts. We have the support of more than 40 MPs, 50 schools and are reaching 5,000 girls in schools and universities across the UK. It's time we all recognised the achievements of women in science and technology. Many of the women who have created amazing things such as Kevlar for bullet-proof vests (Stephanie Kwolek), or designers of Apple's interface icons (Susan Kate) go unnoticed in today's classrooms. I'd like to believe that my niece has a chance to be one of the next generation of technology pioneers – and deploys technology to reach her dream of becoming a best-selling singer-songwriter. Help us put the Her in Hero by tweeting @GdnWomenLeaders with your female tech hero and use #HERinHero. Belinda Parmar is the founder of Little Miss Geek and the CEO of Lady Geek Sign up to become a member of the Women in Leadership community here for more comment, analysis and best practice direct to your inbox theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Beijing airport bomber sentenced to six years Posted: 14 Oct 2013 11:43 PM PDT  Ji Zhongxing, who is partly paralysed, blew off his own hand while trying to draw attention to his claims of police brutality A partly paralysed man who exploded a bomb inside Beijing's airport in hopes of winning redress over an alleged beating by public officials has been given a six-year prison sentence. Former motorcycle taxi driver Ji Zhongxing went on trial last month for endangering public safety with a homemade bomb. Ji was the only person injured in the 20 July explosion, losing a hand. The attack drew widespread condemnation but also sympathy from many Chinese who said it showed the government is ignoring the powerless and marginalised. Ji had faced up to 10 years in prison. A statement from the Beijing Chaoyang district court said the explosion inside the crowded airport and Ji's transporting of the device by public bus from his home province of Shandong constituted a major threat to public safety. But it said it decided on a lighter sentence because Ji had warned onlookers that he had a bomb and co-operated with prosecutors. Ji's lawyers and relatives were on hand for the verdict and sentence on Tuesday. The court did not say whether the defendant was among the nearly 40 people in attendance. Ji's lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan said his client had hoped to attract police so he could be detained and discuss his beating in 2005 by city security guards in the southern city of Dongguan. Ji had denied exploding the bomb deliberately, claiming it went off accidently as he was shifting it from one hand to the other. Ji, 33, from the eastern city of Heze, had been petitioning Chinese authorities for years after the 2005 attack, which left him paralysed from the waist down and more than $16,000 in debt, his elder brother Ji Zhongji said. Response to the verdict online was generally positive, although some questioned whether the government was sincere in investigating Ji's earlier beating. Legal commentator Xu Xin wrote in his verified account on the Twitter-like Weibo that Ji's sentence was relatively light. "Well, that's that. At least in prison his life will have some sort of order," Xu wrote. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Tamil refugee tried to hang himself in detention, asylum advocates say Posted: 14 Oct 2013 11:12 PM PDT Detainee, who won high court case that led to review of Asio security assessments, tells friend: 'I have no hope, no hope tomorrow, no hope next week, no hope next year'       |
| Victorian MP Geoff Shaw reportedly assaults protester Posted: 14 Oct 2013 11:05 PM PDT Witnesses say the independent Frankston MP seemed to swing at an elderly man and throw him down the stairs       |
| Afghan mosque bomb kills governor of Logar province Posted: 14 Oct 2013 11:05 PM PDT  Arsala Jamal was delivering a speech to mark Eid holiday when explosion killed him and wounded 15 others, police say A bomb placed inside a mosque in eastern Afghanistan has killed the governor of Logar province. Police said the explosion took place as Arsallah Jamal was delivering a speech on Tuesday morning to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid. The governor's spokesman, Din Mohammad Darwesh, said the bombing took place at the main mosque in the provincial capital of Puli Alam. Provincial deputy police chief Rais Khan Abbul Rahimzai said the explosion also wounded 15 people, five of them critically. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but the Taliban have been targeting Afghan officials, military and Nato troops as part of a campaign to retake territory as international troops withdraw ahead of a full pullout at the end of 2014. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Australia's billionaires: how much do you know? Posted: 14 Oct 2013 10:53 PM PDT Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest has donated $65m to the University of Western Australia, but what else makes the country's richest people tick? Take our quiz to find out       |
| 'Overwhelming' response to Madeleine McCann appeal, say police Posted: 14 Oct 2013 10:17 PM PDT  Police say Crimewatch TV special and other developments about potential suspects have propelled case in new directions Police investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann received more than 300 calls and 170 emails after new developments in the case were put to air on the BBC Crimewatch programme on Monday night. Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, who is leading the investigation, said Scotland Yard was "extremely pleased" with the overwhelming response and officers were at work following up new lines of inquiry. "Our appeal continues and later today I will be travelling to Holland, and tomorrow Germany, to continue the appeal for information," he said. The Metropolitan police revealed on Monday that they have shifted the emphasis of their inquiry after discovering that a presumed sighting of Madeleine being taken away from her holiday apartment, long seen as central to the case, was a false lead. Detectives from the Met now believe that a man with dark collar-length hair seen carrying a pyjama-clad child almost outside the McCann family's apartment in Praia da Luz, southern Portugal, at about 9.15pm on 3 May 2007 was in fact an innocent British holidaymaker returning his own child from a night creche. In the light of what police describe as "a revelation moment," altering six years of thinking about the case, investigating officers now believe Madeleine could have been taken up to 45 minutes later in the evening. The discovery had brought "a shift of emphasis", said Redwood. "We're almost certain now that this sighting is not the abductor. "But very importantly, what it says is that from 9.15pm we're able to allow the clock to continue forward. In doing so, things that were not seen as significant or have not received the same attention are now the centre of our focus." Inquiries are now centred on another man – whom police have been unable to