Maple syrup makers go high-tech with wireless monitoring

Producers in the historic industry can now use their iPhones to check on their operations and spot leaks

Maple syrup producer Donnie Richards poses with sap lines on a maple tree and his wireless radio unit box. Photograph: Holly Ramer/AP

Maple syrup production has come a long way from metal buckets hung on trees, but even high-tech operations have had to rely on old-fashioned foot patrols to fix a common problem – leaks.
The tubes that draw sap from trees straight to sugar houses often get pulled down or bent by falling limbs or chewed by critters, meaning sugar-makers spend hours and sometimes days stomping through snowy woods to find and fix problems – a big time-waster in a sugaring season that lasts just a few weeks.
But now sugar-makers are harnessing new technology to keep the precious sap flowing.
Meadowbrook Maple Syrup in January installed a monitoring system that is already paying off. Designed to help mid-to-large scale syrup producers keep an electronic eye their sap vacuum lines, the Tap Track system consists of solar battery-powered radio units strapped to trees, with each unit monitoring the pressure on a half-dozen lines. The data is transmitted to a computer or smartphone, where it shows up as a map with green dots indicating lines with good sap flow and red dots indicating leaks. Users can even get text messages alerting them to problems.
"I think it's the thing of the future. I really do," owner Donnie Richards said.
In the past, Richards and his crew would have to walk the woods of Milton listening and looking for leaks, which was time-consuming.
"And if you didn't find the leak that day, you didn't get sap off that part of the woods all day long," he said.
Now he uses his iPhone to check the system and can immediately see a leak and when it is repaired.
Richards' operation includes about 5,000 taps, with about 18 miles of tubing spread out over more than 100 acres. The new system costs $1 to $2 per tap, but inventor Jason Gagne said the return on investment can be seen in one season. He said the test site of 20,000 taps in Ontario resulted in a more than 5% increase in sap collection, or an extra $15,000.
Gagne, who used to spend days on end patrolling his own sugar bush in Swanton, came up with the idea several years ago, teaming up with Canadian sugar-maker Doug Thompson to develop the product.
The University of Vermont's Proctor Maple Research Center is using a similar remote monitoring system for the first time this season, as the technology becomes more commercially available. Smartrek, produced by a Quebec-based company, also monitors sap lines for leaks and provides the information immediately on a smartphone or tablet.
Nationally, maple syrup production totaled 3.25m gallons last year. Vermont led with 1.3m gallons, followed by New York, Maine, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Each of those gallons of syrup required sugar-makers to collect 40 gallons of sap.
It takes warm days and cold nights for sap to flow, so the conditions are just right for syrup-making for only about 4 to 6 weeks. And cold weather has already pushed back Vermont's season this year. But Proctor researchers expect the new system to make their operation more efficient and productive. It will also give sugar-makers, who are prone to staying up late to boil sap down to syrup, a few extra hours of sleep, said Brian Stowe, Proctor's sugaring operations manager.
"We find that a lot of sugar-makers get sleep deprived during the season, this again they can take a quick look from their house and then they can go to bed and get some good sleep and not have to worry," Stowe said.
The ideal system would have a sensor at the end of each of the main lines. But that can be expensive for some sugar-makers – about $200 per Smartrek vacuum sensor and $400 for a tank level sensor – so some sugar-makers may start with a smaller number depending on what they want to monitor.
"Whether it's mine or Tap Track of any of the other systems, the technology is fantastic," said Eric Sorkin, of Thunder Basin Maple Works in Cambridge, who was so impressed with Smartrek that he became a distributor.
In the past, Sorkin said, the only way to increase production was to make sure sap is flowing in the system, and that meant lots of man-hours checking each line.
"With these remote monitoring systems, we can effectively lower our labor costs and increase our production," he said.
Gagne described an incident last year when his system showed a leak where a porcupine had cut the line. Just as workers had repaired the break, Tap Track showed another leak.
"You could follow the porcupine prints right to the next line where he'd cut it," he said. "Otherwise, it would have been a few more days before we found those two lines."

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Sky chief believes closed music service could have rivalled Spotify

Jeremy Darroch says he regrets closure of Sky Songs, which was similar to model of Apple's iTunes

Jeremy Darroch, chief executive of Sky, says it was not his decision to close Sky Songs Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

Sky chief executive Jeremy Darroch has admitted that one of his biggest regrets is closing Sky Songs, the ill-fated music service he now believes could have rivalled Spotify.
BSkyB launched the music subscription service, which bore hallmarks of the models adopted by Apple's iTunes and a then much smaller scale Spotify, in 2009 with much fanfare and the ambitious aim of signing up "millions of homes".
However, a little over a year later the satellite broadcaster pulled the plug, saying it had been "unable to reach a large enough customer base."
"A couple of years ago we launched a great service called Sky Songs," said Darroch, speaking at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. "I look at what Spotify are doing today, it is doing really well, and Sky Songs at the time was very, very similar to that. We got out of it too early. I kind of regret that. We could have built a good business."
Darroch said it was not his decision to close the service, and that he wished he had backed Sky Songs for longer, but that at the time the company was also focusing on projects such as the roll-out of high-definition services to its 10 million TV customers.
Long-serving Glamour editor Jo Elvin, also a panellist in the session, admitted that her toughest business moment had been the arrival of a flood of weekly magazines into the women's market that threatened the livelihood of the monthlies almost a decade ago.
"About 2005, when weekly magazines started to become a solid force of competition, there was a lot of talk how it was all over for the monthlies," she said. "I had people queuing to tell me that. It was an important moment for me. That is the time to knuckle down and focus on what are your strengths, what is it the magazine does well. The minute we stopped thinking we have to try and be a weekly somehow that is when it all clicked. It is about holding your nerve".

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Alleged 'Craigslist killer' claims two potential victims failed to show up

Miranda Barbour says two other men responded to online post 19-year-old accused of luring man to death in Pennsylvani

Miranda Barbour, who has claimed to be a serial killer, being led by a policeman in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Mike Staugaitis/AP

A woman at the centre of the so-called “Craigslist killer ” case, in which she is accused of luring a man to his death through the classified ad website, claims two other men responded to her online post but failed to show up to their planned meetings, according to a jailhouse interview published on Sunday.
Miranda Barbour, 19, who in an earlier interview said she had killed at least 22 people, named Big Lake, Alaska; Mexico Beach, Florida; and Raleigh, North Carolina, as places where authorities might find evidence, according to the article published by the Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
"They are looking for full bodies," Barbour told reporter Francis Scarcella. "They won't find any. But they will find body parts."
Barbour and her husband, 22-year-old Elytte Barbour, have pleaded not guilty to the stabbing and strangling in November of Troy LaFerrara, 42, whose body was found dumped in an alley in Sunbury. If convicted, they face the possibility of the death penalty.
Prosecutors say the couple used Craigslist to lure LaFerrara to a meeting, offering sex, in a shopping mall parking lot. In an interview with the Daily Item in February, Barbour said she was a member of a satanic cult.
Authorities have expressed scepticism about her claims of being a serial killer, noting her petite size and a lack of corroborating evidence.
In the interview published on Sunday, Barbour said she was supposed to meet up with two other men who responded to her Craigslist ad, but they did not arrive for their dates and therefore escaped being murdered.
"I tried it a few times but it never worked out," Barbour was quoted as saying in the interview at the state's maximum-security women's prison in Muncy earlier this week.
"I knew we were going to do this since the day we met, and we tried, but the others just didn't show up," she said.
Barbour said she dumped body parts of one victim in Big Lake in southern Alaska, about 13 miles from Wasilla where she once lived.
Pieces of another body were left in Mexico Beach, Florida, while another body, apparently intact, was dumped along Interstate 95 near Raleigh, North Carolina, she said.
According to the Daily Item, police in all three locations said they were investigating but knew of no unsolved murders from the times Barbour described. The three police departments could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
The Northumberland county, Pennsylvania, district attorney's office and the public defender representing Barbour could not immediately be reached for comment.

