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Blockbuster's final film rental is... This Is the End
Smartphone wars: Apple v Samsung heads for the courtroom again
John Kerry: world leaders have been understanding about NSA leaks
Toronto mayor refuses to step aside despite crack scandal
German government unveils details of 'Nazi art'
Top 10 documentaries
Music lessons in early childhood may improve brain's performance
Teenage pregnancies and contraception access under spotlight at global summit
The nation falls silent to remember the war dead: from the archive, 12 November 1919
Tony Abbott outlines legislative agenda for the first week – video
Bronwyn Bishop is elected Speaker for the 44th parliament – video
Breast cancer researchers identify genetic 'switch'
How three Indian villages saved the Amur falcon|Kavitha Rao
Joe Hockey forced to negotiate over $200bn boost to borrowing limit
Clive Palmer speaks on the opening day of parliament – video
No class warfare in Australia? Yeah, right | Gabrielle Jackson
Qantas uniforms past and present – in pictures
Video shows man alleged to be Australian suicide bomber
François Hollande booed as 70 arrested at Armistice Day ceremony
Ed Miliband vows to tackle British IT firms' dependence on overseas workers
ABC's Amy Robach reveals cancer diagnosis after on-air mammogram
Albinas Ivanauskas obituary
Typhoon Haiyan: there is worse to come
Letter: Criminal behaviour is not a no-brainer
Letters: Intelligence leaks at the Guardian

Blockbuster's final film rental is... This Is the End

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 01:36 AM PST

Staff tweeted picture of customer making last ever hire on Saturday night; Seth Rogen says "this is nuts and sad"

• Blockbuster to close remaining stores as video rental chain calls it quits
• This Is the End video review

The last film hired from the about-to-become defunct video and DVD rental chain Blockbuster turned out, fittingly enough, to be the Seth Rogen comedy This Is the End.

According to a tweet from Blockbuster's official account, its Hawaii store made the rental at 11pm on 9 November, shortly before the close of the last day of business. Staff took a photo with the unnamed customer and posted it alongside the tweet.

This Is the End, written and directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and starring James Franco and Jonah Hill, takes place at a party which is interrupted by the apocalypse.

Rogen greeted the news by retweeting the company's post, adding "this is nuts and sad", and then tweeting his own tribute: "The last movie ever rented from a blockbuster was this is the end. In high school I would go hang out at blockbuster every day."

According to Variety, owners Dish Network is closing down the 300-or so company-run Blockbusters by the middle of January 2014, leaving around 50 stores operating under license. Its movie rental service closed last Saturday.

• Blockbuster to close remaining stores as video rental chain calls it quits
• This Is the End video review

Andrew Pulver

Smartphone wars: Apple v Samsung heads for the courtroom again

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 01:05 AM PST

The latest chapter in Apple's battle with Samsung opens in a federal court in San Jose, California

The latest round in Apple and Samsung's bitter global battle for supremacy in the more than $300bn smartphone market begins Tuesday in a courtroom a few miles from Apple's Silicon Valley headquarters.

In courts, government tribunals and regulatory agencies around the world, Apple has argued that Samsung's Android-based phones copy vital iPhone features. Samsung is fighting back with its own complaints that some key Apple patents are invalid and Apple has also copied Samsung's technology.

The two have each won and lost legal skirmishes over the last couple of years, and the companies appear oceans apart in settling their differences. Analysts predict continued litigation for months to come.

On Tuesday, the latest chapter opens in a federal courtroom in San Jose, California, where lawyers from the two companies and US District Judge Lucy Koh will begin picking a jury to calculate how much South Korea-based Samsung owes Apple for infringing Apple's patents on 13 older Samsung smartphones and computer tablets.

Representatives of both companies declined to comment.

With Apple's Cupertino headquarters about a 10-minute drive from the courthouse, potential jurors will be asked if any family members work for Apple and whether the company's proximity will have any effect on their views of the case.

A different jury in August found that Samsung infringed six Apple patents to create and market 26 smartphones and computer tablets. The panel ordered Samsung to pay Apple $1.05bn.

Koh then tossed out $450m (£281m) of that amount after deciding the jury wrongly calculated damages for 14 products. Amid an avalanche of legal filings afterward, Koh reduced the damages at issue to $400m and the products to 13, then ordered a new jury to recalculate damages for those products.

Some four dozen people are listed on the trial's witness list, many of them experts hired by Apple and Samsung to deliver damage estimates, which range from zero to more than the original $400m.

Despite the amount of money involved, the current proceedings are somewhat of a warm-up for a much larger trial scheduled for March. That trial will focus on newer products still on the market, while the current trial is a battle over products that are several years old and no longer sold in the US. More money is at stake, and Apple is asking that Samsung be barred from selling some of its current devices in the U.S.

In both cases, jurors will hear from experts opining on the global market and offering dramatically differing views on damages. In the current case, the jury will determine damages by deciding – among other issues – whether Samsung's behavior actually cost Apple sales.

Whatever the outcome, appeals are expected.

"This trial is just about money. Though several hundred million dollars are at stake, that isn't going to make or break either of the companies involved," said Mark Lemley a Stanford University law school professor who specializes in technology issues. "But the trial is also the last step in getting this case ready for the inevitable appeal. ... That appeal will have broader ramifications."

Apple transformed the mobile phone industry when it started selling the iPhone in 2007, but its success was quickly imitated and Samsung's smartphone shipments surpassed Apple's iPhone sales in 2011.

According to research group IDC, Samsung shipped 81m devices in the July-to-September quarter for a market share of 31%, making it the world's top seller. Apple is a distant second, having shipped 34m iPhones, for a market share of 1% over the same period.

John Kerry: world leaders have been understanding about NSA leaks

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 01:04 AM PST

US secretary of state says foreign governments understand that Barack Obama did not order all phone and internet surveillance

World leaders have been understanding about leaked revelations that the US spied on them as they know it was not all done under the orders of Barack Obama, the US secretary of state has said.

In an interview with the BBC, John Kerry said foreign governments understood the president did not personally authorise all the surveillance, which included tapping the mobile phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Asked about the talks held with foreign leaders over the revelations, Kerry said they had been "very respectful, very understanding. We're all trying to find a way forward that respects privacy, rights, that fights terrorism, that doesn't interfere with people."

Earlier, Kerry acknowledged that the leaders had legitimate questions about the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) phone and internet surveillance revealed in stories by the Guardian and other newspapers based on documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

There has been public outrage about the spying in some European countries, leading them to demand information from the US about the extent of its spying on its allies.

Kerry told the BBC: "The president has ordered a full review into what we're doing. People understand that the president didn't order all these things, this happened over a long period of time, it's been an evolutionary process, we now need to define it more effectively and that's what the president is setting out to do."

Kerry also revealed that talks with Iran at the weekend over its nuclear capabilities had come "very, very close to a deal, extremely close".

"I think we were separated by four or five different formulations of particular concepts, but none so terribly that I don't think it's possible to reach agreement.

"The fact is, we had a unity on Saturday in a proposal put forward in front of the Iranians, but because of the changes, they thought we should go back and change it. What's critical is, it has to be absolutely clear to the world that it isn't a nuclear weapons programme. They have to see there is a standard by which they might be able to do something. We just talked more in 38 hours than the best part of 30 years."