identify – seen carrying a blond child, believed to be wearing pyjamas, close to the Ocean Club complex at about 10pm that night. The family who saw him provided two efit images of the man more than five years ago. However, the sighting was viewed as too late to be significant – which is why the efits were only released publicly on Sunday. Police are also seeking to identify a pair of blond men seen lurking around the holiday centre about the time of the disappearance, and a group of presumed bogus charity collectors who targeted nearby apartments – working on the possibility that Madeleine's abduction was carefully planned. Officers are also investigating whether a spate of local break-ins before Madeleine's disappearance could be linked, including one when an intruder was seen peering into a cot but stole nothing. But the key breakthrough since the Metropolitan police launched their investigation in July this year concerns Jane Tanner, among the group of friends dining with Kate and Gerry McCann at a tapas restaurant in the holiday complex on 3 May as Madeleine and her younger twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, slept 50 metres away. Tanner went to check on her own children at about 9pm, around the same time Gerry McCann looked in on his – the last time the family saw Madeleine. About 15 minutes later, Tanner recounted, she saw the man carrying a young child in pyjamas almost directly outside the McCanns' apartment. From 2007 onwards, Portuguese and British police presumed any abduction most probably took place between 8.30pm, when the McCanns went to dinner, and 9.15pm. However, the new investigation tracked down the British holidaymaker, who said he was carrying his child home via that route at that time. A new police photograph of the man wearing similar clothes to those worn that evening is remarkably similar to an artist's sketch based on Tanner's recollection. The Tanner sighting had "dominated up to now", Redwood admitted. He added: "It has meant the focus was always done and dusted by about quarter past. Now it takes us forward to 10pm." The man police now want to contact was spotted at about 10pm walking down the hill from the Ocean Club complex towards either the beach or the town centre, carrying a blond child aged around three or four, who was most probably wearing pyjamas. He was seen by an Irish family called Smith, who gave a statement to police soon after their holiday. The efits were compiled by private detectives in September 2008. However, Redwood said, for years the sighting was seen as "wrong place, wrong time" and thus unimportant. Redwood declined to say whether the breakthrough could or should have been made earlier, when the investigation was led by the Portuguese police: "What I'm not here to do is to try and dissect the decision-making of previous detectives, or private detectives. That's not appropriate. Today is about saying this is the information that we have, and this is how my work, with my team, is coming together, and this is what we're asking the public to help with." A parallel part of the inquiry concerns reports of blond men, sometimes alone or as a pair, loitering in areas near the McCanns' flat on 2 and 3 April 2007, including on the stairwell of their apartment block about 6pm on the evening Madeleine vanished. Police reissued two other efit images of the men as part of an appeal on BBC1's Crimewatch programme. The appeal will also be shown in the Netherlands and Germany, following reports that these men may have been heard speaking Dutch or German. Police said they had had an immediate and encouraging response to the Crimewatch appeal. Redwood told viewers two separate callers had given the same name for the man featured in the efit imagine seen carrying a child at about 10pm. He said that there had been an "overwhelming response" from the public to the Crimewatch appeal, including calls from people who had been in Praia da Luz at the same time as the McCanns. The McCanns told Crimewatch they believed it was possible their daughter was still alive, noting recent cases where kidnapped children were discovered years later. Gerry McCann said he was "hopeful and optimistic" at the progress of the new investigation. He said: "These cases can get solved. That is what the public need to think about tonight." Officers are also seeking to track down the people behind a series of burglaries around the Ocean Club complex, mainly in the early months of 2007. There was also an incident almost exactly a year before the abduction when children in a ground-floor apartment saw an intruder break in through a patio door and stare into a travel cot, stealing nothing. Redwood said: "We're particularly interested in that event as to whether it has any resonance to the disappearance of Madeleine." Such incidents could be connected to premeditation in the case, Redwood said: "There are elements of this case which on one reading of the evidence could suggest that there was an element of pre-planning or reconnaissance." But despite the detailed briefings, police warn that speculation about imminent arrests is premature. Redwood said: "It is about trying to understand who, precisely, these people are. Our absolute priority is to whittle them down." Officers do not consider the McCanns themselves as suspects or persons of interest to the inquiry. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       |
| Anna Burke defends previous minority parliament to new MPs Posted: 14 Oct 2013 10:00 PM PDT 'Leave aside politics, leave aside parties, the parliament did not fail,' says outgoing speaker       |
| Anna Friel and Stephen Poliakoff back WWF fight to save Virunga national park – video Posted: 14 Oct 2013 10:00 PM PDT Video produced by the World Wildlife Fund with director Stephen Poliakoff and actor Anna Friel aims to rally opposition to western oil companies       |
| Rural fire service rejects Port Stephens mayor's hazard reduction claim Posted: 14 Oct 2013 09:59 PM PDT  Spokesman denies responsibility for lost houses, saying residents are permitted to carry out hazard reduction burns The NSW rural fire service has insisted there is no restriction on conducting fire hazard reduction burns after the mayor of Port Stephens claimed houses had been lost due to the supposed anti-burning stance of the "fire service, the politicians and the greenies". The fire tore through 50 hectares in the Port Stephens area on Sunday, resulting in six homes being lost. A separate fire nearby burned through 177 hectares. The then Fairfax columnist Miranda Devine said green activists should be 'hanging from lamp-posts' for allegedly prevening hazard reduction burns before the 2009 Victorian bushfires, which killed 173 people. The Royal Commission into the bushfires recommended the amount of prescribed burning to reduce fuel load should be increased. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds       This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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