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World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk


Tony Abbott ordered cabinet documents to go to royal commission

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:57 AM PST

Attorney general says he was unaware documents on home insulation from Labor cabinet had been transferred in January









Ukraine protests: warrant issued for arrest of Viktor Yanukovych – live updates

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:56 AM PST

Interior minister says former president – last seen in pro-Russian Crimea peninsula – is suspected of involvement in killing of civilians









G20's $2tn growth pledge fails to cheer markets - business live

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:56 AM PST

Fears of a slowdown in China's property sector overshadow G20's "jam tomorrow" pledge to create $2tn in fresh economic activity,









Ukraine: warrant out for Viktor Yanukovych's arrest, says interior minister

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:52 AM PST

Calls grow for former president, last seen in Crimea on Sunday, to face charges relating to deaths of civilians

Ukraine's acting interior minister says a warrant is out for the arrest of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was last seen in the pro-Russian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

In a statement on his official Facebook page on Monday, Arsen Avakhov said Yanukovych arrived in Crimea on Sunday, relinquished his official security detail, then drove off to an unknown location.

Avakhov said a warrant was out for Yanukovych's arrest and several other officials suspected of involvement in the killings of civilians.

Calls are mounting in Ukraine to put Yanukovych on trial, after a tumultuous presidency in which he amassed powers, enriched his allies and cracked down on protesters.


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Abbott stands by Fiona Nash despite claims she breached ministerial code

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:49 AM PST

Tony Abbott says assistant health minister did not breach protocol because she corrected the record on her chief of staff's links to food industry









Poison feared as seven Sumatran elephants found dead

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:37 AM PST

Dozens of the critically-endangered animals have been killed on Indonesian island in recent years

Seven Sumatran elephants have been found dead in western Indonesia and it is thought they were poisoned, a wildlife official said on Monday.

Dozens of the critically-endangered animals have died after being poisoned in recent years on Sumatra as the creatures come into conflict with humans due to the rapid expansion of palm oil plantations which destroy their habitat.

The latest to die were an adult female, five male teenagers, and a male calf believed to be from the same herd, said local wildlife agency spokesman Muhammad Zanir.

The remains were found on 16 February just outside Tesso Nilo national park and it is thought they died five months earlier, he said.

"There is an indication that they were poisoned," he said. "Some people may consider the elephants a threat to their palm oil plantations and poison them."

While Sumatran elephants are regularly found dead, it is rare to discover so many at the same time.

Swaths of rainforest have been destroyed in recent years to make way for plantations and villagers increasingly target Sumatran elephants, which they regard as pests.

While most concessions for palm oil companies are granted outside Tesso Nilo, in Riau province in eastern Sumatra, many villagers still illegally set up plantations inside the park, said WWF spokeswoman Syamsidar, who goes by one name.

Poachers also sometimes target the animals – the smallest of the Asian elephants – for their ivory tusks, which are in demand for use in traditional Chinese medicine.

The WWF says there are only between 2,400 and 2,800 Sumatran elephants remaining in the wild and warns they face extinction in less than 30 years unless the destruction of their habitat is halted.

Rampant expansion of plantations and the mining industry has destroyed nearly 70% of the elephant's forest habitat over 25 years, according to the WWF.

Protection group the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the elephants as "critically endangered", one step below "extinct in the wild".


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OECD prescription is a hard pill for Joe Hockey to administer

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:35 AM PST

It will take a courageous treasurer to follow a recommendation that includes transport congestion charges and a higher GST









Jennifer Lawrence 'to take year off from Hollywood'

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:33 AM PST

Producer Harvey Weinstein says Hunger Games star 'deserves a rest' after series of exhausting movies

• David O Russell apologises for 'stupid' Jennifer Lawrence slavery comparison

Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence is to take a year-long break from the movie business, according to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

Speaking to the Sun on Sunday (paywall) Weinstein said the exhausted star of dystopian sci fi saga The Hunger Games and comedy Silver Linings Playbook would be taking a well-deserved rest after an incredibly busy period of filming.

"Jennifer is too nice and will do people favours and agrees to do a movie like American Hustle when she could have had a rest," said Weinstein. "She signed on to do Hunger Games when she was young and wouldn't have realised how much it would dominate her life. But she's a professional and always will be."