Rowena Mason

Toronto mayor refuses to step aside despite crack scandal

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 12:59 AM PST

Rob Ford says 'I'm not going anywhere' as city council member files motion calling for powers to remove him from office

The mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, says he intends to stay in office despite immense pressure to step aside after admitting he smoked crack cocaine.

"I'm not going anywhere, guaranteed," Ford told a supporter on Monday as he walked back to city hall after giving a speech during Remembrance Day ceremonies to honour war veterans.

Later, in response to a question about a motion filed by the city council member Denzil Minnan-Wong, who wants the mayor to step aside, Ford told reporters: "Let's get it on". A vote on the motion is likely to be held on Wednesday.

Ford's refusal to resign or take a leave of absence has frustrated both his opponents and allies on the city council, which has no legal way to force him out unless he's convicted of a crime.

The unprecedented motion would ask the province of Ontario to pass legislation to remove the mayor if he doesn't agree to take a leave of absence. Some councillors have said they are unwilling to take that step. The provincial government has also expressed reluctance to interfere in Toronto's municipal affairs.

"I think it's critically important that council speaks as one voice to say that what he has done is wrong," Minnan-Wong said. "He should go and take a leave of absence, remove himself from council while he gets the help that he needs, and let the city move forward and not be distracted by any of the future information that's going to come out."

The mayor of Canada's largest city acknowledged last week that he smoked crack while in a "drunken stupor" about a year ago. The stunning confession came a week after police said they had a video that appears to show the mayor smoking crack. News reports of the video's existence first surfaced in May, but it has not been released publicly.

Police said they obtained the video in the course of a drug investigation into Ford's friend and occasional driver, Alexander Lisi.

The mayor has called on police to release the tape, but police have said they are prohibited from doing so because it is evidence in a court case. Police said the video would come out when Lisi faces trial on drug and extortion charges. He is accused of threatening two gang members who had been trying to sell the video to the media.

A judge could make a decision this week on whether to allow the release of the remaining portions of a document that revealed Ford's ties and covert meetings with Lisi.

The Toronto police chief, Bill Blair, has said police have a second tape, but has declined to discuss its contents.

There has been no indication that Ford will enter rehabilitation since his lawyer said on Friday that he was considering it.

Voters may have the final word on Ford's future. He has said he still plans to run in the October 2014 mayoral election.

Second world war veteran Tony Smith said after the Remembrance Day ceremony that Ford should not have been at the observances, given his admission. He refused to shake the mayor's hand.

German government unveils details of 'Nazi art'

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 12:58 AM PST

Almost 600 works of art discovered in Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt may have been stolen by Nazis

Bowing to demands from Jewish groups and art experts, the German government made public details of paintings in a recovered trove of about 1,400 pieces of art, many of which may have been stolen by the Nazis, and said it would put together a task force to speed identification.

In a written statement, the government said as many as 590 works of art could have been stolen by the Nazis. In a surprise move, it quickly featured some 25 of those works on the website lostart.de and said it would be regularly updated.

Officials had until now released few details about the art found in the Munich apartment of 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, though it was known to include pieces by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The discovery resulted from an ongoing tax investigation, adding to secrecy concerns.

Among the paintings listed on the site were Otto Dix's The Woman in the Theater Box, Otto Griebel's Child at the Table, and Max Liebermann's Rider on the Beach.

Art was stolen or bought for a pittance from Jewish collectors who were forced to sell under duress during the Third Reich. For the heirs of those collectors, the discovery has raised hopes of recovering works, while the slow release of information has stirred frustration.

A spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Monday that the government understood the demands of Jewish groups that the pieces be quickly made public.

"We can well understand that especially Jewish organisations are asking many questions. They represent older people who were treated very badly," said the spokesman, Steffen Seibert.

A task force of six experts will be put together by the German government and the state government of Bavaria, with the support of a research group on "degenerate art" at the Free University of Berlin.

Such art was largely modern or abstract works that Adolf Hitler's regime believed to be a corrupt influence on the German people. Many such works were later sold to enrich the Nazis. Three hundred and 80 works of art fall under this category, the government said.

The task force will work in parallel with the continuing legal investigation by prosecutors in Augsburg, the government said.

The prosecutor had only said there was evidence that one item – a Matisse painting of a sitting woman – was stolen by the Nazis from a French bank in 1942.

Also on Monday, Stuttgart state police spokesman Horst Haug said that local police last week took 22 pieces of art from a home in Kornwestheim in southern Germany to a safe location "because parts of these paintings were associated with the Munich art discovery".

German media identified the owner of the paintings as Gurlitt's brother-in-law, who reportedly was worried about the safety of his art due to the recent media frenzy.

The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, meanwhile, warned that Germany's reputation abroad would suffer if it did not take a more proactive approach to publicly identifying the artworks in the Munich trove.

"We should not underestimate the sensitivity of this issue around the world," Westerwelle told German news agency DPA. "Transparency is at the highest importance now."

10. Man With a Movie Camera

To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium that revealed the truths of life.

Heavily influenced by futurism and constructivism, both key concerns of the Soviet avant-garde, Vertov set out with a simple plan – to record a day in the life of urban Russia. Significantly, though, there is nothing mimetic about this documentation; Vertov's plan was to make the camera and the celluloid itself as significant as the scenes portrayed. Hence the result is a heady and vertiginous piece of cinema, using optical effects, split screens and double exposures as it jump-cuts, by association, from city to city and moment to moment, the titular "man with a movie camera" more of a magician – maybe even a cyborg – than a social historian, and far from a passive bystander.

Seen now, its celebration of the burgeoning machine age is still resonant but not without humour – even if its constantly self-reflexive nature borders on exhausting (the breakneck 65-minute film has had arguably more influence on art and music than it did on cinema itself, perhaps bested in the latter regard by Dali and Bunuel's more purely surreal Un Chien Andalou, premiered later the same year). Indeed, you could draw a direct line from Vertov's film to the deadpan electronic beats of Kraftwerk, whose 1978 album Man Machine the Polish-born director would surely have relished. Damon Wise

9. Crumb

The cartoonist Robert Crumb is a man who made his name by sketching gleeful and disturbing pictures of a dysfunctional USA, who is reported to masturbate over his own drawings, and who confesses to becoming sexually aroused by the sight of Bugs Bunny in drag. Terry Zwigoff's bewitching 1994 documentary, however, reveals him to be arguably the sanest brother in the most wild and wonky brood this side of the Addams family. It was Crumb's abiding good fortune to find an outlet for his demons. His other siblings were not so blessed.

Crumb (the movie) paints a portrait of the artist as snickering, self-loathing geek, pushing the boundaries of taste with his exultant inky emissions and view of modern-day America as a kind of circus of the damned. Zwigoff - Crumb's former friend turned tormentor - chases him down and shoots him at length. Having established Crumb as a successful, serious artist, the film then turns the clock back to his nightmarish upbringing in a hothouse home where he and his brothers hid from the world and drew their comics in a frenzy. Maxon Crumb would later grow up to be a sex pest, all but losing control of his motor functions as he recalls assaulting a woman in his local shop. But the film's dark centre is filled by tragic Charles, the Colonel Kurtz of American cartooning, who ventured further and further upriver while scribbling his own version of the Treasure Island tale and now lives at home with mum, strung out on anti-depressants and periodically fantasising about killing his younger brother.

