Facebook urged to action after commemorative sites defaced

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CANBERRA (Reuters) - Cyber attacks on Facebook pages set up to pay tribute to two murdered Australian children has prompted calls for the social networking site to be more accountable for its users.

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Social media experts say it is natural that people who use sites such as Facebook or MySpace as a major form of communication should turn to these sites with personal tragedies.

These memorial sites often attract thousands of friends and well-wishers, as in the case of the pages set up after the deaths this month of Elliott Fletcher, 12, and Trinity Bates, 8.

Students from Brisbane College in the state of Queensland flocked to a memorial site set up after Fletcher was stabbed in a schoolyard fight two weeks ago, but it was defaced with offensive comments and images including child pornography and bestiality.

The same happened to a site set up in memory of Bates who was taken from her bed in Bundaberg, Queensland, with her body found in a nearby storm drain on Monday. A teenager accused of her murder was also revealed to be a Facebook friend of her parents.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has appealed to the owners of U.S.-based Facebook to find ways to stop a recurrence of these types of "sickening incidents."

"To have these things happen to Facebook pages set up for the sole purpose of helping these communities pay tribute to young lives lost in the most horrible ways adds to the grief already being experienced," Bligh wrote in a letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg which was released to the media.

"I seek your advice about whether Facebook can do anything to prevent a recurrence of these types of sickening incidents."

A spokesman for Bligh said the premier had yet to receive a response from Zuckerberg.

But Facebook spokeswoman Debbie Frost said the site had rules to check content and reviewers were quick to respond to any reports of hate or threats against an individual, pornography, or violent photos or videos, and would remove the content, and either warn or disable the accounts of those responsible.

"Facebook is highly self-regulating, and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive," Frost said in a statement.

She said in the tragic case of Elliott Fletcher, Facebook responded to reports of vandalism from others users and the police by removing the groups and disabling the accounts of the people responsible but that was about all the action possible.

"It is simply not possible to "prevent" a person with a sinister agenda from undertaking offensive activity anywhere on the Internet where people can post content. Nor is it really possible in real life," Frost added.

Detective Superintendent Peter Crawford of Queensland police said people should think twice before setting up such social networking groups. As well as memorial sites, Facebook pages popped up vilifying the man accused of murdering Bates.

"I would say anybody thinking about putting these sites up in the future need to realize that they"re going to attract these kinds of people," Crawford told radio station Fairfax Radio 4BC.

"The reality is once you open these sites up to open access to anyone on the Internet, you are going to attract unsavory people and clearly that"s occurred again."

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

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So most for Labour crackdown on cannabis as 5 out of 6 people held with drug shun justice

Ineffectual: Cannabis prosecutions have barely risen

Five out of every six people caught with cannabis escaped prosecution last year - despite the fact Labour has reclassified it as a more serious drug.

More than 160,000 people were found in possession of cannabis in 2008-09 but just 27,500 ended up in court, according to Home Office figures.

The leniency was highlighted despite police statistics showing a 40 per cent increase in the number of people caught with the drug in just 12 months.

The figures will prompt critics to claim that Labour has failed to tackle the problem.

In recent months, a succession of parents have spoken of the devastating impact the drug - particularly the potent form known as skunk - has had on their children"s mental health.

The Government upgraded cannabis from a Class C drug to the more serious Class B in January last year, meaning those caught in possession could face up to five years in jail.

Announcing the move, the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told MPs: "There is a compelling case for us to act now rather than risk young people"s health. We must err on the side of caution and protect the public."

But the change - which was supposed to reflect the Government"s tougher stance on the drug - has led to only a slight increase in prosecutions over the previous year, when one in seven users faced charges.

Instead of taking people to court, police are handing out thousands of warnings or cautions in a situation politicians have described as chaotic.

The latest figures show that almost 67 per cent of those in possession of cannabis are given a "street warning", 16 per cent are given an official caution and 17 per cent are charged.

Verbal warnings are not recorded, although some forces ask people to sign a document confirming the reprimand, and are mostly used for first-time offenders.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: "This Government"s policy on cannabis has been all over the place, so it"s hardly surprising that the policing of cannabis use is chaotic too. If Ministers give out muddled messages they shouldn"t be surprised if the result is confusion."

The data also shows huge variations in the way cannabis users are treated by forces across England and Wales.

In Gwent just ten per cent are charged but in Northumbria the figure is 34 per cent. The Metropolitan Police and forces in Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire all charge around one in eight of those caught with the drug. The Met issued the most street warnings - 47,204, or in four out of five cases.

The Government downgraded cannabis to a Class C substance in 2004 and introduced verbal warnings for possession of the drug.

But Gordon Brown ordered a review within days of becoming Prime Minister in 2007 because of fears that its skunk variety could cause serious health problems, including schizophrenia.