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UK should consider e-voting, elections watchdog urges

Electoral Commission calls for urgent reforms to engage younger voters who are turning out in ever declining numbers

Jenny Watson, chair of the Electorial Commission. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

The UK should look at allowing internet voting in elections as the current system risks appearing alien and outdated to an increasingly disenfranchised younger generation, the election watchdog has said.
Launching a review of modern voting, the head of the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, warned that the state of the electoral system was "not an issue that can stay on the slow track any longer".The long-term trend of falling voter turnout was particularly acute among the young, she said.
Watson said the election watchdog would examine a range of ways to make voting more accessible, including the "radical" option of internet voting, as well as US-style same-day registration for those who have forgotten to sign up to the electoral roll.
"Whether it is the ability to register to vote on the day of the election, or voters being able to use any polling station in their constituency, or the introduction of advance voting, or even more radical options such as e-voting , we plan to look at a variety of options, assessing how they will help citizens engage more effectively," she said.
Watson said online registration was welcome but did not add up to an ambitious, comprehensive modernisation strategy.
With some polls showing around 76% of pensioners voting compared with about 44% of eligible under-25s, the Electoral Commission said more could be done to make the system more reflective of wider society.
"By doing so," Watson said, "we could by proxy help address some of the issues with turnout, particular amongst an increasingly disenfranchised younger generation."
"Unless our electoral system keeps pace with the way many voters live the rest of their lives – where the way they bank and the way they shop has been transformed – it risks being seen as increasingly alien and outdated, particularly to young voters as they use it for the first time."
She said critics should not see change as a move towards making the electoral system like the TV talent show The X Factor, as society must make sure voting is seen as a "serious and important civic act".
Stressing the importance of a balance between accessibility and protection against fraud, Watson added: "There needs to be a proper focus on how the system can keep that balance as well as changing to help address the declining levels of participation that anyone that cares about elections should be worried about.
"Electoral registration will make the system more secure whilst ensuring that each individual is responsible for their own vote, replacing the outdated 19th-century concept that a single 'head of the household' is responsible for registering everyone."
The government is already introducing online voter registration, but Labour is looking at further measures including allowing people to register to vote on the same day.
Some experts fear that large numbers of people will drop off the electoral register and will have to sign up again when the government moves to individual, as opposed to household, voter registration this summer.
The Electoral Reform Society has warned that this number could sharply increase with the introduction of individual electoral registration, saying the proposals, if implemented badly, could have a "devastating impact on British democracy by alienating millions of voters right before the 2015 general election".
However, the Cabinet Office insists the new system will make registering to vote more convenient.
It has said: "Individual electoral registration, which was originally put into legislation by the previous government, is an important change that will make sure we have an electoral register in which we can all have confidence, reducing the risk of fraud. The introduction of online electoral registration in June this year is a major step forward and will make registering to vote more convenient."
Boosting electoral registration is just one aspect of tackling the problem of declining democratic participation, particularly among the young, which is worrying politicians from the former Labour home secretary David Blunkett to Chloe Smith, the former coalition minister in charge of electoral reform.
In December, the Guardian published ICM research showing nearly half of Britons say they are angry with politics and politicians, in a survey analysing the disconnection between British people and their democracy.
When Harold Wilson won the 1964 election, more than three-quarters of people cast their vote and turnout was roughly equal across the generations. But, according to data from Ipsos Mori, at the last election 76% of over-65s were still voting while only 44% of those aged 18-24 were doing so.

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Kirsten Stewart, cute kids and death: how headlines try to hook you in

Search engines and social media may have hyped up how stories are presented – but are readers growing immune?

When Kirsten Stewart wrote a poem, hyperbole was added to the headline to try to make the story more attractive. Photograph: Rex Features

To trace journalism's erratic transition to the digital world, you only have to look at how dramatically headlines have changed – and why.
Throughout the print era, pictures, standfirsts, opening paragraphs and several other factors helped lure you into a story. Online, headlines have to work far harder on their own, often competing against dozens of others on busy homepages, search results, and most importantly, social media.
How compelling headlines are is now the biggest factor in whether stories are a hit or a flop. No wonder we've started to 'pimp' them up out of all recognition, like a boy racer's crudely painted Ford Escort tearing up a motorway screeching for attention.
After initially replicating traditional news, tabloid or magazine headlines, we first entered the age of SEO. Ostensibly a stripped down, facts-first style of writing, search engine optimisation was really about tickling Google's probing algorithms with keywords to top the site's results pages.
This led to much handwringing on the behalf of journalists who felt their creativity stifled (see also: opening paragraphs). For a while, we all felt like machines, rather than writers. It also, on occasion, baffled readers. I remember once being told that my job, in the event of a celebrity death, was to include both the words "dead" and "dies" in the same headline to cover any search term people many use. The odd, clunky syntax that followed – "Michael Jackson dies: singer found dead in home" – prompted users to question why we were ramming home the morbid fact quite so crudely.
When social media began to replace search engines as the main way people found content, the shackles of SEO were largely shrugged off and what emerged were "superlative headlines". A sort of evolution of tabloid sensationalism, they focused on being earnest and positive. The idea wasn't to shock readers from the newsstand but cosy up to them from their Facebook feed.
We called these superlatives headlines "click bait", and among the media brands that grew out of the internet age, they seemed enjoyably informal, ironic and playful – primarily because their stories were all informal, ironic and playful anyway.
But then we all tried to join in, and that's where "click bait" began to grate and misfire. In February, when the actress Kirsten Stewart published a self-penned poem in a magazine, a UK paper (not this one) published the story on its website with the headline: "Kristen Stewart: Twilight star writes worst poem of all time for Marie Claire".
Stewart's poem – though hardly Sylvia Plath – was of course far from "the worst poem of all time" (as anyone who has attended an open-mic night will quickly attest). The hyperbole was inserted to generate the clicks that "Twilight star writes a poem" simply would not, and many found it jarringly off-brand for the newspaper.
Soon, click bait seemed new and fun but insincere and manipulative. Words like "amazing", "astonishing" or "greatest" seemed to lose any real meaning, or as UsVsTh3m editor Rob Manuel put it wryly on Twitter the other day: "Despite so many promises I can't think of one instance an article on the internet has blown my mind."
More recently, websites like Upworthy have begun to take the superlative approach one step further to pioneer, with great success, what you might call the "emotionally manipulative" headline.
Their "The Things This 4-Year-Old Is Doing Are Cute. The Reason He's Doing Them Is Heartbreaking." is a good example of how far the humble headline has come from describing the basics facts of a story to promising the reader – almost demanding of them – a strong emotional reaction to it, as if we're all predestined to respond to it in exactly the same way to whatever we read.
Mercifully, the traditional news press have resisted following this particular trend so far, even while being aware that Upworthy articles were viewed and shared hundreds of millions of times last year.
One reason is simply good taste. It's one thing for the Times or the Guardian to get a little less stuffy, quite another to publish "How Putin Has Threatened The Ukraine Will Shock You, The Possible Consequences For International Diplomacy Will Scare You Half To Death!".
But perhaps – and this may yet prove wishful thinking – it's because readers have grown more immune to overcooked headlines that often leaves them feeling cheated, in the same way they bored of SEO headlines, or figured out picture galleries of 100 barely distinguishable photos were really just cynical attempts to milk them for page impressions. Just as many people seem to roll their eyes and shrug at Upworthy's over the top headlines, or indeed parody them, as enthusiastically click or share. We're getting less gullible about what lies on the other side of the internet's casual promises.
For the media, which so far in the digital age has often resembled a pack of puppies all chasing whichever bright new ball rolls into the garden next, this can only be a good thing. It's easy to measure the clicks you generate, less the people you've annoyed.