Zwigoff's film is black as pitch and twisted like a pretzel. Small wonder that Crumb reacted with horror when he finally sat down to view his likeness up on screen. Xan Brooks

8. Grey Gardens

Directed by David and Albert Maysles, Grey Gardens is surely one of the most hypnotic studies of human behaviour ever recorded. For a time, its shattered-mirror assembly is really quite frustrating, offering slivers and fragments of its subjects, until suddenly it snaps from chaos into order, albeit of the most subjective kind. Made in 1975, it depicts a world now long gone, but unusually for a documentary of the period, it presents a situation that was unthinkable even then: two once-wealthy socialites living in squalor, gloom and cat shit in New York's fashionable East Hampton area.

Both women are named Edith Beale – Big Edie and Little Edie – and the film begins with the two women in their rundown house, a newspaper clipping screaming, "Mother And Daughter Ordered To Clean House Or Get Out," a second clipping telling us that the pair are Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin. This, however, is a much as we get in the way of third-party context: the Maysles's approach is to go inside the Beales' world and show us what they see there. It turns out to be an extraordinary vision of life through the looking glass. Artworks moulder, raccoons nibble at the once-grand 28-room mansion, and Little Edie mixes cocktails in empty mayonnaise jars. And suddenly Big Edie will drop a bombshell, saying of her daughter, "She had a proposal of marriage from Paul Getty." Turning to Little Edie, she adds, "Remember Paul? The richest man in the world?"

What Grey Gardens does quite brilliantly is to present these two wild women at face value and then reveal them as they are: thoroughbred eccentrics, by no means as crazy as they look. And though they come as double act (Big Edie shooting down her daughter with an acid tongue), Little Edie is the film's poster girl. With her strange taste in clothes, often wearing sweaters on her apparently bald head (it is never explained), Little Edie has since become an icon for gay culture and the fashion world alike: a true original. DW

7. A Propos de Nice

Around the time he released his Man With a Movie Camera in late 1929, Vertov claimed that he had found "an authentically international absolute language of cinema," free from "foreign elements" from theatre and literature. That same year, Vertov's younger brother, the Paris-based cameraman Boris Kaufman, teamed up with novice film-maker Jean Vigo to work in the same vernacular: no scenario, no intertitles, no performers, no sets.

Vigo was the son of an anarchist-leftist who'd been strangled in prison when Vigo was 12, and immured in one of the grim boarding schools he would denigrate in his Zero de Conduite. Vigo's loathing of militarism, uniforms, clerics and authority was bred in the bone alongside an inborn subversiveness and a deeply lyrical aesthetic. A Propos de Nice is thus both scathing and exquisite. Vigo dwells at first on Nice's gilded gargoyles, the idle rich at play in this Mediterranean pleasure dome: the bourgeoisie making their evening promenade - ostensibly on parade, but recoiling at the camera's approach - buttoned-up, aloof, ugly, angry.

The other Nice edges in slowly: a filthy tramp among the rich, a child with smallpox, a cat in the garbage. Then a bizarre parade of people in huge papier-mache masks gives way to a repeated shot of pretty working-class girls dancing and flashing their drawers at the camera below them, an image of pure unharnessed hedonism and unselfconscious joy intercut with images that scorn the sombre mausoleums of generals and monarchists and blasphemously mock the tedium of a Catholic funeral procession.

The contrasts may be simple, perhaps obvious, and certainly there's venom, but it is the lyricism that lingers, and which would find its purest refinement in Vigo's third and final film, the luminous L'Atalante. John Patterson

6. Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore's takedown of the Bush administration's reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Centre in September 2001 remains, by some margin, the most successful non-fiction feature to play in America – even March of the Penguins and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never don't come close. After winning the Palme d'Or from Quentin Tarantino's Cannes jury in 2004, it made the unexpected leap from arthouse to mainstream, gaining unexpected support from ordinary citizens whose spouses, sons, daughters, brother and sisters were soldiers in the field.

What's most surprising, in retrospect, is that Fahrenheit 9/11 is very much a game of two halves. The first, in which Craig Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud is the road map, sets up lots of questions that aren't always answered, rattling the closets of George W Bush's cabinet in a bid to expose their vested and mostly lucrative interests in the war. Midway, though, the film changes tack; now the recipient of covert, digitally shot footage shot by embedded journalists, Moore is able to reveal the true miseries of the situation in Iraq, as experienced by both sides.

Viewed now, it's clear that Fahrenheit 9/11 is, in anything, a precursor of WikiLeaks and the first sign that digital technology would be a significant tool in the fight for democracy. And despite its sprawling, digressive structure, its raw and angry belief in truth and justice remains relevant today. Asked in 2009 if he still thought the film was a worthy Cannes winner, Tarantino replied: "As time has gone on, I have put that decision under a microscope and I still think we were right," he said. "That was a movie of the moment – Fahrenheit 9/11 may not play the same way now as it did then, but back then it deserved everything it got." DW

5. The Sorrow and the Pity

In the late 1960s, director Marcel Ophüls was commissioned by French TV to shoot a documentary about the 1940-1944 Nazi occupation. He unearthed old sins, uncovered old witnesses and came back with a devastating 265-minute expose, a rap sheet as long as your arm and a film which exploded the myth of Vichy France as a hotbed of patriotic fervour. So troublesome were the picture's findings that it was not screened on French TV until 1981.

Weaving vibrant newsreel footage with contemporary interviews, The Sorrow and the Pity installs the town of Clermont-Ferrand as the microcosm for a cowed, craven country, presided over by the Blimpish Marshal Pétain and serenaded by the honeyed tones of Maurice Chevalier. Collaboration is the norm. A hairdresser shops her friend to the Gestapo, while a shopkeeper named Klein puts an ad in the local paper to assure customers he's not Jewish. France, it appears, was caught off guard and then sold down the river by its own middle-class. "The workers always showed more resistance," explains one old-timer. "But the bourgeoisie were scared."

In the film's second half, heroes belatedly emerge from the rubble. We are told of Gaspar, the bull-necked boss of the local Maquis, a mercurial Jewish politician who broke out of his prison cell and the faceless students from Clermont-Ferrand high school, who joined the Resistance and are no longer around to tell the tale. "Many of them have streets named after them," boasts their proud former teacher, who stood by and did nothing. XB

4. Nanook of the North

For good or ill, Nanook of the North is the Birth of a Nation of documentary film. It cast a shadow just as dark and wide over the films in its wake, it established the grammar and syntax of the classical feature documentary at a stroke, and it exemplified all the flaws, contradictions and controversies latent in the form - observation versus intervention; objectivity or immersion; staged recreations, among many others - that would engage its practitioners for decades into the future.

Filming in the late teens of the last century, Robert Flaherty lived among the Inuit of Hudson Bay for several years after 1913. He lost his early footage in a fire and reconfigured his approach, confining himself to the story of a single hunter-fisherman. His footage still transfixes the viewer after a century: five family members and a puppy emerging from a single tiny canoe; Nanook spearing fish and harpooning seals on wild icy seas; rescuing an ice fox pup; the construction of an igloo with ice-block windows in under an hour.

Ethnographic documentary was born here ... kind of. Flaherty was not simply observing, he was recreating a way of life that was within the living memory of his subjects, but on the wane. Many Inuit now hunted with rifles, not spears, and wore modern rubber waterproofs, not sealskin. These Inuit tribesmen weren't mired in a primitive hunter-gatherer stage of life; in fact half of them were members of Flaherty's crew, including one cameraman, and Flaherty had two common-law wives during his sojourns, which you might say compromises the purity of the endeavour.