The Home Office said the issue was a matter for individual forces. "Police must have a proportionate response to cannabis possession. It is simply not practical to seek prosecutions for high-volume, low-level offences."

Portsmouths enchanting notation breaks Hull City hearts Portsmouth

Brian Glanville at Fratton Park & , : {}

ASTOUNDING Pompey. Penalised 9 points for their monetary failings, fundamentally doomed to relegation this deteriorate from the Premier League, though still in the semi-finals of the FA Cup, they rose gallantly from the dead.

With zero in the Premier League to fool around for and a idea down, they boldly came to life, scored twice inside of a minute, and to illustrate won opposite a Hull group that indispensable the points so most some-more than they did.

Their generous fans, not to discuss their rather unhappy manager, Avram Grant, contingency be relieved and gay that he did not lift out his hazard to margin a enervated team.

As for Hull, carrying sent Phil Brown, their manager, on highly-rewarded gardening leave, they have brought in Iain Dowie not as an central physical education instructor but as a supposed consultant. It did see for multiform durations as if his initial diversion would be met with success. As sleet poured down on to an increasingly sleazy pitch, Hull twice took the lead, after twenty-nine mins and again on 73 minutes. It was, however, enormously to the credit of Portsmouth that they should never desert hope.

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The initial idea came for Hull at a impulse when they had perceptibly seemed superior. Craig Fagan, outward the box, gathering in a low right-footed shot that Caleb Folan deflected past a wrong-footed David James.

Portsmouth were not discouraged and on 39 minutes, constructed to equalise. Quincy Owusu-Abeyie, once an Arsenal prospect, took a short dilemma to the ever sharp-witted Jamie OHara, still on loan from Spurs. OHara crossed, Frederic Piquionne done for the round but done no contact, enabling Tommy Smith to flog Boaz Myhill.

Hull regained the lead when the Portsmouth counterclaim was penetrated by a tidy by pass from Richard Garcia and Folan had abounding time and space to get his second goal.

But in one conspicuous minute, to be accurate in between the 88th and the 89th, Portsmouth won it. OHara thumped his left-footed shot past Myhill after the Greek general underling Angelos Basinas had tapped in a free flog on the left.

Scarcely had the Portsmouth throng exulted than Nadir Belhadj put opposite a round from the left that the evergreen Nigerian Nwankwo Kanu, an additional sub, gathering home to give Portsmouth their thespian victory.

Grant said: After the bad and wrong preference opposite us during the week, we motionless to fool around to the finish to keep the suggestion of the team.

Star man: Jimmy Bullard (Hull City) Yellow cards: Portsmouth: James Hull: MyhillReferee: Phil Dowd Attendance: 16,513Portsmouth: James 6; Mullins 6, Rocha 6 (Basinas 84 min), Hreidarsson 6, Belhadj 7; Smith 6, Mckoena 6 (Kanu 56 min, 6), Wilson 6, Owusu-Abeyie 7 (Webber 81 min); Piquionne 6Hull: Myhill 6; Mendy 6, Mouyokolo 7, McShane 6, Dawson 6 (Garcia 70min, 6); Fagan 7, Bullard 7, Marney 6, Kilbane 6; Vennegoor of Hesselink 6 (Barmby 66min, 6), Folan 7.

To see how the compare unfolded click here

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Comment: Passage of time does not relieve crimes of Karadzic

Anthony Loyd & , : {}

Time has fertilised the belligerent on that Radovan Karadzic"s lies will fall. It is fifteen years given the finish of the Bosnian war. An complete era has grown up in Europe that is usually dimly wakeful of names such as Srebrenica, Foca, Gorazde; who cannot stop who did what to who and because in a treble dispute that was feeble accepted by most who were adults at the time.

Moreover, events of the last decade have ensured that the tenure "Islamic extremism" has penetrated to the deepest levels of the Western psyche.

So when an clear Serb public speaker such as Dr Karadzic describes his fight crimes as being piece of the "just and holy" counterclaim of his Orthodox Christian people opposite the flay of belligerent Islamism in Bosnia, most will find his arguments plausible, even attractive.

There were positively Muslim fanatics in Bosnia. Units such as the 7th Muslim Brigade were barbarous for their wartime atrocities opposite Serbs and Croats. They worked to one side small groups of unfamiliar Islamic fighters such as El Mujahedin whose emissary commander, the Algerian belligerent Abu Mali, I met fast in executive Bosnia a decade prior to he appeared on CIA longed for lists.

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But they were never some-more than a little minority. As a newly arrived contributor in Sarajevo at the begin of 1993 it fast became strong to me that the fight was not being fought between forces of next to racial intolerance.

