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

Malaysia Airlines MH370: authorities play down terrorist theory - live updates
Studio cut of Noah 'featured religious montage and Christian rock song'
What's going on with global warming and Antarctica's growing sea ice? | Graham Readfearn
MH370: Malaysia Airlines plane search continues - live
Lay down your needles, knitters: penguins are covered for time being
Telstra published details online of 15,000 customers in privacy breach
Oscar Pistorius trial, day seven - in tweets
Call for 'year off' so schools can search their souls | Joanna Moorhead
Canned hunting of white lions is despicable – it's time we marched to stop it | Jerome Flynn
Sleepless in the Senate: Democrats pull all-nighter for climate change – live
Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten battle over what's best for Western Australia
Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O in top slot for FM radio ratings
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have turned back, say authorities
Adelaide festival 2014: Lola's Pergola - in pictures
Former midwife found guilty of misconduct and fined $20,000
When the sun comes out so do the Londoners to warm their cockles
New British woodlands to mark first world war centenary
Student shot dead at Venezuela protest
Australian police declined to interview 'tortured' Sri Lankan asylum seeker
Australian grand prix gears up for Formula One's biggest change in years
NRL faces race row after Bulldogs fan allegedly abused Ben Barba
Troy Buswell supported by Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop amid drinking claims
Liberal and Palmer United parties attack each other over campaign ads
Vanished: Laotian development worker still missing after more than a year
Ukraine crisis: Russia preparing counter-offer to US demands

Malaysia Airlines MH370: authorities play down terrorist theory - live updates

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 01:13 AM PDT

Follow live updates as the hunt for the Boeing 777 continues almost four days after it went missing with 239 people on board

Matthew Weaver

Studio cut of Noah 'featured religious montage and Christian rock song'

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 01:06 AM PDT

Paramount's desperate efforts to market Darren Aronofsky's biblical epic to Christians appear to have failed

Studio executives tested an alternate version of Darren Aronofsky's forthcoming biblical epic Noah that opened with a montage of religious images and ended with a Christian rock song, it has been revealed.

Aronofsky said recently that he had won a battle with executives to screen his own version of Noah in cinemas after around half a dozen alternate cuts failed to find traction with evangelical filmgoers. Now a new profile of the film-maker in The New Yorker details the desperate lengths to which Paramount went to court religious audiences in the US, who had earlier turned their noses up at a test screening of Aronofksy's edit.

"In December, Paramount tested its fifth, and 'least Aronofskian,' version of Noah: an 86-minute beatitude that began with a montage of religious imagery and ended with a Christian rock song," reveals the profile.

Fortunately for cinemagoers, the new cut scored lower than Aronofsky's own version had with Christian audiences. The New Yorker piece also reveals why executives felt they had to move forward with (now abandoned) alternate cuts in the first place: the Black Swan director, who gave up final cut on his film in exchange for a reported $160m (£96m) budget, was seemingly in no mood to compromise.

"Noah is the least biblical biblical film ever made," Aronofsky is quoted as saying. "I don't give a fuck about the test scores! My films are outside the scores. Ten men in a room trying to come up with their favourite ice cream are going to agree on vanilla. I'm the Rocky Road guy."

The New Yorker piece suggests Noah is far from the successor to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which took $611m worldwide in 2004 after evangelicals flocked to see it, that Paramount had apparently been hoping for. Aronofksy's movie is said to feature a segment showing how Darwinian evolution transformed amoebas into apes, as well as what the director describes as "a huge [environmental] statement in the film … about the coming flood from global warming".

Earlier reports suggested religious audiences at test screenings for Aronofsky's cut disliked "dark" scenes in which Russell Crowe's Noah gets drunk and ponders taking extreme measures to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth. Many complained that the film inaccurately represented the biblical story upon which it is based, despite the fact that a scene in which Noah has one too many after finding land with his Ark does appear in the Bible.

Paramount now appears to have given up on its efforts to market Noah to Christians, with the studio issuing a statement last month making clear that the movie is not intended as a direct translation. It also looks likely to be banned across large swaths of the Middle East and parts of north Africa for contravening Islamic rules on the depiction of prophets.

Aronofsky's film, starring Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson and Ray Winstone, hits the US on 28 March, with UK cinemas set to follow on 4 April.

Ben Child

What's going on with global warming and Antarctica's growing sea ice? | Graham Readfearn

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 01:04 AM PDT

How melting ice sheets and increased winds could be behind Antarctica's apparent paradox of growing sea ice in a warming world

As every good climate science denialist knows, the fact that there's a bit more sea ice in Antarctica is proof enough that global warming is probably a load of old Adélie penguin poo.