These rich and perplexing issues have been argued over by entire schools of thought in documentary, from the British in the 1930s to the cinema vérité purists of the 60s, through Jean Rouch, the Maysles brothers and Errol Morris. But it all springs from here. JP

3. Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog's insistence that his documentaries are simply fiction films "in disguise" never really rang completely true until this jaw-dropping study of ill-fated adventurer Timothy Treadwell signalled the director's return from critical neglect in 2005. Although documentaries had always been an integral component of Herzog's filmography – he has the rare distinction of telling the same story twice, once as the doc Little Dieter Wants to Fly and again as the fiction movie Rescue Dawn – Grizzly Man is perhaps the director's most complete and representative genre piece: an unbelievable true-life story, explored with the director's arch, deadpan Bavarian outlook and drone.

Herzog's film is very much a documentary of its time, in which straight reportage was no longer enough and films such as Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and DiG! (2004) began drawing on the three-act structure to compose a narrative that put emotional twists and turns before straight factual revelations. Although Treadwell was only recently dead when the film debuted, Herzog puts himself square into the story, and his masterstroke is that just when Grizzly Man seems to peter out halfway through, the director goes back to the beginning: revealing the shocking truth about Treadwell, who presented himself as a wildlife expert when in fact he was anything but.

Herzog is in his element here, retracing Treadwell's steps and even listening to the recording of his death, attacked by a hungry bear as his screaming girlfriend walloped it with a frying pan ("You must never listen to this," he solemnly informs the friend who provided the tape – as if she's ever going to!). The result is the film that best represents Herzog's view of life, fiction work or otherwise. "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony," he says at one point, "but chaos, hostility, and murder." As an alternative to Attenborough, nature has never been laid so bare. DW

2. The Thin Blue Line

The idea of the police as a thin blue line – a solid, unflagging protection between proper society and anarchy – is a comforting and utterly false one as depicted here, debunked over and over again as Errol Morris untangles the utterly unsafe conviction at the centre of this landmark documentary. Randall Adams, the man accused of killing a police officer in Dallas, Texas in 1976, was an itinerant worker with no motive for murder. The teenager uncovered by Morris as the likely culprit, David Harris, was a petty criminal who had bragged about the crime and went on to be convicted of another murder. How Adams was sent to death row and Harris was sent free is a story of conflicting motives and memories, of small-town biases and basic mistakes – both frustratingly specific to Adams' unlucky circumstances and telling of an entire justice system.

That The Thin Blue Line eventually led to Adams' exoneration adds a happy coda to the film, but it remains sombre and enraging at the same time. Morris recounts the story in linear, exquisite detail, using simple cuts, his signature re-enactments and even Philip Glass's hypnotic score to draw conclusions that an entire city's worth of attorneys and policemen never managed. The interviewees, rarely identified by name, are colourful glimpses into 1970s Texas: a Greek chorus who prove, without Morris ever having to say it, just how easily justice can be miscarried. An astonishing feat of reporting, The Thin Blue Line proves that facts – the presumed basis of the entire documentary genre – are as slippery and subject to manipulation as any fictional narrative. With his probing camera, Morris combines fact and fiction to suss out the truth that no one else could. Katey Rich

1. Shoah

Jean-Luc Godard has often said that the greatest crime, or failure, or perhaps just the greatest "absence" in the history of cinema was the medium's inability to witness directly the central crime of the 20th century: no footage exists of the gas chambers, the ovens, the pyres of corpses burning day and night for years. In that absence, argues Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, it would be obscene to imagine it or to recreate it, and over the years he has had much scorn for those who have done so, Steven Spielberg included.

When it befell him to approach the war against the Jews himself in Shoah, he forswore all archival footage, relying only on his own images of faces and places: the haunted survivors, their denial-prone camp oppressors, the bureaucrats of industrialised genocide, the Polish peasants who abetted or ignored it all, the benighted Jewish Sonderkommandos compelled to strip, shave, and incinerate the dead. All of them are intercut with the present-day sites, often reclaimed by nature, of the camps at Auschwitz, Chelmno and Treblinka, raw death seething beneath the sod, bone-fragments ten-a-penny in the loam. Publicity-shy ex-Nazis and SS officers were pinned down in full confessional flow by hidden cameras, among them while the Polish peasants seem to condemn themselves blithely out of their own mouths.

The result, at nine and a half hours, is nothing short of monumental - literally, a monument to the lost. That punishing length can be a drag on narrative velocity: all conversations - German, Polish, Yiddish - are passed through translators onscreen, and subtitled in the French that Lanzmann finally hears, but even the issue of interminability seems of a piece with the inexorable horrors being recollected.

Lanzmann had been gestating the movie all his life. He was a Jewish teenager with fake papers (like his whole family, who all survived) when he joined the resistance. After the liberation he waited an agonizing year for a single French Jew to return from Germany - pitifully few ever did. Filmed across six years and 14 countries in the mid-70s, then edited down over another four, and released to widespread acclaim in 1985, not long after Klaus Barbie was extradited to France from Bolivia, Shoah had its roots in the revitalisation of Jewish and Israeli self-consciousness and self-confidence in the aftermath of the Six Day War (celebrated in other Lanzmann docs) and the belated SS and Order Police trials in West Germany in the early 1960s. The years of mentally suppressing the ordeals of the 1940s had ended; the Kunderian war of memory against forgetting was now under way.

Hailed as a masterpiece on its release, it also generated plenty of controversy and vitriol, particularly in Poland. Many decried Lanzmann's apparent willingness to condemn the entire Polish nation (the often high-handed Lanzmann didn't deny it) without acknowledging their own extreme suffering under Nazi domination. A gargantuan attempt at historical memorialisation, Shoah stands utterly alone in documentary history. John Patterson

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Music lessons in early childhood may improve brain's performance

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 11:01 PM PST

Results suggest it might be better to start musical training before age of seven, says study's author

Music lessons in early childhood lead to changes in the brain that could improve its performance far into adulthood, researchers say.

Brain scans of young adults revealed that those who had formal musical training before the age of seven had thicker brain regions that deal with hearing and self-awareness.

The findings highlight how brain development can be influenced by the age that children start to learn a musical instrument, and how those changes can persist into later life.

"Early musical training does more good for kids than just making it easier for them to enjoy music. It changes the brain and these brain changes could lead to cognitive advances as well," said Yunxin Wang of Beijing Normal University.

"Our results suggest it might be better to start musical training before age seven, which is consistent with what most piano teachers recommend," she added.

Wang devised the study to investigate whether musical training early on in life had any lasting effect on the structure of the brain. She hoped the results might help parents decide when was best for their children to learn an instrument.

The brain's cortex plays a leading role in scores of crucial abilities, from thought and language to memory and attention. The region matures rapidly in the early years of life, and its development could be affected more if a person started musical training before it fully matured.

Wang studied 48 Han Chinese aged between 19 and 21 who had received formal music training for at least a year sometime between the ages of three and 15. Each had a magnetic resonance scan to measure the thickness of the cortex and the volume of grey matter in their brains.

After taking gender and the number of years spent having music lessons into account, Wang found that musical training that started before the age of seven appeared to thicken areas of the brain involved in language skills and executive function, which is a person's ability to plan and carry out tasks. She presented the results at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

"We're not sure why these changes arise, but a reasonable explanation is that early starters might rely more on auditory clues during learning music, since it might be more difficult for younger children to read music," Wang said.