Indeed, incompetent to hark behind to the same chronological self-definition as the Serbs, it was Bosnia"s "Muslims", the descendants of southern Slavs who had converted to Islam during the Ottoman period, who were in all some-more usurpation of multi-ethnic coexistence than their foes, and who aspired to a churned state rather than one of racial division.

Fear was Dr Karadzic"s principal apparatus in cleaving Bosnia"s communities apart. To catalyse the murdering that followed he removed the past confinement of Serbs by Turks, raising the spook that it was about to repeat itself once more. Such polemic, corroborated by a black promotion debate and narrow-minded killings, shortly sparked the brushwood of Serbs" deepest fears.

"We usually did to them what they would have finished to us," one Serb warrior told me after the electrocute of about 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica. It was a drawn out view whose foothold lay some-more in the age-old mental disorder of a people whose temperament was created by tales of fighting Turks some-more than any � la mode reality.

Sadly, as time passed, the forecast began to do itself. Bosnia"s Muslims, at initial confused at the onlaught leveled opposite them, afterwards hurt by the miss of Western intervention, in the future began to rise their own prejudices. Even so, there were still supervision units in Sarajevo at the finish of the fight that enclosed Serbs to one side Muslim fighters: the same could not be pronounced of Dr Karadzic"s forces.

Now times have changed. The former psychiatrist fortifying himself at The Hague knows this usually to well. The ramblings connected with an illusory Islamic hazard that he once used so effectively to try by artful means to get his own people"s fright might currently find a some-more penetrable ear between an assembly who know no better, or have lost the truth.

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Houses with low appetite potency will lose worth in supervision plans

Ben Webster, Environment Editor & , : {}

Houses with low appetite potency will lose worth underneath supervision plans to meddle in the skill marketplace to assistance cut hothouse gas emissions from homes by a third by 2020.

Estate agents will be since superintendence revelation them to take some-more notice of appetite potency when determining the worth of homes. Ministers hold that homeowners are some-more expected to compensate for potency measures such as solar panels and insulation if their investment obviously increases the propertys value.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change pronounced in a plan request that it had asked the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors for recommendations to safeguard that a homes appetite opening was improved reflected in the value. Council taxation rebates of some-more than �100 a year will be offering to homeowners who urge insulation. Landlords will be barred from vouchsafing feeble insulated properties and will have to ascent them to a smallest customary of appetite efficiency.

Councils will be means to need appetite companies to work with them to isolate amicable housing. Banks and shops will be speedy to suggest loans of �10,000 per home to householders who implement solar panels, feverishness pumps and insulation. The repayments will be lonesome by assets in appetite bills.

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Legislation will concede the loans to be related to the home rather than the owner, definition that when the home is sole the new owners will get the debt. The National Association of Estate Agents pronounced that such debts could have commercial operation some-more difficult.

John Healey, the Housing Minister, pronounced that movement was indispensable to revoke appetite wastage in secretly rented homes, that tended to be comparison and in poorer condition than owner-occupied homes. It is due to have the designation of loft and form wall insulation a condition of renting out a property.

Two women barred from moody to Pakistan for refusing full-body indicate World headlines

Manchester and Heathow are the initial airports in Britain to have full-body scanners. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

Two women, one a Muslim, have turn the initial people to be barred from boarding a moody since they refused to go by a full-body airfield scanner.

Manchester airfield reliable currently that the women, who were requisitioned to fly to Islamabad with Pakistan International Airlines, were told they could not get on the craft after they refused to be scanned for healing and eremite reasons.

The women had been comparison at random, pronounced the airport.

The Muslim lady motionless to pledge her sheet and left her luggage at the airport. Her messenger additionally left the airfield observant she did not go by the scanner on healing drift since she had an infection.

The full-body scanners were introduced at Manchester and Heathrow last month after the Yuletide Day bombing try in Detroit. The £80,000 Rapiscan machines show a transparent physique outline and have been described by critics as the homogeneous of "virtual frame searching".

While American ride authorities suggest passengers a preference in between going by the full-body scanner or going by a metal-arch scanner and a earthy search, the British supervision has pronounced that a warding off to go by the physique scanner would club passengers from boarding aircraft.

A Manchester airfield mouthpiece said: "Two womanlike passengers who were requisitioned to fly out of Terminal 2 refused to be scanned for healing reasons and eremite reasons. In suitability with the supervision gauge on scanners, they were not available to fly.

"Body scanning is a big shift for business who are comparison underneath the new manners and we are wakeful that remoteness concerns are on the customers" minds, that is since we have despotic procedures to encourage them that their remoteness will be protected."

A organisation of Muslim-American scholars, the Fiqh Council of North America, last month argued that going by the scanners would violate Islamic manners of tact since they display people"s in isolation parts. The pope has additionally voiced concerns.

Heathrow airfield has refused to criticism on particular cases.