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Microsoft wins battle over ads attacking Google privacy standards

Advertising Standards Authority agrees Gmail's scanning of email contents to target ads sets it apart from Outlook.com

Microsoft's radio ad is a continuation of the company's ongoing criticism of Google's privacy standards, including its Scroogled campaign

The UK advertising watchdog has cleared a campaign by Microsoft attacking the privacy standards used by Google's Gmail email service.
An ad campaign promoting Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft's rival email service, criticised Gmail for scanning the contents of users' emails for commercial purposes.
The radio ad opens with a sentence of seemingly indecipherable language, the type Microsoft cheekily claims Gmail users will have to adopt if they want to stop Google from scanning their messages to glean personal information to sell to advertisers.
The ad continues: "Pig Latin may be hard to understand, but you probably need it if you use Gmail, because Gmail scans every word of your emails to sell ads."
The Advertising Standards Authority received two complaints challenging whether the ad was misleading because they believed that Microsoft was no better and also also scanned the contents of the all emails.
Microsoft stood by its claim that Outlook.com offered greater privacy options than Gmail, arguing that it only undertook "protective" scanning of emails for viruses and spam.
The ASA said that it was "standard practice" for email providers to scan for viruses and spam, while the criticism of Google's Gmail related to scanning email contents to target ads.
"Because the ad made clear that the privacy claims were in relation to ad targeting, which Outlook.com does not carry out, we therefore concluded that the ad was not misleading," said the ASA.
The ASA said that Microsoft's claims did not breach UK rules relating to misleading advertising.

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Danny Dyer's Twitter rows land him in Barney Rubble with the BBC

Danny Dyer has been told to use his loaf and try to avoid any Barney Rubble on Twitter. Photograph: Barcroft Media

Danny Dyer is known as much for running off his north and south (mouth, for anyone who's not a pwopah geezah) as he is for his film roles and it appears BBC bosses aren't all that happy about it. The EastEnders actor has had a sit-down meeting with the show's producers over his Twitter battles, but the Daily Star reports him as saying it's because he's not a 'posh boy' like Benedict Cumberbatch. "They're taking a risk with me and that's what is going to make it exciting." On Cumberbatch, he said: 'There's definitely some snobbery. You've got actors like Cumberbatch, a great actor, but he's a posh boy playing posh boys. He does it well and doesn't get mocked for that. I play working-class people and I get mocked for it." It's toff at the top, Danny.

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Peter Carey to tackle computer hacking and international politics in new novel

Booker prize-winner will turn his sights towards the 'cyber underworld' and hacktivism in Amnesia, out in November

Could not be more timely' … Peter Carey. Photograph: Flora Hanitijo

Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice for his ventures into historical fiction, True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda. Now the acclaimed Australian author is set to address a rather more modern situation in his new novel, Amnesia: the "cyber underworld", with a story of a hacker who unlocks the doors of thousands of prisons across Australia and the US.
Due out in November, Amnesia was announced by publisher Faber this morning. Opening in 2010 – "It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time" – it sees a worm sent into the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons by a young Australian hacker. The worm goes on to infect jails across America, "because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations".
"Wherever it went, it travelled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE," writes Carey as the novel opens.
"Has a young Australian woman declared cyber war on the United States? Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia's harsh immigration policies? Did America suffer collateral damage? Is she innocent? Can she be saved?" asked the publisher as it unveiled the novel, adding that Carey's books have sold more than one million copies in the UK alone.
Editor Angus Cargill called Amnesia "a thrilling and witty journey to the place where the cyber underworld of radicals and hackers collides with international power politics", and said it "could not be more timely".
Carey's Booker-winning novels take place in more distant times: Oscar and Lucinda is set in 1864, as Oxford seminarian Oscar Hopkins meets Sydney heiress Lucinda Leplastrier on the boat to Australia. True History of the Kelly Gang, meanwhile, allows the outlaw Ned Kelly, hung in 1880, to speak for himself: "I lost my own father at 12 yrs of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in hell if I speak false."
Carey has set books in current times: his most recent novel, The Chemistry of Tears, takes place in London 2010 – with a back story in 1850s Germany – while His Illegal Self also has a modern setting. The author is best known for weaving history into his fiction, however, from his retelling of Great Expectations, Jack Maggs, to Parrot and Olivier in America, in which a French aristocrat sets sail for the New World

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Obama: US must 'win back the trust of ordinary citizens' over data collection

President confirms plans to end NSA bulk telephone collection, and admits revelations have shaken faith in US intelligence

Barack Obama in The Hague. 'There's a tendency to be sceptical of government, and to be sceptical of US intelligence services,' he said. Photograph: Sean Gallup/AP

Barack Obama confirmed on Tuesday that the US plans to end the systematic collection of Americans’ telephone data, admitting the disclosures had shaken the trust of the country’s intelligence and pledging to address the concerns of privacy advocates.
Under plans to be put forward by the Obama administration in the next few days, the NSA would end the so-called bulk collection of telephone records, and instead would be required to seek a new kind of court order to search data held by telecommunications companies.
The proposals come nine months after the practice was first disclosed by the Guardian, based on leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Obama conceded on Tuesday that the revelations had caused trust in the US to plunge around the world.
“We have got to win back the trust not just of governments, but, more importantly, of ordinary citizens. And that's not going to happen overnight, because there's a tendency to be sceptical of government and to be sceptical of the US intelligence services,” Obama said at a news conference in The Hague, where world leaders were meeting to discuss their response to the crisis in Crimea.
Legislators in the House of Representatives unveiled a separate bill on Tuesday that would significantly curtail the practice of bulk collection but lower the legal standards for the collection of such information. The House proposal would not necessarily require a judge's prior approval to access phone or email data.
Neither the White House nor the House intelligence committee proposal would require telecommunications firms to keep such records any longer than the current 18-month maximum, a significant shift away from the five years during which they are currently held by NSA. The moves represent a significant overhaul of the secret mass collection practices of the past 13 years, as exposed by Snowden.
But under the White House proposals, the National Security Agency would still be able to gain access to the data from thousands of phone calls from a single court order. Phone companies would be required to provide phone records up to two "hops" – or degrees of separation – from a phone number suspected of wrongdoing