The findings build on earlier work that suggests musical training before the age of seven can have a significant impact on the brain's development. Earlier this year, researchers at Concordia University in Montreal showed that people who took music lessons before seven years old had stronger connections between motor regions of the brain, which are involved in making movements, and the sensory areas.

Wang hopes to look at whether the age people start musical training has any meaningful impact on their cognitive skills as an adult, and on the rate at which their brain function declines with age. "As we know the brain is the executive organ of our mind, these changes might possibly reduce the ageing of the auditory system," she said.

Ian Sample

Teenage pregnancies and contraception access under spotlight at global summit

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 11:01 PM PST

Family planning talks kick off in Addis Ababa, as data shows millions of women have inadequate contraception support

Reducing the number of teenage pregnancies and ensuring young women have access to contraception will be the focus of the largest global summit on family planning, which opens in Addis Ababa on Tuesday.

The third international family planning conference aims to build on the momentum of last year's meeting in London, where donors pledged $2.6bn (£1.6bn) in new funding and committed to providing 120 million more women with access to modern contraceptives by 2020.

The Malawian president, Joyce Banda, Thai prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, and Melinda Gates are among the thousands of political leaders, philanthropists, medical experts and women's rights activists expected to attend.

"These are exciting times," said Ketchie Obagwu, senior expert on family planning at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), who wants governments to present clear action plans on how to fulfil their promises.

Obagwu praised the focus on young people and said there was an urgent need to ensure that they too have access to family planning information and services.

According to estimates from the UN agency, published in its Motherhood in Childhood report last month, the number of girls in sub-Saharan Africa giving birth before the age of 15 could increase by more than 1 million by 2030, if current trends continue.

Each day, approximately 20,000 girls in the global south give birth before the age of 18. Childbirth is a leading cause of death for girls aged 15-18, according to the report.

After decades of relative neglect, family planning has rapidly acquired greater prominence on the global funding agenda, with rich countries and large philanthropic foundations ploughing billions into the expansion of services and the development of contraceptives.

"The [London] summit last year really was a turning point for this issue," said Michael Holscher, director of international programmes at Marie Stopes International But it remains critical to ensure that broad commitments are translated into hard cash and concrete programmes on the ground, he said. "If we just walk away now, promises will not be kept."

Family planning is a political minefield, particularly around the question of abortion. Ensuring teenagers and unmarried women have access to contraception is also controversial in some places where sex before marriage remains taboo.

At the UN commission on the status of women this year, delegates faced strong but ultimately unsuccessful lobbying from some conservative governments and religious groups to remove references to reproductive rights, emergency contraception and sex education in its outcome document.

There is fear in some quarters that the global family planning agenda is being driven at least in part by those keen to stem population growth, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

The world population, now at 7.2 billion, could exceed 9.5 billion by 2050 and climb to nearly 11 billion by the end of the century, according to UN estimates. More than half of the growth predicted between now and 2050 is expected in Africa, where the number of people is set to more than double, from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion.

The UNFPA executive director, Babatunde Osotimehin, said it was critical that family planning be recognised as a human rights issue. "Family planning is not just a public health issue … women must be able to make choices about their lives," he said.

Estimates suggest that 222 million women who do not want to get pregnant are without access to contraceptives, information and services.

The Addis Ababa conference will take stock of how much progress has been made towards high-level pledges. A number of countries and donors are also expected to make new commitments.

Organised under the banner of "full access, full choice", the summit will highlight the importance of not only expanding access to contraceptives but also ensuring women have the choice of a full range of methods. How to fund these ambitions and ensure efforts are sustainable remain critical questions, however.

There is concern, for example, that moves by some aid donors – including the UK – to pull out of middle-income countries like India and South Africa could damage efforts to ramp up services. Holsher believes investments by national governments will be critical. "The big wins will be in these transition and middle-income countries, when national governments show a commitment to family planning and investing in women," he said.

The conference will highlight the importance of national leadership, and particularly the role of female leaders in championing family planning and gender equality. "Success ultimately depends on the sustained commitment of national leaders," Banda said.

More than 100 countries will be represented at the conference, according to organisers, and dozens of African ministers are expected to attend a high-level meeting on young people and family planning on Tuesday.

Delegates from large pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer will also be in attendance. Whether new investments in family planning should go through the public or private sector remains a subject of debate.

Claire Provost

The nation falls silent to remember the war dead: from the archive, 12 November 1919

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 11:00 PM PST

Nearly everyone wanted to be in the open air. Crowds streamed out of the offices a few minutes before eleven to stand on the pavement

London, Tuesday night

There must have been a resemblance between the scenes in all great cities during the silent minutes to-day, but because of its position as capital London probably expressed itself more impressively. It was like stopping a clock for two minutes, and because of the fineness of its social machinery the clock of London was stopped and began again with very little damage to the day's work.

I have discussed the question with people who were in many different parts of the town, and all agreed about the completeness of the observance. The exceptions proved this. One man walked down Tottenham Court Road during the pause, with the crowd standing bareheaded and the vehicles motionless, and this one man, striding along in the middle of the road, impressed my friend as the strangest apparition he had ever seen. It seemed something against nature.

Nearly everyone wanted to be in the open air. Crowds streamed out of the offices a few minutes before eleven to stand on the pavement. Shopkeepers came out of their shops, workgirls out of their factories, sailors came on deck, tubemen came out of their lifts. It was as though a message was being sent and received, and that its transmission must be through the void.

Meetings

My thoughts turned back to a farewell scene, near the beginning of the war, when the 2nd Scots Guards went out to the front. There was, of course, silence about their going as about all the departures of that great army, and they passed through London by-streets, so the few who were at Waterloo to see them go were relatives and friends. It was an unusually moving scene, for it was in the black days, and people had begun to realise how small the chances were against their return.

The soldiers were marched on to the platform, and their wives and mothers and sweethearts remained outside behind the grating. Just before the train pulled out the men began to sing at one part of the train, and it was quickly taken up right along the train and by the men still on the platform. It was not "Tipperary" or a music-hall song, but the old Scots ballad that flowered out of partings and sudden death:

You'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road,

And I'II be in Scotland afore ye;

But me and my true love will never meet again

On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

It was written of a Jacobite lover whose sweetheart had come to say farewell to him before his execution. The High Road is the high road and the Low Road is through the grave. To-day as we stood among the multitude where many women were weeping one conceived the vast multitude of London's dead soldiers who had come home by the Low Road to every suburb and district in this wilderness of bricks as the Jacobite had come home to his Highlands, and in these two minutes surely there were meetings.

Memories

A soldier writes:— At eleven o'clock I chanced to be at Oxford Circus. It was a most impressive moment. There was a loud detonation, and immediately the restless traffic was silent, every male head uncovered, and all flags on the house-tops slackened in the leech until they were half-mast high. I have never before assisted in a pause so reverent. It was possible to gauge the thoughts of the crowd. Many themselves had served, and will have been flung back, like the writer, to the memory of those fine fellows with whom they had lived in the closest union until the fatal scythe of war snatched them away. Of the others, who does not mourn a vacant chair?

For two brief minutes I saw again the distorted horizon of Northern France, and the last resting-place of so many of my gallant comrades. One by one the dearest of them were visualised during those brief two minutes. It was a great and sacred idea.