The producer said Lawrence, who took the best actress Oscar last year for her turn in David O Russell's Silver Linings Playbook, had every right to give last week's Baftas a miss. The 23-year-old was unable to attend despite taking the best supporting actress prize for Russell's followup American Hustle. "It's been non-stop for her and she deserves a rest," said Weinstein.

Lawrence is a frontrunner to take the best supporting actress prize for American Hustle at the Oscars next month. She is due to appear in the final two Hunger Games films, Mockingjay Parts One and Two, between now and 2015, and also has comic book epic X-Men: Days of Future Past due out this year. Other upcoming roles include the lead in Suzanne Bier's Depression-era drama Serena and a part in the comedy sequel Dumb and Dumber To.

Weinstein, who worked with Lawrence on Silver Linings Playbook, also put paid to suggestions he would stop collaborating with Quentin Tarantino during the interview. The producer, who has been Tarantino's biggest supporter since the days of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, recently said he planned to stop working on films which featured heavy gun violence due to his political views on the subject.

• Jennifer Lawrence says fat-shaming should be illegal in Walters interview


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Leopard sparks panic in India by wandering into hospital and cinema

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:15 AM PST

Officials launch hunt in Meerut after animal is seen prowling streets and entering apartment block

A leopard has sparked panic in a north Indian city after wandering into a hospital, a cinema and an apartment block.

Authorities closed schools in Meerut, 37 miles (60km) north-east of the Indian capital, after the leopard was discovered prowling the city's streets on Sunday, a senior city official said.

"Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to track the leopard down. We have launched a massive hunt for the beast," said the additional district magistrate SK Dubey.

The big cat was found inside an empty ward of an army hospital on Sunday before wildlife officers were called and managed to fire a tranquiliser dart into the animal, Dubey told AFP.

"But despite that he managed to break [out through] the iron grills and escaped. He then sneaked into the premises of a cinema hall before entering an apartment block. After that we lost track of the cat," he said.

Authorities have urged that markets be closed in the city of 3.5 million people until the animal is captured, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

A photograph in the Hindustan Times newspaper on Monday showed the leopard leaping off a terrace in a congested residential area of the city as people scrambled out of the way.

Last week, a leopard killed a five-year-old boy in central Chhattisgarh state, the latest in a string of incidents raising concerns about depleting habitats for the cats, which is forcing them into populated areas.

Alarming video footage from Mumbai last year showed a leopard creeping into an apartment block foyer and dragging away a small dog

Meanwhile, a tiger on the prowl in northern Uttar Pradesh state since last December is believed to have killed about 10 people. Wildlife officials are still trying to hunt it down.

WWF called for better management of forests and other habitats for India's leopard population, which numbered 1,150 at the 2011 census.

"Leopards are large territorial mammals. They need space to move around. Some of their corridors are getting blocked so there is bound to be an interface," Deepankar Ghosh of WWF-India told AFP.

"We can't put all the leopards into cages. We can't remove all the people living near forested areas. We have to manage the situation the best way we can."


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Banks and big business warn Direct Action will lift costs and deter projects

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:06 AM PST

Short-term incentives offered by the policy 'will drive up the amount the government will have to pay to buy emissions reductions'









Polio-like disease seen in California children

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:01 AM PST

Doctors investigate handful of cases of paralysis in one or more limbs

A polio-like illness has afflicted a small number of children in California since 2012, causing severe weakness or rapid paralysis in one or more limbs.

The Los Angeles Times reported that state public health officials had been investigating the illness since a doctor requested polio testing for a child with severe paralysis in 2012. Since then, similar cases have sporadically been reported throughout the state.

Dr Carol Glaser, leader of a California department of public health team investigating the illnesses, said she was concerned about the request because polio had been eradicated in the US and the child had not travelled overseas.

The symptoms sometimes occur after a mild respiratory illness. Glaser said a virus that is usually associated with respiratory illness but which has also been linked to polio-like illnesses had been detected in two of the patients.

Dr Keith Van Haren, a paediatric neurologist at Stanford University's Lucile Packard children's hospital who has worked with Glaser's team, will present the cases of five of the children at the American Academy of Neurology's upcoming annual meeting.

He said all five had paralysis in one or more arms or legs that had reached its full severity within two days. None had recovered limb function after six months.

"We know definitively that it isn't polio," Van Haren added, noting that all the children had been vaccinated against that disease.

Glaser would not say how many cases were being investigated. Van Haren said he was aware of about 20.