So when a ship carrying climate scientists on an expedition got stuck in that sea ice over Christmas it was time to sharpen the blogging knives with those stones of irony.

"Warmists trapped by irony off Antarctica," wrote News Corporation's Andrew Bolt.

"Global Warming's Glorious Ship of Fools" said The Spectator magazine.

"This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop," Tweeted Donald Trump.

Bolt told his readers the expedition, led by Professor Chris Turney, "apparently hadn't realised sea ice there had grown over three decades to record levels" despite the fact that the expedition clearly did know about the conditions in the region they were about to explore.

On the expedition website, one of the nine stated scientific goals was to "explore changes in ocean circulation caused by the growth of extensive fast ice and its impact on life in Commonwealth Bay".

"How we laughed", wrote Bolt, who "apparently hadn't realised" that the exhibition in fact had "realised" that sea ice was expanding.

How ironic.

Often when it's pointed out that Arctic sea ice is rapidly melting, the climate change contrarianites (or if we'd like to take the short route to eliciting a Nazi analogy, we can use the term 'deniers') will step bravely forth with data from Antarctica.

Antarctica is a vast continent that's almost double the size of Australia, almost one and a half Canadas or 60 Great Britains.

So what's going on down there?

Antarctic vs Arctic Sea Ice

The Tasmania-based Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre has just released a new "position analysis" of the brain-achingly complex issue of southern hemisphere sea ice.

It's got a lot of science in it.

Antarctica's sea ice goes through dramatic swings from year to year.

Between September and October, the amount of sea ice can reach as much as 19 million square kilometres – an area one and half times the size of the continent. By the end of the summer melt season, there's only about three million square kilometres left.

The annual change, the ACE CRC reports, is "one of the biggest natural changes" observed anywhere on Earth.

The ACE CRC's report says that since 1979, the amount of sea ice coverage around Antarctica has been rising by about 285,0000 square kilometres every decade.

By contrast, the Arctic has been losing 1.8 million square kilometres per decade.

But Antarctica appears to be a much more complex beast than the Arctic, where sea ice is on a downward trend pretty much everywhere as the region warms at roughly twice the global average.

For example, the ACE CRC report says that in one area of Antarctica – the Bellingshausen Sea – the rate of sea ice loss is actually greater than the fastest melting regions of the Arctic.

In the Ross Sea, the area of frozen ocean has been going up by five per cent per decade.

Complex changes

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, Dr Jan Lieser, lead author of the ACE CRC report, told me the increase in sea ice is consistent with the changes in a warming world.

The sea ice is sitting at the interface of the ocean and the atmosphere, and so it gets a double-whammy effect. We actually understand the physics of this quite well. It is because of the warming that we can see the sea ice increasing at the moment.

Speaking from Hobart and an international gathering of scientists to discuss polar sea ice, Dr Lieser said the picture of change in the Antarctic was complex.

But he said increased wind, wave and storm activity in the Antarctic helped to stir up the waters, creating ridges and rifts that helps sea ice to thicken.

Professor Ian Simmonds, of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth sciences, also told journalists that while it might seem paradoxical to have sea ice growing in a warming world, scientists understood the mechanisms behind it.

He said an increase in westerly winds across the continent which were linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions were helping to create ideal conditions for ice to form, particularly in those areas where there have been marked rises in ocean ice.

But the paradoxes in the Antarctic don't stop there.

There's also a suggestion that a big contributor to the increasing sea ice could be the melting of the massive Antarctic ice sheet in the west of the continent.

According to the last IPCC report, between 2002 and 2011 the Antarctic ice sheet was likely losing ice at a rate of 147 billion tonnes a year – up from 30 billion tonnes a year over the previous decade.

A study published last year in the journal Nature Geoscience, concluded that all this added fresh water creates ideal conditions for Antarctic sea ice to form.

But the ACE CRC report notes that the current modest trend in rising Antarctic sea ice will likely be short lived.

The melting and break-up of glaciers, the changes in snowfall and changes in the air temperatures will all play a role in the future, says the report.

Overall, computer modeling suggests that Antarctic sea ice will decline in the future, but how it will effect different parts of the vast continent and the its rich ecosystems is very much an area of live science.

So while some commentators prefer to rely on their intuition to form a view, the scientists travel to the world's most challenging environment to get answers.