Tony Abbott outlines legislative agenda for the first week – video

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 10:28 PM PST

Tony Abbott outlines the bills the government will introduce in the first week of the 44th parliament

Bronwyn Bishop is elected Speaker for the 44th parliament – video

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 08:26 PM PST

Bronwyn Bishop was dragged to her chair by Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne on the opening day of the 44th session of parliament in Canberra

Breast cancer researchers identify genetic 'switch'

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 07:02 PM PST

Australian scientists have discovered a gene fragment that could provide a clearer prognosis for patients

Queensland scientists have identified a genetic "switch" that indicates whether breast cancer is aggressive and likely to spread.

The discovery may provide a clearer prognosis for breast cancer patients and pave the way for new treatments.

Teams from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the Institute of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland have found a particular RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecule goes missing in aggressive cancers.

QIMR Berghofer's Dr Nicole Cloonan says the discovery will make it easier to identify aggressive tumours.

"Essentially, this particular gene fragment, or microRNA, normally acts like an emergency brake in our genetic program, ensuring our cells continue to reproduce normally," Dr Cloonan explained.

"But we've identified that this 'emergency brake' fails in invasive, aggressive tumours. Its sudden absence in cancer tests would be a clear marker that a tumour is likely to spread.

"And we know that primary breast cancer rarely kills; it is those aggressive tumours that spread, or metastasise, which result in poor outcomes."

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Australian women.

Survival largely depends on the timing of diagnosis. If the cancer is limited to the breast, 96% of patients will be alive five years after diagnosis, according to Cancer Council Australia.

Dr Cloonan says although the research focused on breast cancer, it has wider implications.

It is clear the microRNA is also missing in aggressive liver, stomach, brain and skin cancers, she said.

"What we've uncovered seems to be a common cellular process which could be a new drug target," Dr Cloonan said.

How three Indian villages saved the Amur falcon|Kavitha Rao

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 07:01 PM PST

A new grassroots conservation model takes root

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes several to save wildlife. In the eastern Indian state of Nagaland, three villages have done just that: working together to save the Amur falcon from mass slaughter. Also on board: governments, green groups and even the church.

Every year, tens of thousands of migrating Amur falcons from Siberia stop over in the state on their way to Africa. The effect is spectacular; the sky is thick with flying birds. It is thought to be one of the biggest-possibly the biggest-falcon roosts in the world. But this layover has made the falcon vulnerable. In the last few years, villagers have been hunting- or rather massacring- the birds for their meat. Green groups estimate that at least 120,000 birds are killed every year, but the numbers could be far higher.

In August this year, just ahead of the hunting season, local conservation group Nagaland Wildlife and Biodiversity Conservation Trust (NWBCT), along with several other green groups, launched a conservation and patrolling programme called Friends of the Amur Falcon. The church (Nagaland is a mostly Christian state) stepped in too, citing the Book of Leviticus in the Bible, which prohibits the consumption of birds of prey.

Meanwhile the government, and the villages of Pangti, Ashaa and Sungro, stepped in. "It is our duty to protect these wonderful birds while they are passing through Nagaland and treat them as our honoured and esteemed guests, in the true Naga tradition of hospitality," said Nagaland's chief minister Neiphiu Rio. Rio also threatened to stop grants to villages involved in hunting the falcons. Village councils agreed to make the hunting of the falcons illegal, and levied a fine of Rs 5000 (about GBP 50)on any hunters. Villagers and green groups patrolled the region to catch transgressors.

The Amur falcon is a fascinating bird. It is only the size of a pigeon, but it has one of the longest migratory paths in the bird kingdom, travelling up to 22,000 km in a year. It also survives wholly on insects, making it a very useful bird to have around for farmers. "The ecological significance of this bird is huge," says Ramki Sreenivasan, wildlife photographer and co-founder of Conservation India, which runs several education centres in the villages. In a "train the trainer" campaign, teachers, church officials, and other village elders are being taught about the falcon and its amazing journey. They, in turn, pass on the message of conservation to hunters and children.

So far, the carrot and stick approach has worked spectacularly. "This hunting season, we have had no killings at all,' says Sreenivasan. "There is still a long way to go, but the Nagaland government, the central government and the community deserve to be congratulated." This week, Hungarian scientists working with the local and central government began satellite tagging some of the birds to track their flight paths.

But it may be premature to rejoice. There is already some discontent in the village, with many hunters-and even village heads- arguing they now need an alternative income, if they are to protect the falcon in years to come. There is talk of poultry and fish farming, and demands for government aid. But, as Sreenivasan says, "Money is always used as an excuse for animals being slaughtered, but this kind of hunting has only happened in the last few years. The first priority was to stop the killing of the birds. Now that villagers have given up hunting, parties can come to the table to negotiate alternatives."

Sreenivasan hopes Nagaland can be used as a template for other states. "Many states display the 'empty forest' syndrome, where exploding populations have completely depleted forests of wildlife. This could be a case study for South Asian forests. We hope a larger conservation ethic emerges in the region."

Joe Hockey forced to negotiate over $200bn boost to borrowing limit

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 06:38 PM PST

Treasurer wants to talk compromise with Labor party and Greens to push through his controversial debt ceiling increase

The treasurer, Joe Hockey, is being forced to negotiate a compromise with the ALP or the Greens over the government's demand for a $200bn increase to the government's borrowing limit before the end of the year, as the Abbott government faces the reality of a hostile Senate at least until next July.

As the Abbott government was formally sworn in on Tuesday, its highest legislative priorities – the carbon tax repeal and the increase in the debt ceiling – faced a rocky path through the Senate as the Greens leader, Christine Milne, backed Labor's concerns about the size of the proposed increase in allowable borrowings.

Australia is set to exceed its allowable debt ceiling by the end of the year and Hockey is demanding the increased ceiling be passed as quickly as possible.

A spokeswoman for Hockey said the government was "seeking talks" with other parties – indicating the debt ceiling issue would become an early political test both for the new government and the opposition parties.

"When Labor tried to raise the debt ceiling by $50bn, Tony Abbott behaved like the Tea Party in the United States, he carried on a treat about budget emergencies and debt crises and specifically he said 'the government should be forced to specifically justify this … our money, our future is too important to be mortgaged like this without the government giving us the strongest possible arguments for it because every dollar they borrow has to be repaid'," Milne told the ABC.

Her remarks followed Labor's decision to oppose Hockey's proposal to raise the debt ceiling from $300bn to $500bn, calling for a compromise figure of $400bn and the release of the mid-year economic forecast to explain why the increase was needed.

"Australians aren't able to get new mortgages or credit cards without submitting their personal financial information for scrutiny, so it's a bit rich for Mr Hockey to take the public credit card to half a trillion dollars without updated budget estimates," Bowen said.

"He's asking Australians to blindly tick off a $200bn increase in the nation's credit card limit without showing them why."

Milne agreed Australians should hear "justification for this $200bn increase to the debt ceiling … Labor has suggested a $100bn increase could be justified … we'll have a look at that."

A spokeswoman for Hockey said even under calculations done when Labor was in office, Australia's debt ceiling would have exceeded $400bn, because Australia's debt was predicted to hit $370bn by the end of the year and former treasurer Wayne Swan had himself argued that a $40bn to $60bn buffer was needed above predicted peak debt levels.

Labor and the Greens have also said they will vote against the eight carbon tax repeal bills which the Abbott government will introduce on Wednesday as its first item of legislative business.

In the new Senate, which sits from July, the government is likely to need the votes of six out of eight crossbenchers, with the outcome still somewhat unclear because of the possibility of a new Senate poll in Western Australia.