She urged doctors to report new cases of acute paralysis so investigators could try to determine the cause.


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How can we measure the immeasurable? | Miranda Threlfall-Holmes

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 12:00 AM PST

Miranda Threlfall-Holmes: George Herbert – part 2: Put simply, we can't. Herbert is at his most profoundly theological through his poetry's use of arresting images and scenes

In typical 17th-century metaphysical style, Herbert's poem The Agony begins with a sweeping and grand survey of the state of human knowledge:

Philosophers have measur'd mountains
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains.

The effect is to paint an impressive still life, full of globes and maps and sextants, crowns and armies, books and telescopes. Geography, mathematics, astronomy, political science: the educated elite of the 17th century were justly proud of their state of knowledge, and of the speed at which it was growing. This was a time when the known world was rapidly expanding into the New World, great advances were being made in navigation and associated sciences, and the study of political theory was in ferment. The sense of pride and awe and intellectual excitement of all this is palpable.

It is still remarkably fresh today, as science strains towards a Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. A modern poet might similarly summarise the state of contemporary science and humanities: we have measured virtually everything there is to be measured. The contemporary stand off between science and religion rests on the assumption that religion was used in the past to fill the gaps that science couldn't explain, and is therefore nearly, if not quite, redundant.

But the question of what can't be measured remains. How are we to value things for which science is yet to devise a metric? How are we to assess things that it is theoretically impossible to measure?

Recently, I was trying to define the value of chaplaincy to a university. Much of education policy comes down to this: how do we value the things we can't measure? Are things like art, music, spirituality or sport only of value because they are believed to contribute to the bottom line, by raising educational attainment, attracting a wider customer base, or enabling us to command higher fees?

More broadly, the question at the heart of policy debates on subjects from economic policy to euthanasia is: what is quality of life? Is it only quantifiable in metrics such as income, health, longevity and satisfaction surveys?

Herbert suggests two "vast spacious things" which few experts attempt to "sound" (get to the bottom of, as with measuring the depths of the sea): sin, and love.

At this point, for a moment, the modern reader might want to pause. This sounds like the usual religious jargon. But we aren't given a chance to pause. The poem has an almost cinematic quality, and here the action cuts from a carefully arranged academic still life, to an equally familiar but graphically contrasting crucifixion scene. It is a grisly one. From standing in a museum, we are suddenly confronted with:

A man so wrung with pains that all his hair
His skin, his garments bloody be.

Just as we are staring in shock at the abrupt change of focus, the poem drags us back to the academic question. How can one plumb the depths of sin? The question could easily be one of angels dancing on the head of a pin, but Herbert answers it not with theology, but with another arresting image:

Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.

Then the scene shifts again – as in a dream, or nightmare, we are no longer looking at the scene from the outside, but are suddenly a participant in it. To measure love, we are told, to "assay" (again, a carefully chosen scientific term) the blood that flows from the dead man's side. As we are recoiling in horror from this thought, it becomes even more graphic – we are asked how it tastes. In the final couplet, Herbert draws us back into the present by making the link with the wine at communion explicit:

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

How can we measure the immeasurable? We can't. The stock in trade questions of academic theology - what is sin, what is love, what did Jesus' death accomplish – are not answered. We are simply presented with the image of Christ on the cross. And in doing so, Herbert is of course at his most profoundly theological. The poem's construction itself communicates the fundamental Christian doctrine that God's answer to all our questions is not words or theories, but to become incarnate as a human being and simply say: I am. Taste and see.


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Mango unchained: was Bowen's three- storey tourist attraction really stolen?

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:58 PM PST

Owners of the 10-tonne landmark maintain it has been stolen, despite the police saying no report had been filed and the involvement of a Sydney advertising agency









George Brandis refuses to back up claim that Snowden put lives at risk

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:47 PM PST

Attorney general says he cannot provide confidential details to substantiate his claim against US intelligence leaker









Scott Morrison faces questions over Manus Island – as it happened

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:44 PM PST

The immigration minister faces pressure over the Manus Island disturbances as federal parliament resumes.