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Airliners should broadcast location every 15 minutes, says Inmarsat expert

Satellite company describes use of Doppler calculations and 'burst frequency offset' to determine fate of missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 in Indian Ocean

Potential paths of Malaysian Airlines MH370: more frequent position reporting would have reduced search area substantially. Photograph: Guim

Every commercial airliner should be upgraded to transmit its position to satellites every 15 minutes, particularly for flights which go out of radar contact as they cross the Indian or Pacific oceans, an expert from Inmarsat says.
Had that been in place, the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 would have been substantially narrowed to perhaps a quarter of its current size.
Inmarsat, which analysed the eight satellite "pings" from the missing MH370 to determine that it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, already offers a service which costs $1 per hour to provide rapid updates. This service were used by Air France, and helped rescue services determine where flight 447 crashed into the sea off Brazil.
"It's nothing to do with the age of the aircraft," said Chris McLaughlin, senior vice-president of external affairs at Inmarsat. "Ships are already required by the International Maritime Organisation to have long-range identification and tracking, and are required to report their position every six hours. They're moving much slower than an aircraft – and if you're in a fast-moving aircraft then when you get over the Indian or Pacific ocean then if you don't report your position, effectively you're off the network."
Radar systems do not beyond the horizon from land.
McLaughlin said that the International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO), which has the power to make the use of more frequent reporting systems mandatory, had been considering whether to make them mandatory for civil airliners in 2009 but had not reached a decision. "Like every multinational organisation, it moves very slowly," he said.
Nobody from ICAO was available for comment.
Aviation experts said that it was likely that the plane was on autopilot when it crashed. "A single pilot would be unable to manually fly for seven hours without autopilot assistance," Paul Mossman, a former RAF pilot who has worked as an air traffic controller and on the design of Kuala Lumpur airport.
"A crew of two co-operating with rest breaks could achieve the task." Manual unattended flight would not be possible because the airplane would lose "trim" – the ideal setting for flight – as it consumed fuel. "Any significant turbulence could disturb the flight stability and this would over seven hours inevitably lead to a crash."
A strong theory over the past week has been that a fire in MH370's hold or nose wheel led to the crew and passengers being overwhelmed, and that the pilots set the autopilot after turning towards the nearest airport to make an emergency landing. Without the "black box" with the cockpit voice recording and other flight data, it will be impossible to know.

How it was done: the Doppler shift

Inmarsat's engineers determined the likeliest flight path of MH370 by taking the data from eight satellite "pings" with its Inmarsat-3F1 satellite, launched in 1997 and set in a geostationary orbit off the coast of Africa. Its "footprint" allows it to see the whole of Africa, Asia and most of Australia; the whole of MH370's flight would have remained inside that space.

Inmarsat-3 F1 is in geostationary orbit and has a 'footprint' that covers Africa and much of Asia and Australia. Photograph: n2yo.com

Inmarsat's team initially passed on the data from the total of eight hourly "pings" from the onboard transponder, which is separate of the built-in ACARS system in the cockpit, on 9 March. When it became apparent that the airliner had not been found, they carried out further analysis of the signal. Each "ping" consists of identification data sent back and forth between the plane and satellite; each is formally called a "handshake".
They had already determined that the pings offered two potential directions for the flight, one on a northerly arc and the other on a southerly one. It wasn't possible to say precisely which direction because the time that the pings took to reach the satellite would be equal from the northern or southern hemisphere.
Further study revealed that there was a "doppler shift" to the signals. This is the same phenomenon that makes the pitch of an emergency siren seem to rise as a vehicle approaches and then fall: for a vehicle the sound waves are squeezed together and then spread out.
For MH370's "pings", the same applied to the electronic pulses; the same technique is used by astronomers on the light of distant galaxies to determine how quickly they are travelling, and whether it is towards or away from us.
In the case of the MH370 signals, the difference is called the "burst frequency offset" – that is, the difference (offset) between the expected frequency of the transmission, which comes in a brief burst, and the received one.

How Doppler correction works to calculate the movement and potential direction of MH370. Photograph: Guim

The differences were tiny – milliseconds or microseconds – but our team came up after six or seven days of study with what appeared to be a correlation with the southerly potential part of the track," McLaughlin said.
The northerly direction was ruled out because the aircraft would have had to cross over land, and here were no correlating reports from civil defence units monitoring borders.
Inmarsat compared the data acquired from MH370 – whose signal was "as identifiable as a mobile handset is to a base station," said McLaughlin - with that from six other Boeing 777 aircraft which flew on the same day in various directions, and found that there was "good agreement" with its predictions.

Inmarsat's analysis of the predicted path of MH370 against the available data. Photograph: Malaysia Ministry of Transport

After the last full "ping" between the satellite and the plane at 0011 UTC, there is one tantalising last "semi-ping" – an incomplete handshake - timed at 0019 UTC, eight minutes after the last. But the Malaysian government said: "At this time the transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work."
The use of Doppler analysis in this way – which has never been done before with such satellite data, partly because no plane has gone missing in such a way before – cut the area that had to be searched to just 3% of the initial amount, said Inmarsat.
But a spokesman for the company said that there was no more analysis which could be done with the eight full pings that had been received. "We've pretty much exhausted what can be done with that."
MH370: how Inmarsat homed in on missing Malaysia Airlines' flight

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Boris Johnson's £1m startup competition flops

A scheme to entice tech startups to London has been pulled after a lack of quality entries, the Guardian has learned

Boris Johnson's scheme to entice technology firms to the capital has failed, despite a £1m prize Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images for Invictus Games

A £1m Boris Johnson-backed startup competition designed to entice promising tech businesses to London was quietly killed off in 2013 and will not run again, the Guardian has learned, while the Digital Shoreditch 2014 festival has been cancelled.
The Million Pound Startup competition, supported by the Mayor of London and the Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO), among many others, was closed last year without any public notice because none of the 1,000 entrants were deemed worthy of the prize.
Described as “a new, groundbreaking global competition to bring a high-growth technology company to London”, it offered entrants the chance to win £1m, as long as they moved their HQ to the capital. Winners were also to be offered legal consultation worth £10,000 from Taylor Wessing and £10,000 of consulting services from KPMG.
Although a final 20 had been selected from more than 1,000 applications from 72 countries, in late September it became apparent there were no suitable candidates.
In October, all the money invested in the project was returned. “The £433,000 capital raised had been held in ESCROW by Seedrs as part of their normal platform and was returned to the 200 or so investors,” said Richard Botley, an account director from Ketchum, the PR agency which had pledged to give the winning company public relations services worth £20,000.
“The requirements for the finalists and eventual winner included both ambitions - could you be a £100m company and are you at the right stage for £1m investment? In the end it proved difficult to find companies that had both the right level of ambition and could stand a valuation for £2m-£10m.”
Despite some “amazing companies” being uncovered, and even with all the help the winner would have received, no entrants were deemed of good enough quality, a spokesperson from Seedrs said.
Steve Price, a volunteer for Digital Shoreditch who helped run the competition, said there were too many early-stage companies who entered. “To get £1m off an investor, you need to be a little bit further down the road.”
No further Million Pound Startup competitions are planned for the future. Neither Ketchum nor Price could say why no public release had been made available when it was shut down.
The Guardian also understands the Digital Shoreditch 2014 festival is to be cancelled, partly due to a lack of resources. A decision, announced today, will “suspend new activities” related to the event.
The festival, designed to showcase the best of Tech City’s startups and create a vibrant networking environment, was set up in 2011, with the following two years seeing growth in numbers, according to Digital Shoreditch. An estimated 15,000 attended last year, according to the not-for-profit.
“We have the need for what we create to be as good or better than the last time. And well after three years of Digital Shoreditch, it seems that it’s time for us to focus our attention on to bringing new perspectives into the mix,” a notice on the Digital Shoreditch website read.
“To refresh. To ensure we’re super relevant. We want to create completely new types of events and competitions. And most importantly we want the next Digital Shoreditch Festival, whether it’s in 2015 or 2016 to be even better and bigger than 2013.”
Despite the government’s efforts to foster a thriving tech sector in the capital around the Shoreditch area, it continues to face criticism over its work on Tech City.
This month, the author Cory Doctorow wrote in The Guardian that companies in Silicon Roundabout were being forced out of the area because of government-approved construction projects and rising rents.