Despite his demands to raise the debt ceiling and Indonesian resistance to central elements of his asylum policy, including the turning back of boats, Abbott said on Tuesday the parliament had "great work to do: to secure our borders, to balance our budget, to strengthen our economy, to the relief of families and for the protection of jobs".

Lenore Taylor

Clive Palmer speaks on the opening day of parliament – video

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 06:28 PM PST

Clive Palmer claims he seeks to represent the '97% of Australians who can't afford to have lobbyists or can't afford to join political parties'

No class warfare in Australia? Yeah, right | Gabrielle Jackson

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 06:00 PM PST

Gabrielle Jackson for The Hoopla: Tony Abbott's top business adviser came out last night slamming the minimum wage, the NDIS, Gonski reforms and the carbon tax. At least we know where we stand

Gabrielle Jackson

Qantas uniforms past and present – in pictures

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 05:14 PM PST

Qantas has unveiled its latest uniforms for cabin crew, amid complaints the new clothes are too tight. The airline has commissioned uniforms 10 times since 1938, by names including Pucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Newson. Take a look – doors to manual ...

Video shows man alleged to be Australian suicide bomber

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 04:37 PM PST

Group linked to al-Qaida releases footage before attack on Syrian government troops

A video of a man claiming to be Australia's first suicide bomber has been released as a propaganda tool by a group connected to al-Qaida.

In the video, which contains graphic images and is not suitable for minors, the suicide bomber, whose pseudonym is Abu Asma al Australi, stands on the back of a truck packed with explosives with his face blurred out.

The scene matches photos of the man circulated on social media in September.

Music plays as loud explosions are shown in the distance before the video cuts back to the man standing on the back of the truck chanting in Arabic what seems to be a prayer. He has a shawl draped across him with Arabic writing on it. When he finishes the prayer he starts giving a speech to the camera, pointing his finger to the sky.

The speech is yet to be translated.

Abu Asma al Australi is believed to have carried out a car-bomb attack against Syrian government troops stationed in the Syrian city of Deir al-Zor. The exact timing of the attack is not known but it became public in September and at the time was reported to have led to a protracted battle in the area.

The propaganda video includes footage of about five men hugging the alleged suicide bomber before he leaves for the attack and says what seems to be a farewell to the camera.

A gun battle is then shown with about 15 men involved, though who they are shooting at and who is returning fire not shown. The battle ends with a member of the group being shot.

The video was reportedly published by Jabhat al Nusrah, a group connected to al-Qaida.

It is understood the man in the video is from Queensland and has a wife and at least one child in the state.

Bridie Jabour

François Hollande booed as 70 arrested at Armistice Day ceremony

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 04:17 PM PST

French government says protesters linked to far-right groups as polls reveal another fall in president's popularity ratings

French police detained about 70 people at an Armistice Day memorial ceremony on Monday after protesters the government said were linked to the far right booed President François Hollande.

Newscasters said it was the first time a French head of state had been jeered on 11 November, the day commemorating the signing of the armistice in 1918.

Scuffles erupted between police and the demonstrators as the socialist president's motorcade drove up the Champs- Élysées to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Some of the protesters shouted "Hollande, step down", and "Socialist dictator". Interior minister Manuel Valls said the demonstrators included members of far-right groups opposed to government policies such as same-sex marriages.

"Today on the Champs-Élysées, several dozen individuals linked to the far right … did not want to respect this moment of contemplation and gathering," Valls told reporters, describing their actions as unacceptable.

The 70 were arrested because the demonstration was not authorised, said a source at the presidential palace.

One protester told BFM-TV the boos and gibes were targeted purely at Hollande. "I find it absolutely shameful that we don't have the right to speak up without being arrested," said the woman. "Saying 'Hollande, step down' is not offensive."

Polls published on Monday by OpinionWay and Ipsos showed Hollande's popularity ratings, pummelled by an ailing economy, heavy taxes and other issues, at 22% and 21% respectively.

Those ratings fell below the 25% approval rating in a CSA survey published on Friday, which had put his popularity at the lowest level of any president since the founding of France's Fifth Republic 55 years ago.

Protests have forced Hollande to give ground over planned tax increases, including most recently a new levy on heavy trucks that mobilised hundreds in the western region of Brittany. Hollande has now deferred but not scrapped the levy.

Valls said Monday's protesters included members of the far-right National Front, whose popularity has risen on the back of widespread public discontent ahead of municipal and European elections scheduled for next year.

Ed Miliband vows to tackle British IT firms' dependence on overseas workers

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 04:01 PM PST

Miliband will also promise to make UK-based IT firms take on a full-time British apprentice for each overseas recruit

Ed Miliband has hired former Tomorrow's World presenter Maggie Philbin to head a new independent taskforce to review the growing IT skills gap in the UK, as the Labour leader highlights the growing dependence on overseas workers.

Miliband will make the announcement as he warns that British IT firms filling staff shortages from outside the EU, mainly the Indian subcontinent, will be required to take on a full-time British apprentice for each overseas recruit under a Labour government.

The Philbin report will be available to all political parties.

David Cameron is due to visit subcontinent this week, where there has been controversy about the coalition government's efforts to restrict the number of skilled workers from India. Miliband is determined to highlight the skills gap in the IT sector as the prime example of Britain's wider skills failure, which has led to British firms trawling for skills elsewhere.

On a visit to Tech City in London, Miliband will say the number of IT and digital apprenticeships in the UK has declined by a quarter over the past year at the same time as recruitment of skilled workers from outside the EU in the sector has risen.

Miliband will warn IT firms that he intends to make their industry a showcase for his call for more British apprenticeships, a subject he first pressed at the Labour conference in the autumn.

"We'll say to big firms who want to hire skilled workers from outside the EU, you can, but you will have to offer apprenticeships too so that we equip young people in this country and businesses with the skills that they need to succeed.

"We'll say to firms who want a government contract, you will have to have offer apprenticeships."

Official government figures show that the number of people starting apprenticeships in information & communication technology (ICT) fell by 26% last year. Over the same period, there were 7% more tier 2 high skilled migrant visa applications, increasing to 43,485, of which the largest single group were in the ICT sector (18,304).

According to Home Office figures, 40% of tier 2 migration has been driven by demand within the ICT sector since 2010.

Miliband will argue: "IT and digital is now worth more than £100bn a year to the UK – and this figure could rise by half as much again over the next parliament, it is a key player in Britain winning the race to the top in which rising national income generates a prosperity shared by working families"

A recent report from research firm GfK, found that 77% of the businesses based in the Tech City area around Old Street in east London said the lack of skilled workers was restricting growth. It said 44% agreed that finding skilled workers is the single biggest challenge their business faces.

They cited problems including poor training courses and the general perception that all IT jobs are highly technical. Miliband has promised to let firms do more to design courses.

In India, Infosys has a large-scale training campus in Mysore, where currently 15,000 to 20,000 students attend a 23-week residential training programme each year.

Michael Gove, the education secretary, described the existing school curriculum for ICT as harmful and dull.

In the UK the demand for big data experts in large companies is expected to more than double by 2017 to 69,000, according to a study sponsored by data analytics specialists SAS.

In 2013, there were 31,000 people employed as big data specialists at firms employing more than 100 staff, and the number is set to increase by an average of 49% each year, a survey carried out by sector skills council e-skills UK found.

Questions have been raised whether the Labour government has the powers under EU law to require British firms to train British apprentices if they planned to hire a non-EU worker.