ABC’s Media Watch did not meet editorial guidelines, says Chris Mitchell

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:25 PM PST

Editor-in-chief of the Australian accuses program of failing to seek his comment on claims paper lost $40m to $50m a year









Great Barrier Reef authority board members cleared of improper conduct

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:12 PM PST

Government's legal expert says conflict of interest allegations against Tony Mooney and Jon Grayson are unfounded



Where do you hide if you are Mexico's most wanted man? - video

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:07 PM PST

Mexico's attorney general's office has released footage showing some of the tunnels and drainage system's used by notorious drug kingpin Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman to give authorities the slip. Guzman was arrested in the pacific resort city of Mazatlan following a co-ordinated search by Mexican and US police









Could even Facebook become a convert to privacy? | Ian Brown

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:00 PM PST

The mining of personal data drives profits at Facebook and Google – but companies could give users more control

The stunning $19bn Facebook paid last week for messaging service WhatsApp has made all of the headlines. But tucked away in the announcement of the deal is an interesting comment from founder Jan Koum: "You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee … you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication."

Facebook has built its $173bn market valuation around profiling its users and showing them targeted adverts. It has refused to allow users to subscribe with money rather than personal data. Might even Mark Zuckerberg be coming around to the value of privacy? After insisting for years that it was a sign of duplicity, he decided last month: "If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden."

The business models of internet giants such as Facebook and Google are crucial to the future of privacy. If these services make all of their revenues through tracking and profiling customers, their technology will be designed to gather as much personal data as possible – including websites visited, locations looked up on maps and visited with smartphones, and identities of friends and colleagues.

Since 2012, Google has been battling with European data protection authorities over a change to its privacy policy that allows the company to combine user data from all of its different services. Despite a recent fine of €150,000 from the French privacy agency CNIL, it is showing no signs of reversing this.

It's quite possible for social networking and messaging applications to be designed differently, to give users meaningful control over their data. Before Microsoft bought it, Skype used to route calls directly between its users, making money from calls made outside its network to standard telephones. Societies that wish to protect privacy in the internet era need to find ways to encourage technology companies to take these alternative business models and technical designs more seriously.

Aren't people getting a good deal from the advertising-supported services that dominate today's internet? An industry-commissioned study estimated that this ecosystem contributed $530bn to the US economy in 2011.

However, people are often unaware of how much data is being gathered about them – let alone the purposes for which it can be used. A 2008 study found that the privacy policies of the 75 most-visited websites took on average 10 minutes to read, and the average internet user visited 119 unique sites each year. Very few people are spending 20 hours every year reading privacy policies.

Most privacy risks are highly probabilistic, cumulative, and difficult to calculate. A student sharing a photo of over-exuberant exam celebrations might not be thinking clearly about the risk a photo could be seen by a future interview panel. Or that the heart-rate data they share today from a fitness gadget might later reveal a higher risk of heart problems. Or that combined, this data might fit the profile of a high risk-taker – with all the implications that could have for future employment, insurance and financial services decisions.

These are low-probability but high-impact risks. Four decades of behavioural economics research has shown that most people are bad at making decisions trading immediate benefits – such as polishing your reputation with your university friends or running club – against uncertain, delayed costs, like future difficulties getting a mortgage.

Even individuals with strong privacy concerns have limited options when it comes to finding privacy-friendly alternative internet services. New software is expensive to write, but almost free to run. It can be difficult for users to transfer their data from one service to a competitor. And if all of your friends are on one social networking service, you probably want to be there too. These effects all tend to favour incumbents in information industries. And indeed, in Europe Google has about 90% of the search market, while 71% of online Americans use Facebook.

Since the 1980s, computer scientists have been developing methods for designing privacy into new technologies and systems. One of their most important principles is data minimisation. This means very carefully limiting the collection of personal data to that needed to provide a service – rather than storing everything that can be conveniently retrieved. Access to data should be limited within organisations, ideally held by the individuals it relates to, and restricted using encryption. And once personal data is no longer needed, it should be deleted or anonymised.

A simple example is the targeted adverts that lead to so much personal data being collected. With UK and Hong Kong colleagues, I designed smartphone software that selects adverts to show to users based on their browsing behaviour, without notifying advertisers of individual interests. The system works especially efficiently for location-targeted adverts – for example, offering a discount at a local shop. And when a user clicks on an advert, an anonymous report is sent to the advertising network, which can claim payment from the advertiser without identifying the user. Unlike existing behavioural advertising systems, users' profiles are kept under their control.