Graham Readfearn

MH370: Malaysia Airlines plane search continues - live

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 12:57 AM PDT

Malaysian authorities expand search area to include a region west of the takeoff point

Paul Farrell

Lay down your needles, knitters: penguins are covered for time being

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 12:51 AM PDT

Penguin Foundation's call for little jumpers was not a hoax, despite claims, but there are now plenty to go around

Helen Davidson

Telstra published details online of 15,000 customers in privacy breach

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 12:39 AM PDT

Company fined $10,000 after two reports into data breach find personal details of 15,775 people were published online

Bridie Jabour

Oscar Pistorius trial, day seven - in tweets

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 12:39 AM PDT

Live updates as the trial of Olympic and Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp continues

• Pistorius vomits as Steenkamp wounds described

Live tweets from David Smith, the Guardian's Africa correspondent

David Smith

Call for 'year off' so schools can search their souls | Joanna Moorhead

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 12:00 AM PDT

A new report says teachers need more space to help children grow into 'rounded' individuals

There aren't many headteachers who would tell a meeting of prospective parents that it would be fine for their child to get a B grade rather than an A, but Gary Lewis says he has no qualms about doing just that.

"I do it every year," says the principal of Kings Langley secondary school in Hertfordshire. "I'm not telling parents I'd be happy with their child getting a B if they were predicted an A. But what I do say is, rather than your child slogging their heart out, I'd prefer it if he or she spent time developing leadership skills or doing charity work, even if that meant not getting a higher grade."

The point is that education isn't all about results. And the strange thing is, says Lewis, he's never had anyone raise an objection. "Parents get it: they understand how important it is for their children to be rounded individuals with a developed moral compass."

Parents may get it, but for a long time there's been a widespread feeling that policymakers in the education world do not. This week a report is published calling for more of what its authors say matters most – not exam results and league tables, but the spiritual, moral, social and cultural aspects of education or, in a nutshell, the "soul" of a school.

"For far too long now, headteachers have been distracted from these aspects of their pupils' education by constant considerations around results, inspections and protocols," says Joe Hallgarten, one of the report's authors and head of education at the Royal Society of Arts, which was behind it. "But SMSC (spiritual, moral, social and cultural) is the very lifeblood of schooling. It provides young people with a set of characteristics and capabilities that enable them to cope with life.

"The overriding finding of our investigation is that, at precisely the time when SMSC might have most to contribute, it is losing prominence and being given neither space nor high value."

Hallgarten says that what goes into giving a school a "soul" actually helps pupils to achieve highly – in other words, it's not just focusing on results as such that gives the best exam outcomes.

Gary Lewis couldn't agree more: when he arrived at Kings Langley in 2002, he says, it was in the bottom 3% of schools in terms of achievement. "What we decided to concentrate on was building character. I said to parents, what I want is for your child to leave this school feeling confident and being resilient," he says. Today academic standards are twice what they were, and the school is oversubscribed. "In our school we hammer home the importance of stickability, empathy and self-regulation," he says. "They are fundamental, and much more so than results."

He believes the sorts of skills Ofsted might regard as "soft" – sociability, personal skills – could in the long term be the very attributes a young person needs for genuine, rounded success in life. "I'm highly critical of Ofsted; it has raised standards, but it has lost the plot in the way it has put all the emphasis on exam results."

Lewis is one of a number of heads, academics and other educationalists whose views were sought for the report, Schools with Soul: A New Approach to Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education. Its key recommendation is that the year 2015-16 should be designated a "year of reflection", with no big policy changes or new Ofsted frameworks, to allow staff and pupils to focus on deeper values and goals.

In addition, the report's authors say, there should be more consistency and rigour in inspecting SMSC provision in schools and a DfE working party should be set up to develop clear guidelines.

Guy Shears, principal of RSA-sponsored Arrow Vale academy in Redditch, was another headteacher to contribute. He would love a respite from the onslaught of announcements. Some give hardly any time for heads to react: the recent announcement about changes to policy on early entry on GCSEs was "unhelpful" as it meant heads had only a few weeks to change direction; similarly Ofsted guidance had been reissued three times since September. "It's impossible to keep up," he says.

Planning of the right content is crucial. "It's not enough to leave SMSC to chance in school life. It needs to be properly planned for, and programmes need to be designed to, for example, develop resilience, and to ensure that the pupils most in need are directed towards them."

One of the biggest worries the report voices is that SMSC provision is "in danger of moving to the margins of all but the most confident schools". And of the four different aspects of SMSC, it's the spiritual dimension that is most at risk of neglect.

"At a time when the number of adolescents in the UK diagnosed with depression has almost doubled in recent decades ... there is a strong case for protecting spaces for spiritual development because many aspects of spirituality, particularly practices like meditation, but also and most simply a richer experience of life's meaning, can serve to promote wellbeing," it says.

Patrick Garton, assistant headteacher at Cherwell school in Oxford, says spirituality is "much harder to tackle" in a non-faith school such as his. At Cherwell, he says, new pupils visit several different places of worship in Oxford to introduce them to the different faith traditions, and sixth-formers visit Auschwitz each year. "Some people think education is all about spreadsheets, but the truth is that you never get a child to do better unless you engage him or her as a human being," he says.