Patrick Wintour

ABC's Amy Robach reveals cancer diagnosis after on-air mammogram

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 02:49 PM PST

Correspondent underwent public mammogram after anchor told her that if story saved one life, it would be worth it

A month after undergoing a mammogram on Good Morning America, ABC's Amy Robach said on Monday she has breast cancer and will have a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery this week.

The 40-year-old correspondent admitted she had been reluctant to have the public mammogram but went ahead after GMA anchor Robin Roberts told her that if the story saved one life, it would be worth it.

"It never occurred to me that life would be mine," she said.

Robach joined ABC in 2012 from NBC, where she was a Weekend Today host. She spent a considerable time on ABC's top-rated morning show, filling in for Roberts, who has fought back from a serious blood and bone marrow disease.

Producers chose her for the mammogram story because, at 40, she's at the age when it is recommended that women regularly check for breast cancer. Married with two children and a full-time job, Robach said she had found plenty of reasons to put it off.

In her original story, she emerged from her mammogram telling Roberts and her GMA colleagues that it hurt much less than she thought it would.

A few weeks later, she returned for what she thought would be some follow-up images only to learn she had cancer. Her husband, who had been away on business, and her parents flew in that night "and we started gearing up for a fight".

She said she will learn after Thursday's surgery what her treatment will entail.

Robach said she was told that when someone gets cancer, many lives around them are saved because people are vigilant and get check-ups.

"I can only hope my story will do the same and inspire every woman who hears it to get a mammogram, to take a self-exam," she said. "No excuses. It is the difference between life and death."

Albinas Ivanauskas obituary

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 02:46 PM PST

My dad, Albinas Ivanauskas, who has died aged 88, was a member of the small, almost invisible Lithuanian community which settled in Britain after the second world war.

The eldest son of a farmer, born near Seta, Albinas grew up in the new, independent Lithuania, born out of the treaty of Versailles. Enrolled at the agriculture school in Vepriai, he had hopes of becoming an agronomist, but war intervened. His family narrowly avoided being arrested and sent to Siberia when the Russians invaded in 1940, and in June 1941 Albinas learned of how Jewish friends and neighbours were murdered by German Einsatz squadrons (paramilitary killing squads) and their Lithuanian collaborators.

During the war years, Albinas's family eked out a living on their smallholding in the forest, each night putting food outside on the porch for the desperate and sometimes dangerous people hiding amongst the trees. On 16 February – Lithuanian Independence day – in 1944, Albinas stood with other students on his college balcony to hear General Povilas Plechavičius's radio appeal for volunteers to join an independent Lithuanian unit. He later recalled how they all sang the national anthem and headed for the recruitment office.

It was a short, ill-fated adventure. Plechavičius's dream of an independent unit was impossible. The Nazis eventually forced them to don German uniforms and shipped them out at gunpoint in cattle wagons to the western front. In 1945 Albinas found himself near the Dutch border unable to return home.

After time in German displaced persons camps, like many young Balts he was granted refugee status by the British government, working firstly as a miner in the Midlands, before finally settling in London and working as a bookkeeper. In the capital he met Titia, a Dutch nurse, bought a house and went on to have a family – me and my sister Diana.

At a time when few had even heard of Lithuania, Albinas continued to work tirelessly to promote the plight of the Baltic states and their emigre communities. One of his proudest moments came in January 1991 when the BBC asked him to translate radio reports of the Soviet repression of the independence movement. The news bulletin that night, describing Soviet tanks entering Vilnius, was based on my dad's transcriptions. Happily he lived to see a free Lithuania.

He is survived by Titia, Diana and me, and his five grandchildren.

Typhoon Haiyan: there is worse to come

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 02:07 PM PST

The first disaster to kill more than a million people could happen within our lifetimes

No single typhoon, flood or drought anywhere in the world can be blamed on global warming, but the inexorable rise of the global thermometer is nevertheless an indicator of worse to come. Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are temperature-dependent phenomena. They become increasingly hazardous as sea temperatures rise. As average global temperatures increase, so does the likelihood of ever greater extremes of local temperature. So does evaporation, and so does the capacity of air to carry ever greater volumes of water vapour. So the lesson of typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with unparalleled fury on Friday, is that there is more to come, with more deaths, more destruction, more wrecked economies.

This would be true even without global warming. Population growth rates might have declined, but every 60 minutes there are another 8,000 people in the world: about 75 million every year. Most of these are in the developing world, and since so much of the developing world is within and around the tropics, where cyclones are a seasonal hazard, that means there will be more potential victims in the path of any climate-related disaster. For the first time in human history, more people are concentrated in the cities than dispersed in the countryside, and this concentration is expected to continue until almost two-thirds of all humanity lives in the cities. That means that any typhoon that hits an urban region will find more people in the way.

But more than 2 billion people have to survive on incomes of no more than $2 a day, and these too are crowded in cities in and near the tropics. These people are more likely to live in substandard housing, some of it shamelessly jerrybuilt by greedy landlords and authorised by corrupt authorities, or in shanty towns on unstable or marginal land at risk from flood and landslip when the heavens open. The schools built for their children are liable to collapse in earthquake or cyclone, any hospitals available to them are likely to be reduced to rubble along with their houses.

The Philippines government, with a long and cruel experience of typhoons, had a comprehensive disaster management strategy, plenty of warning, and it knew what to expect. The second lesson of Haiyan is that even those who make ready for bad weather may be overwhelmed by even worse.

The final lesson is that, sooner or later, some unparalleled disaster will slam with little or no warning into some crowded city managed by a heedless authority in a country run by a corrupt or brutal oligarchy. It could be the first disaster to kill more than a million, and it could happen within our lifetimes. There may be worse to come, and not just because of climate change.

Editorial

Letter: Criminal behaviour is not a no-brainer

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 01:00 PM PST

"Not me, guv; it's my brain wot done it" is akin to proclaiming that I didn't shoot the sheriff, but the bullets did ('My brain made me do it …' US defendants turn to science to try to explain crimes, 11 November).

Of course, the very possibility of moral responsibility may be questioned. All actions result from neurological changes which themselves result from chains of prior causes or even indeterminancies. Currently, we muddle through, placing some people in jail, others in straitjackets, yet with no clear justification for the differential treatment.

In West Side Story, the Jets excuse their criminal behaviour; it's neurology resulting from genes and environment "that gets us out of hand". When the judge sentences them to hard labour, he, of course, also lacks moral responsibility, his judgment being the result of his neurology, and nothing to do with him.

Wait until government ministers jump on the bandwagon: "It's my legs that took me into the 'aye' lobby to reduce welfare benefits, privatise the NHS and support inequalities of wealth – so blame my legs, not me."
Peter Cave
London

Letters: Intelligence leaks at the Guardian

Posted: 11 Nov 2013 01:00 PM PST

In a report on the leaks of intelligence data by Edward Snowden (Tory peer accuses UK media of 'lackadaisical' response to spying, 11 November), a spokesperson for Guardian News & Media is quoted as saying: "The loss of [this] classified data was not the responsibility of journalists but of the intelligence community itself. It is only the involvement of global newspapers that prevented this information from spilling out across the web and genuinely causing a catastrophic leak."

Really? Are we now to believe that the Guardian's decisions to give a wider audience to the product of Mr Snowden's theft of data have been motivated entirely by a selfless concern to protect the security of the nation?

Does this Orwellian explanation not come into the same bracket as the criminal who blames the householder for the burglary he's just committed?
Jack Straw MP
Labour, Blackburn

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