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Bitcoin goes national with Scotcoin and Auroracoin

Are hyper-national currencies the future of the bitcoin movement?

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights in Iceland. Photograph: Arctic-Images/Getty Images

The promise of bitcoin is a universal currency free from the control of any nation or government. But a new generation of cryptocurrencies are focusing on the opposite goal: building money to solve problems specific to one country.
On midnight Monday, Auroracoin, a bitcoin clone which is the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency being traded today, entered the second phase of its life, with a "helicopter drop" of 30 auroracoins to every citizen of Iceland.
The currency began life in February, and for the first month, traded like many other bitcoin clones. As you can buy auroracoin with bitcoin, and bitcoin with US dollars, it's possible to establish an exchange rate: one auroracoin is now worth $11.37, putting the value of the entire currency at $121m.
But unlike bitcoin, which is only created by users "mining" for more, auroracoin was brought into life with a significant "pre-mine": 10m coins were created before the currency went public, and now they will begin distribution throughout Iceland.
The rationale behind the currency is to fight Iceland's capital controls, which ban Icelanders from taking kronas outside the country. The controls were put in place to strengthen the island nation's economy after the disastrous crash in 2008 which all but destroyed its banking sector.
Auroracoin launched with a manifesto, detailing its creator's plans. "The people of Iceland are being sacrificed at the altar of a flawed financial system, controlled by an elite that made astronomical bets supported by the government on behalf of the people and ultimately at the expense of the people," it says.
"The power must be taken away from the politicians and given back to the people. Cryptocurrencies are a very important milestone in this fight for liberty. They bring the hope of a new era of free currencies, immune to the meddling of politicians and their cronies." The document is signed "Baldur Friggjar Odinsson"; just like with bitcoin, the currency's creator is pseudonymous.
But Baldur may find there is a stumbling block ahead. Iceland's central bank has not been ignorant to the possibility of cryptocurrencies enabling the evasion of capital controls. BitLegal, a site which monitors the legal status of Bitcoin around the world, says that "domestic entities are not allowed to buy bitcoins from foreign entities, as such transactions are considered a capital movement out of the country."
"Furthermore, the Central Bank considers exports of goods and services in exchange for bitcoin in breach of these capital controls," it adds. "Icelandic merchants and service providers are thus not able to legally accept bitcoin as payment."
Regardless of legal problems ahead, Auroracoin has started strong. Too strong, maybe: the currency's site has collapsed under the load of Icelanders trying to claim their 31.8 coins.

"I am hopeful that the Scottish people will, over time, understand the vision of this project"

Already, other currencies are following in Auroracoin's footsteps. The Scotcoin project is one such proposal.
Set up by Derek Nisbet, an Edinburgh-based venture capitalist, the cryptocurrency is offering 1,000 Scotcoins to every resident adult of Scotland – as well as bigger allocations for businesses, charities and start-ups, to boost the economy.
Nisbet's motivations are necessarily different from Baldur's, since Scotland doesn't have capital controls. Instead, he tells the Guardian that the motivation is Scotland's uncertain future.
"There is so much uncertainty with the current financial situation, that introducing a voluntary cryptocurrency, which may in the future act as a medium of exchange for the Scottish people, can only benefit them should there be major disruption."
"I am hopeful that the Scottish people will, over time, understand the vision of this project, the good it can do for the Scottish people, and will therefore choose to participate, to make this successful for all."
Despite appearances, Nisbet says he isn't a Scottish nationalist. "The motivation for us has nothing to do with the vote later this year, or politics for that matter.
"Our motivation is to empower the Scottish people with an alternative digital currency opportunity, which may be used as a medium of exchange, should the need or wish arise."
And just recently a third such coin launched: Gaelcoin is offering 50 free coins to every Irish citizen. The trend shows no sign of stopping yet.
That missing £70m of bitcoin? Found it!

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YouTube star PewDiePie launches $250k Save the Children fundraiser

Brighton-based gamer hopes his 25m subscribers will chip in to crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo

With 25m YouTube subscribers, PewDiePie is raising money for charity.

PewDiePie is the most popular YouTuber with 25m subscribers. Now he’s encouraging his youthful audience to donate money to charity Save the Children.
The Brighton-based gamer – aka Felix Kjellberg – has launched a fundraising drive on crowdfunding website Indiegogo, with a goal of raising $250,000 for the charity.
The campaign came as the multi-channel network (MCN) to which he is signed, Maker Studios, was bought by Disney in a deal worth up to $950m, and also just after Kjellberg signed up his 25 millionth subscriber on YouTube.
Hitting this milestone means so much to me, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate than by doing something really cool with all of you,” wrote Kjellberg on Indiegogo, in an address to his fans.
“We're all just kids who grew up (kind of). Can you imagine if you never got that chance? Save the Children is an awesome charity that has helped more than 125 million children around the world providing everything from school books to food to blankets and shelter.”
This being crowdfunding, there is a series of tiered rewards for people who back the campaign with varying amounts of money. Fans donating $5 will be entered into a sweepstake to play a game with PewDiePie, while $10 gets their name listed on a thank-you website.
The rewards then run through a “custom brofist” email ($25); being named in a thank-you YouTube video ($50); tweets from PewDiePie with fans’ handles ($100 to be part of a group, or $250 alone); a custom video message ($500); signed headphones ($1,000); a Skype chat with PewDiePie ($1,500); and a “Friday with PewDiePie” for companies, priced at $50,000.