SMSC provision is particularly scant after the age of 14, says the report, because of exams "leaving little space to focus on wider development". And it points out that the narrowing of focus after 14 is at odds with the policy in other nations around the world, where a broadening-out of interests is much more common.

Joanna Moorhead

Canned hunting of white lions is despicable – it's time we marched to stop it | Jerome Flynn

Posted: 11 Mar 2014 12:00 AM PDT

Jerome Flynn: Gunning down tamed lions in is a cold-blooded slaughter that South Africa's president must stop

Sleepless in the Senate: Democrats pull all-nighter for climate change – live

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:57 PM PDT

28 Democrats have signed on to an all-night speechathon to try to push Congress to take up climate change

Suzanne Goldenberg

Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten battle over what's best for Western Australia

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:57 PM PDT

Abbott aims at Labor's carbon tax stand and Shorten returns fire, demanding no cuts to health and education

Daniel Hurst

Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O in top slot for FM radio ratings

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:51 PM PDT

2DayFM, which made millions from the pair's popularity, has seen its audience plummet since their defection to Kiis

Amanda Meade

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have turned back, say authorities

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:48 PM PDT

Search area widened over sea and land, while Thai authorities play down significance of two passengers with stolen passports

Tania Branigan

Adelaide festival 2014: Lola's Pergola - in pictures

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:21 PM PDT

Adelaide festival's pop-up nightspot Lola's Pergola emerged on the banks of the Torrens in the city centre almost two weeks ago. With degustation dinners from top Australian chefs and DJs playing late into the night, photographer Alicia Canter enjoyed some evenings down by the river

Alicia Canter

Former midwife found guilty of misconduct and fined $20,000

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:10 PM PDT

Lisa Barrett, who was involved in three home births in which the babies died, is banned from practising again

When the sun comes out so do the Londoners to warm their cockles

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:02 PM PDT

When spring temperatures reach the heady heights of 18 degrees, the locals start shedding their kit quicker than a footballer after a championship goal

Myf Warhurst

New British woodlands to mark first world war centenary

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 11:00 PM PDT

Woodland Trust to create four new woodlands and plant millions of trees as a memorial to the great war

Plans to mark the centenary of the first world war by creating four new woodlands and planting millions of trees have been unveiled by the Woodland Trust.

Four flagship woodlands – one each in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – will be planted as part of the £12m project to provide a memorial to the great war that should last for hundreds of years.

More than 3 million free trees will also be provided for schools, communities and youth groups to help create hundreds of woods that will stand as a legacy to those who died, fought or lost loved ones between 1914 and 1918.

The Woodland Trust announced that it planned to plant the English Centenary Wood on a 640-acre site near Epsom, Surrey.

The site at Langley Vale, which is bigger than the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, will be home to more than 200,000 trees, linking up pockets of existing woodland.

Sites have also been identified for the centenary woodlands in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and members of the public will be able to dedicate trees to ancestors at the woods.

A thousand acres of woodland will be created by the four flagship sites.

The Trust said it hoped land owners and communities across the country would also get involved in creating hundreds of other woods, containing millions of trees.

Woodland Trust project director Karl Mitchell said: "The trees planted during the course of this £12m project will stand for hundreds of years, providing a lasting tribute to all those involved in the first world war.

"We hope to see many thousands of people getting involved by planting their own tribute or dedicating trees in memory of loved ones."

He added: "At a time when our woodland cover is so low compared to other countries, planting trees now is more important than ever.

"As well as representing enormous strength and bravery shown by the nation during the first world war, the trees that are planted during the course of the project will help strengthen our natural landscape, increasing its resilience to the threats posed by pests and diseases."

The Woodland Trust will deliver the Centenary Woods project in partnership with Sainsbury's, whose chief executive, Justin King, said planting trees and creating woodlands was a fitting tribute to the sacrifices made during the first world war.

"I especially think of my late great grandfather, Charles Robert Avery, who was a Bombardier in the first world war and it is pleasing to know that I can ensure his contribution will be permanently remembered, along with many others," he said.

The first trees will be planted this autumn and the project will continue until autumn 2018.

Student shot dead at Venezuela protest

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 10:47 PM PDT

Day of clashes in San Cristóbal between government troops, militias and demonstrators culminates in killing

Australian police declined to interview 'tortured' Sri Lankan asylum seeker

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 10:39 PM PDT

Exclusive: Cable from high commission in Colombo says AFP declined offer of interview to avoid 'interfering'

Oliver Laughland