How to encourage companies to develop these kinds of privacy-protective services? Unless Zuckerberg has had a truly Damascene conversion, it is unlikely Facebook and Google will lead the way, as their profits are so dependent on collecting user data. It is difficult for competitors to break into these markets, and most users are unwilling to become digital hermits.

For societies that are serious about protecting privacy, it may be that legal pressure is also required. A proposed new EU privacy law would provide just that, and would apply to all companies providing services to European citizens. But thanks to opposition from Britain and several other governments, it has stalled. If we want online privacy to be better protected in the next decade than it has been so far, we need Europe's governments to pass this law as a matter of urgency – and put pressure on internet firms to use their engineering genius to protect our privacy, not invade it.

• Ian Brown delivers the 2014 Oxford London lecture, titled Keeping Our Secrets?, at Church House, Westminster, on 18 March


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GM crops: European scientists descend on Africa to promote biotech

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:00 PM PST

Delegation to meet Ghanaian, Ethiopian, Kenyan and Nigerian farm ministers as well as officials from the African Union

Africa is expected to be the next target of GM food companies, as European scientists and policymakers travel to Ethiopia to boost the prospect of growing more of the controversial crops on the continent.

Anne Glover, the chief scientific adviser to the European commission, and other prominent pro-GM researchers and policymakers from European countries including Germany, Hungary, Italy and Sweden will this week meet Ethiopian, Kenyan, Ghanaian and Nigerian farm ministers as well as officials from the African Union.

The British environment secretary, Owen Paterson, who said last year that the UK would be acting immorally if it did not make GM crop technologies available to poor countries, pulled out of the conference in Addis Ababa, organised by the European Academies Science Advisory Council (Easac).

According to an Easac spokeswoman, the meeting is intended to help EU and African scientists collaborate to allow the crops to be grown more easily on the continent. "EU policy on GM crops is massively important for Africa," she said. "A lot of countries are scared to do any research. They fear they will be punished by EU restrictions. They depend on the EU for their exports."

Critics, however, said the meeting was a thinly disguised attempt to promote GM farming at a governmental level, whether or not it was good for local farmers.

"The meeting has the appearance of giving the European stamp of approval on GM crops, even though the majority of EU citizens oppose GM in food," said a spokeswoman for GM Watch, a UK-based NGO.

The talks take place as industry data shows the planting of GM crops has practically halted in the US and as G8 countries, led by the US and Britain, press African states to liberalise their farming as part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition initiative.

The New Alliance is intended to accelerate African agricultural production, but farmers have widely criticised it as a new form of colonialism.

Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has described Africa as the last frontier for large-scale commercial farming. "There's a struggle for land, for investment, for seed systems, and, first and foremost, there's a struggle for political influence," he said.

According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (Isaaa), South Africa grows GM food crops, and Burkina Faso and Sudan cotton. Seven other African countries – Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda – have conducted GM field trials. The first drought-tolerant genetically modified maize is expected to be grown on the continent in 2017, it says.

Annual figures from Isaaa show that US farmers planted 70.1m hectares (173m acres) of GM crops in 2013, less than 1% more than in 2011 and 2012. Latin American and Asian farmers grow more than half of the world's GM crops, mostly for animal feed or cotton production.

The latest figures show that 77% of the world's GM crops are grown in three countries – 40% in the US, 23% in Brazil and 14% in Argentina – with plantings in Europe and Africa negligible, and concern growing worldwide about the emergence of herbicide-resistant "superweeds".


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Ten Network’s new prime-time dance show fails to rate

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 10:51 PM PST

Central element of chief executive Hamish McLellan's comeback strategy attracts a disappointing 378,000 viewers









Tony Abbott hangs portrait of the Queen in parliamentary office

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 10:39 PM PST

Prime minister's painting is copy of 1954 portrait by William Dargie, known as 'wattle painting' for colour of Queen's gown









DPP to launch crackdown on assets hidden abroad by criminals

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 10:25 PM PST

Alison Saunders hopes £10m will be recovered from drug barons and corrupt businessmen in Spain and the UAE









Bangkok bomb blast kills two and injures 22 - video

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 10:13 PM PST

A bomb blast in a shopping district in the Thai capital on Sunday has killed two and wounded at least 22









Light the Dark vigils for Reza Berati - your pictures

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 10:12 PM PST

We asked you to send us your pictures from the vigils being held for Reza Barati, the 23-year-old Iranian asylum seeker killed in the Manus Island riot and to protest for more humane immigration policies











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