At the time of writing, nearly 3,800 backers have pledged more than $103,000 to the campaign, which has 37 days left to run. It’s the latest example of YouTubers using their online fame for the benefit of charities. PewDiePie launched a fundraising campaign for Charity: Water in July 2013 when he had 10m subscribers, raising $446,462 for the charity. Earlier this month, YouTubers Marcus Butler, Joe Sugg, Jim Chapman, Caspar Lee and Alfie Deyes teamed up to record a cover version of McFly’s It’s All About You for Sport Relief in the UK, encouraging fans to donate online or via SMS. • PewDiePie king of YouTube with 1.3bn views in second half of 2013

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Flight MH370: how Inmarsat homed in on missing Malaysia Airlines' plane

UK satellite firm and AAIB cited for 'groundbreaking maths' to narrow the flight corridor of missing passenger jet and help solve riddle

Search area for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

Analysis by the British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) was cited on Monday by the Malaysian prime minister as the source of information that has narrowed the location where the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean to a corridor a couple of hundred miles wide.
The analysis follows fresh examination of eight satellite "pings" sent by the aircraft between 1.11am and 8.11am Malaysian time on Saturday 8 March, when it vanished from radar screens.
The prime minister, Najib Razak, said: "Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.
"This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."
He added that they had used a "type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort".
The new method "gives the approximate direction of travel, plus or minus about 100 miles, to a track line", Chris McLaughlin, senior vice-president for external affairs at Inmarsat, told Sky News. "Unfortunately this is a 1990s satellite over the Indian Ocean that is not GPS-equipped. All we believe we can do is to say that we believe it is in this general location, but we cannot give you the final few feet and inches where it landed. It's not that sort of system."
McLaughlin told CNN that there was no further analysis possible of the data. "Sadly this is the limit. There's no global decision even after the Air France loss [in June 2009, where it took two years to recover the plane from the sea] to make direction and distance reporting compulsory. Ships have to log in every six hours; with aircraft travelling at 500 knots they would have to log in every 15 minutes. That could be done tomorrow but the mandate is not there globally."
Since the plane disappeared more than two weeks ago, many of the daily searches across vast tracts of the Indian Ocean for the aircraft have relied on Inmarsat information collated halfway across the world from a company that sits on London's "Silicon Roundabout", by Old Street tube station.
Using the data from just eight satellite "pings" after the plane's other onboard Acars automatic tracking system went off at 1.07am, the team at Inmarsat was initially able to calculate that it had either headed north towards the Asian land mass or south, towards the emptiest stretches of the India Ocean.
Inmarsat said that yesterday it had done new calculations on the limited data that it had received from the plane in order to come to its conclusion. McLaughlin told CNN that it was a "groundbreaking but traditional" piece of mathematics which was then checked by others in the space industry.
The company's system of satellites provide voice contact with air traffic control when planes are out of range of radar, which only covers about 10% of the Earth's surface, and beyond the reach of standard radio over oceans. It also offers automatic reporting of positions via plane transponders. It is possible to send route instructions directly to the cockpit over a form of text message relayed through the satellite.
Inmarsat was set up in 1979 by the International Maritime Organisation to help ships stay in touch with shore or call for emergency no matter where they were, has provided key satellite data about the last movements of MH370.
Even as the plane went off Malaysian air traffic control's radar on 8 March, Inmarsat's satellites were "pinging" it.
A team at the company began working on the directions the plane could have gone in, based on the responses. One pointed north; the other, south. But it took three days for the data to be officially passed on to the Malaysian authorities; apparently to prevent any more such delays, Inmarsat was officially made "technical adviser" to the AAIB in its investigation into MH370's disappearance.
Inmarsat's control room in London, like some of its other 60 locations worldwide, looks like a miniature version of Nasa: a huge screen displays the positions of its 11 geostationary satellites, and dozens of monitors control and correct their positions. A press on a key can cause the puff of a rocket on a communications satellite 22,236 miles away, nudging its orbit by a few inches this way or that.
More prosaically, Inmarsat's systems enable passengers to make calls from their seats and also to use Wi-Fi and connect to the internet while flying.
If the plane has its own "picocell" essentially a tiny mobile phone tower set up inside the plane then that can be linked to the satellite communications system and enable passengers to use their own mobile phones to make calls, which are routed through the satellite and back to earth.
After its creation, Inmarsat's maritime role rapidly expanded to providing connectivity for airlines, the media, oil and gas companies, mining and construction in remote areas, and governments.
Privatised at the end of the 1990s, it was floated on the stock market in 2004, and now focuses on providing services to four main areas: maritime, enterprise (focused on businesses including aviation), civil and military work for the US government, and civil and military work for other governments. The US is the largest government client, generating up to a fifth of its revenues of about £1bn annually. The firm employs about 1,600 staff.

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The BBC needs a young audience more than the young audience needs the BBC

To listen to Radio 1 nowadays is to be regularly instructed to go somewhere else for a complementary, or better, experience

Scott Mills's Radio 1 feature Innuendo Bingo only makes sense when you can actually see the celebrity expel water from their mouth. Photograph: Ray Burmiston

Visiting Radio 1 in 1977 meant going to Egton House, an unlovely building at the side of Broadcasting House with the cheerless, municipal feeling of "the Circus" in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The producers, overwhelmingly male, worked in tiny hutches full of records. The secretaries, all female, hammered away in a typing pool.
When you visit Radio 1 nowadays you take the glass-sided elevator to the top of New Broadcasting House. Here on a clear day you can see as far as Crystal Palace. Stylish young people sporting laminates and lanyards waft around looking for somewhere to lay their laptops. It feels more like the campus of a Californian software company than anything so platform partisan as a radio station, particularly not the one that used to be in Egton House.
You can't help reflecting that when they were in Egton in 1979 more than 16 million people listened to Radio 1. These days it's under 11 million. Which is still an awful lot but the drop shows that the world has changed and will presumably continue to do so.
I went there recently at the invitation of Ben Chapman, who is head of popular music, multi-platform. We didn't meet in Tommy Cooper but in every other respect it felt like a scene from W1A.
Chapman and the BBC face many challenges. The first is that ownership of a big ass transmitter and a humongous record library no longer gives you the undivided attention of young people. That old Lou Reed quote "you need two radios in case one gets broken" wouldn't resonate with many of them. Hence Chapman and others are looking to the other platforms on which young people loiter. They're fishing where the fish are.
The launch of Playlister last year was a BBC toe in that water. With Playlister you can click songs that you particularly like from the BBC's output, save them in your own playlist and then export a list of them to a site like Spotify or Deezer and listen to them at your leisure.
Chapman says it's one of the ways "the BBC is using music to tell stories". At the moment it still feels like a solution in search of a problem. It's had enough take-up to make the commercial partners very grateful for the profile the BBC has helped build for them but it's not quite a mainstream habit. Idleness has a habit of winning when it comes to the web and soft benefits are easily forgotten when the next toy comes along.
The move to other platforms also means thinking visual. To listen to Radio 1 nowadays is to be regularly instructed to go somewhere else for a complementary – or better – experience. The Scott Mills feature Innuendo Bingo, for instance, only makes sense when you can actually see the celebrity expel water from their mouth on hearing fnarr fnarr commentaries from BBC documentaries. (Shame Lord Reith missed this one.) It works, of course. In fact it's generally more popular than music. The big clips get over a million hits. But then again when YouTube pranksters the Slow Mo guys burst a huge water balloon they get 50m. It's a big, wide, flat world and its appetite for stupid entertainment is unlimited. That's both an opportunity and a challenge.
If you're a digital native you've grown up knowing that there is more music and entertainment available to you free than you could ever get round to in your life. This understandably makes them blase and a big challenge for the BBC.
Tony Hall will be acutely aware that the people who will be really hard to convince about the licence fee are the social media generation. They're not interested in channels and there is evidence that they're not bothered about brands either. That's not ideal if you've put all your effort into building yourself as both.
The move to social media has resulted in a tilting of the power balance which comes as a surprise to big media organisations, particularly ones that have just moved into HQs that remind them of their own massiveness. The BBC needs those teenagers an awful lot more than those teenagers need the BBC. Maybe the corporation doesn't realise that yet. The BBC Playlister page on Spotify lists all the listeners who are following its various DJ-originated playlists. It then says "the BBC is not following anyone yet". I wonder if that will change.