More sex preparation greatfully were British Alice Thomson- contains video

Alice Thomson & , : {}

What is sexting, Mummy, my seven-year-old asked at breakfast yesterday, indicating to a design of Ashley Cole and Cheryl prior to it all went wrong. Is that how you had me?

A year ago I would have frantically proposed creation toast or competence be talked about Cheryl Coles dress, right away I speak about sex with my children. Ashley, whom the five-year-old hero-worships for his football skills, has allegedly had sex with five pick women whilst tied together to Cheryl. His harem has called him variously, creative, wild, raunchy and lousy. They have additionally explained that he has a welfare for defenceless sex and vomiting. Far from being embarrassed, the footballer is mad with his bar Chelsea for melancholy to excellent him �400,000 over his antics. The undiluted Cheryl meanwhile, my daughters prime X Factor decider and a inhabitant treasure, is so indignant with her husbands poise that she has been spending time with an American dancer and his dog rather than fighting for this love, and afterwards texted Ashley to plead it him it was over.

Enough. British immature kids shouldnt be removing their sex preparation from Ashley and Cheryl but from their relatives and teachers. I was once one of those prissy, squeamish relatives pussyfooting around the theme until I was sent to the Netherlands by this journal to plead procreation.

As I walked to De Burght youth propagandize in Amsterdam to speak to the headmaster about his policy, I bumped in to eight-year-old Carla delicately balancing a dish. It was a representation of her fathers spermatazoa for show and tell.

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In the Netherlands, sex and immature kids arent a banned subject. As pupils fool around mummies and daddies in the stadium they know only what they competence have been you do last night. Families watch babies being innate on the birthing channel together and a 12-year-old at the comparison propagandize showed me how to hurl a condom on to a broomstick whilst her crony asked me if I masturbated.

Everyone talks about the birds and the bees, as we coyly put it. At De Burght school, they dont have grave sex preparation lessons but they mostly plead contraception, homosexuality and sex as a silken earthy wake up in between dual adults who are in love. Children are as expected to move home a primer about how humans cite to distortion on tip but dogs partner from at the back of as a Biff and Kipper celebration of the mass book. Yet the 17-year-old girls were repelled when I asked if they had essentially had sex. They all concluded they didnt wish to unqualified any attribute until they had a career and a critical partner. The nation right away has the lowest rates of intimately transmitted diseases between immature people, the lowest teenage conceiving physically rate in the West, the lowest rate of termination and one of the lowest rates of divorce.

The British, meanwhile, design their immature kids to sense about sex and relations from the playground, internet porn, WAGs and celebrities, and are vacant that we have the top rate of intimately transmitted diseases and abortions between the underneath 21s in Europe. In Britain, 53 per cent of immature people have make use of of contraception. In Holland, the 93 per cent. David Cameron is disturbed about his daughter Nancy guidance about sex from listening to Lily Allen on his iPod, but he hasnt referred to an alternative.

More sex please, were British. We need to speak about the theme until we can contend assorted anatomical tools but sniggering. When I was at school, the closest we came was dissecting a lily and tittering over stamens and pollination. A crony pronounced his father taught him the contribution of hold up whilst out sharpened on a moan tie up so he didnt have to see him in the eye. When you go to school, bang, there competence be pick boys, bang, who competence ask you to do inapt things, bang. Just contend No, bang, was his usually advice.

For the initial time, I found myself similar with Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, on the Today programme yesterday that sex preparation should be mandatory in all schools. Of march five-year-olds need to sense about sex, the progressing the better, and from relatives as well as teachers. It was far simpler articulate to my five-year-old than my nine-year-old but blushing. According to a Channel 4 survey, 73 per cent of teenagers felt that sex preparation lessons were poor, some-more than a third pronounced they didnt plead sex at home, twenty-nine per cent pronounced they did not assimilate the healing routine concerned in carrying an termination and 55 per cent had not been taught how to have make use of of a condom. Many of the girls insincere that sex was what you let a child do to you in sequence to keep him.

Yesterday MPs debated the sex preparation check and either conviction schools should be authorised the leisure to set their own rules. The Dutch are some-more eremite than the British and still conduct to reach agree between Calvinists, Catholics and Muslims that immature kids should be supposing with all the contribution to have their own sensitive decisions, not only lectured on probity and the companion position.

If Ashley Cole had been since a little sex preparation when he was younger, he competence have learnt that not utilizing a condom can be an own goal, that sex should not be similar to his prime pot noodles, poor and simply forgotten, that a committed matrimony is a pointer of majority not mundanity and that grown-up relations are not about promulgation cinema of yourself in dodgy white underpants to pick women. He competence even have kept Cheryl, the majority pleasing lady in the world. Instead he is left saying, If I lose my wife, I dont wish to live.