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Turkey steps up bid to block Twitter after users flout ban

Move follows threats from Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he would 'root out' the social media network

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photograph: Depo Photos/SIPA/REX

Turkey has stepped up its efforts to block access to Twitter after many users found ways to flout its ban. Internet service providers in the country are now blocking the addresses used by the site, making it significantly more difficult to get around the restrictions, analysts have said.
The move follows threats last week from Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he would "root out" the social media network, which he claimed has been used to spread wiretapped recordings that have damaged his government's reputation.
Initially, Turkish internet service providers (ISPs) were simply redirecting traffic to a government webpage by forcing the DNS servers, which send to the correct IP addresses for the site they are trying to access, to redirect away from Twitter's homepage.
Now, however, ISPs have begun blocking the IP addresses used by Twitter themselves, according to an analysis carried out by internet monitoring firm Renesys. And a Turkish government webpage confirmed the block, citing court orders.
The move represents an escalation in the battle between the Erdogan regime and the social media network. His attempts to block the site on Thursday were derided by Turkish President Abdullah Gül, who flouted it himself.
In a series of messages posted on Twitter, he said: "The shutdown of an entire social platform is unacceptable. Besides, as I have said many times before, it is technically impossible to close down communication technologies like Twitter entirely. I hope this measure will not last long."
While more difficult, it is still technically possible to get around the ban if users can make it appear that they are accessing Twitter from outside Turkey. Twitter refused to comment, but it is understood to be aware of the development.

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World leaders fear Ukraine crisis will harm nuclear cooperation

Nuclear summit convenes in The Hague as fears grow that west's deteriorating ties with Russia will renew nuclear tensions

Cyclists pass the World Forum building where the Nuclear Security Summit is taking place. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

More than 50 world leaders will meet in The Hague to discuss the world's nuclear security on Monday amid fears that the west's rapidly worsening relations with Moscow over Ukraine could hobble international efforts to contain the threat of a catastrophe as result of miscalculation, terrorism or accident.
Barack Obama will meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, at the two-day summit, but Vladimir Putin will stay away. Russia will be represented by foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who will be meeting US secretary of state, John Kerry, and other western officials for the first time since Russia's annexation of Crimea.
So far, nuclear experts said, Washington and Moscow have been successful in insulating their cooperation over nuclear issues from the tension over Ukraine. On the same day that Obama announced sanctions on Putin's allies and advisors, a team of Russian officials arrived in San Francisco on a surprise inspection of the US nuclear arsenal – a visit made possible by clauses aimed at increasing mutual transparency and trust in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) the two countries signed in 2010, setting a ceiling of 1,550 for the number of strategic warheads each country can deploy.
However, advocates of nuclear disarmament say the new freeze in US-Russian relations was likely to torpedo any hopes that they had of persuading Washington and its Nato allies to withdraw the last US nuclear weapons on European soil, an estimated 150-200 B61 gravity bombs deployed in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Turkey.
Campaigners have long argued that the B61 bombs are obsolete and their removal would represent a confidence-building gesture to Moscow at no strategic cost, putting pressure on Russia to make a reciprocal reduction in its arsenal of about 2,000 operational tactical warheads. But most now concede that the disarmament lobby's chance of winning that argument has gone from slim to nonexistent.
"The Ukraine crisis will only amplify voices of those against any move on the B61, from eastern Europe in particular. It will closed down that debate," said Ian Kearns, the director of the European Leadership Network, a group of former ministers pressing the case for disarmament.
"The debate over withdrawing nuclear weapons from European Nato air bases is over for the foreseeable future," George Perkovich, the director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed. "This will pose some dilemmas for the Dutch, Belgians, Germans and others who have parties that want them out."
Paul Ingram, the executive director of the British-American Security Information Council (BASIC) also predicted that if Nato-Russian relations continued to deteriorate, arguments by arms control advocates in the west against upgrading a new fleet of dual-capable aircraft (DCA), with the capacity to deliver B61 bombs, were also likely to fail. The modernisation of the fleet would give new life to the B61 as a weapon and represent a nuclear escalation in the heart of Europe.
"I have little doubt that for the moment at least the political opposition towards spending on updating the DCA aircraft will be weakened by this action. And that could be all it takes to tip the balance," Ingram said.
Earlier this month, the Russian deputy defence minister, Anatoly Antonov, reaffirmed Russia's intentions to stick to the agreements in the New START treated and a 2011 accord called the Vienna Document, which allow for mutual inspections of nuclear sites as a way of building confidence and transparency, lessening the chances of misunderstanding leading to catastrophic miscalculations.
However, Kearns warned that if Putin wanted to raise the stakes in the stand-off with the west there were several ways he could bring the dispute into the nuclear sphere. He could suspend implementation of the New Start treaty, or even withdraw from it altogether, or he could move some of Moscow's stockpile of nuclear warheads into the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, bordering Poland and Lithuania. In December, Russia said it had deployed short-range Iskander missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, into its western military districts, bordering Nato states.
Putin portrayed it as a reaction to the development of a Europe-based anti-ballistic missile system, which Washington says is intended as a shield against a potential Iranian threat. Moscow argues the missile defence system compromises Russian nuclear deterrent.
"One way or another, we will have to react to that," Putin said in December, saying his government had not yet made up its mind to move Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad.
The Nuclear Security Summit which begins in The Hague on Monday is the third in a series launched by Obama in 2010, aimed at improving the security around the world's stockpiles of fissile material, to prevent theft by terrorism. The initiative relies heavily on cooperation between the US and Russia as the stewards of the world's two biggest arsenals.
There are estimated to be 2,000 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) stored at hundreds of sites in 25 countries, with widely varying security standards. In July 2012, protesters broke into a US site called Y-12, where 400 tonnes of military HEU are stored. The most serious breaches in nuclear security in recent years, in which smugglers have been arrested while trying to sell weapons-grade uranium or plutonium have taken places at volatile points along Russia's borders.
In 2010, two Armenians were arrested in Georgia trying to sell an 18 gram sample of 90%-enriched HEU in a lead-lined cigarette case on the black market. In June the next year, three smugglers were caught in Moldova with another HEU sample. In both cases, the fissile material appeared to come from Russian stockpiles, and the smugglers promised police agents posing as customers they could procure several kilograms of fissile material, enough to make a bomb.
The Ukraine crisis has already disrupted global initiatives aimed at preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and fissile material under the auspices of the G8. The western boycott of the G8 meeting in Sochi means that cooperation on the partnership has been suspended.

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Metropolitan police sued over officer who preyed on domestic violence victim

Woman seeks compensation over officer who she says plied her with drink and sexually exploited her following 999 call

The Met denies responsibility for the actions of James Formby, who was convicted of criminal misconduct and dismissed from the force. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

A domestic violence victim who was sexually exploited by a police officer responding to a 999 call is suing the Metropolitan police for gross abuse of power.
Although the police constable was on duty and in uniform, and has been convicted of criminal misconduct and dismissed from the force for what he did, the Met is refusing to accept any responsibility for his actions.
The woman will appear at Central London county court on Monday to relive her ordeal in front of the former officer as she fights for compensation from the Met.
She alleges that the officer, PC James Formby, plied her with drink and made sexually suggestive comments to her after a 999 call for help following an attack by her boyfriend.
When she was so drunk she was incapacitated, the officer initiated sexual activity with her. The following day the 38-year-old woman was so horrified by what had happened she called the police immediately to inform them.
Lawyers for the woman allege the officer grossly abused his position of power. Documents outlining the claim state that in engaging in "sexual behaviour with the claimant" PC Formby "intentionally abused his position of trust as an on-duty police officer".
The papers allege Formby was "recklessly indifferent" to the fact the woman was a vulnerable victim of domestic violence who was clearly upset after being physically assaulted by her boyfriend, and who had called the police in order for them to protect her.
The officer also knew or was recklessly indifferent to the fact that he was taking advantage of a vulnerable woman who was very drunk and that it would be gross misconduct for him to engage in any sexual activity with her, the woman's lawyers claim.
The case was highlighted by the Guardian in a series of reports which lifted the lid on the scandal of police officers who abuse their position of power to prey on vulnerable women.
Met police lawyers are fighting the woman's claim and refusing to accept responsibilty for the actions of one of their officers while on duty.
It is understood they claim the woman had capacity and consented to the sexual activity, and there was no unlawful act. The officer – although on duty – was on a mission of his own and they are not vicariously liable, the Met argues.
Papers submitted to the court state that the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was drunk and vulnerable when two Met officers answered an emergency call in September 2009 after an assault by her boyfriend.
One of the officers who responded arrested her partner while the other, Formby, then 31, stayed at her home in Greater London to take a statement.
The woman told Formby her boyfriend had pulled her out of a nightclub and assaulted her by throwing her onto the floor and grabbing her around the neck.
She told Formby she was scared and was willing to support a prosecution and attend court if necessary.
As she made her statement to the officer, the woman, who was already drunk, said Formby repeatedly filled her glass with alcohol.
She claims he made sexually suggestive remarks to her and that when she got up to go to the toilet, he followed her, opened the toilet door and watched her, making a comment about a body piercing she had.
When the statement was completed the woman said she told Formby she was too drunk to read it, and asked him to read it to her, which he did.
Shortly afterwards the woman said Formby put his hand down her leggings and later took her into the bedroom where he asked her to perform a sex act on him, which she admits she did.
When the woman sobered up she became "frightened, upset and confused" about the sexual contact which had taken place.
She immediately called the police station and told them what had happened and an investigation into Formby's behaviour was initiated.
Formby admitted misconduct in public office at Southwark crown court in 2010 and was given a 20-week suspended jail sentence. He was subsequently dismissed from the Met.
The woman's case is one of the first taken against the Met for alleged abuse of power involving sexual exploitation by one of their officers.
Other forces have faced similar claims. In Northumbria, where the former constable Stephen Mitchell was jailed for life in 2011 for raping and sexually assaulting a number of vulnerable women, the force has settled seven out of 13 claims for £206,040 in total.
But in four of the remaining cases the force is refusing to accept liability for the behaviour of their officer.
A Metropolitan police service spokesman said: "The officer pleaded guilty at court and has been dismissed from the MPS.
"We are aware of a civil action being taken against the MPS, due to commence at Central London county court on 24 March. We will be defending this action."

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Universities minister refuses to rule out increase in tuition fees

Labour warns of 'financial timebomb' and embarrassment for Lib Dems over errors in funding reform

A student rally in central London in November 2012 against sharp rises in university tuition fees. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The Conservative universities minister has refused to rule out raising tuition fees for students after the next election, amid warnings from Labour that the current system is a "financial timebomb" that will leave a big hole in higher education funding.
David Willetts, who oversaw the tripling of tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 in 2012, said the government would "have to see how the income of universities performs" when asked whether he would consider raising fees after 2015.
The comments came after one of Willett's former political advisers, Nick Hillman, called for a rethink of the student loans system and admitted the government got its maths wrong by overestimating the amount of graduate debt that will be repaid.
Hillman on Friday called for action to address the "big funding gap" looming in the universities sector caused by mistakes in the government's modelling and the fact that graduates are earning less than expected. Some experts believe the level of default on student loans is approaching the level at which the £9,000 fee system will not save the taxpayer any money or may even be more expensive than the old regime.
Under the current system, students start repaying loans once they are earning more than £21,000, at a rate of 9% of their salary above £15,000. Ministers thought in 2010 that the taxpayer would have to provide a subsidy of 28% of the total loan book but have had to revise this upwards several times because of growing estimates of debt that will never be repaid.
Willetts told Channel 4 News the government is "committed" to the current tuition fees system, which ministers believe is "far more sustainable than any alternative". He also dismissed warnings that it will not bring in enough money to fund universities, saying the estimates of how much students will repay are likely to "bounce around" depending on what experts are forecasting for earnings over the next 35 years.
But, pressed several times on whether fees would have to rise or graduates would start having to repay money sooner, he said: "We've got a system with a £9,000 fee and a £21,000 [earnings] repayment threshold. That is our system that we are committed to. Above all it means students don't have to pay upfront... We have fixed the fees for £9,000 for this parliament.
"But we will have to see how the income of universities performs. But we have a structure for £9,000 and £21,000 and that is working."
Cathy Newman, a Channel 4 presenter, tweeted that she asked Willetts the question again about the possibility of higher fees after 2015 as he was leaving the studio and the minister replied "could be".
Labour's shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, said the fact that ministers are "now refusing to rule out further hikes in student fees less than three years after trebling the cost of a degree underlines the depth of the crisis they have created in the student finances".
"Ministers need to come clean on what this timebomb will mean for the public finances, our universities and students," he told the Guardian.
Earlier, he said the Liberal Democrats are facing "catastrophic" embarrassment over student loans because they abandoned their election pledge to scrap tuition fees in order to vote for a system that may not save the government any money.
Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, said estimates were variable and the higher education reforms were working and financially sustainable.
"These figures are based on projections of what might happen to graduate incomes in 35 years' time. So these numbers do move around a lot," he said. "The figures I'm most pleased with in higher education is that we're seeing more people going to university than ever before and particularly more children from disadvantaged backgrounds, which was our focus, applying and successfully going to university.
The Guardian disclosed last week Willetts's admission that the true figure for the amount that the taxpayer would have to provide as a subsidy is now more like 45% of the total loan book – approaching the 48% threshold at which experts say the benefits of raising fees to £9,000 are cancelled out.
The Universities UK alliance of higher education institutions has now urged the coalition to open talks with Labour on the issue, saying it is vital to think more carefully about how universities can be paid for.
Any political prominence for the issue of tuition fees is likely to reopen painful wounds for the Lib Dems, who were forced to abandon their anti-fee position when they went into coalition, causing a large loss of support which they have not regained. The policy is ultimately the responsibility of Vince Cable, the business secretary, who oversaw the introduction of the higher tuition fee system from 2012.

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