[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]
[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 05:10 GMT, Saturday, 5 September 2009 06:10 UK
Police patrol after China unrest
Riot police have been deployed again on the streets of the western Chinese city of Urumqi, to try to prevent further protests over a spate of stabbings.
Several roads have been blocked to cars after days of demonstrations by thousands of residents from the majority Han Chinese community.
The biggest protests about the syringe stabbings were on Thursday when five people died and 14 were injured.
Local officials have blamed Uighur Muslim separatists for the attacks.
They accused them of trying to damage ethnic unity.
China's top security official, Meng Jianzhu, has arrived in the city to try to restore order.
On his arrival he was quoted by state-run news agency Xinhua as saying the syringe attacks were a continuation of the July unrest in which 200 people - mostly Han Chinese - were killed in ethnic riots.
Zhang Hong, vice-mayor of Urumqi, confirmed to reporters that there had been casualties in the latest unrest, but did not explain how they died.
"On Thursday, 14 people were injured and sent to hospital and five people were killed in the incidents including two innocent people," he said.
Xinjiang's population is evenly split between Uighurs and Han Chinese - the country's majority ethnic group. But Hans make up three-quarters of Urumqi's population.
Tension between Xinjiang's Uighur and Han communities has been simmering for many years, but July's ethnic unrest was the worst in China for decades.
It began when crowds of Uighurs took the streets to protest about mistreatment - but their rally spiralled out of control and days of violent clashes followed.
[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 18:08 GMT, Friday, 4 September 2009 19:08 UK
US 'concern' over N Korea uranium
The US says it is "very concerned" at reports that North Korea has entered the final phase of uranium enrichment.
The White House said it would "strongly implement" tougher sanctions passed by the United Nations after a nuclear test conducted by Pyongyang in May.
The US said it wanted a denuclearised Korean peninsula.
Uranium enrichment would give Pyongyang a second way to make a nuclear bomb. The North says it is also continuing to weaponise plutonium.
US state department spokesman Ian Kelly said it was unclear how true the latest statements from North Korea were.
But he added: "In general, we are very concerned by these claims that they're moving closer to the weaponisation of nuclear materials."
'Extra drive'
Earlier, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "We continue to be committed to ensuring that North Korea upholds its international obligations and we continue to strongly implement the sanctions that were approved."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said there needed to be a unified international response to North Korea's moves.
He said: "It shows that 2009 and 2010 are the years when the Non-Proliferation Treaty is being tested as never before and when there needs to be extra drive from all of us."
The two tests carried out by the North - in May and in 2006 - were understood to have been carried out with plutonium.
The BBC's John Sudworth in South Korea says the worry is that uranium enrichment is a process that can be easily hidden, and in addition, North Korea has ample natural reserves of the raw material.
The North's KCNA state media said Pyongyang's delegation at the UN had written to the Security Council on the issue.
"If some permanent members of the UN Security Council wish to put sanctions first before dialogue, we would respond with bolstering our nuclear deterrence first before we meet them in a dialogue," the delegation wrote.
South Korea's foreign ministry condemned what it calls "threats and provocative acts".
North Korea's plutonium programme is based on the Yongbyon reactor, which is under US satellite observation.
Observers say the US has long suspected the existence of a secret uranium enrichment programme in the North, though experts say it remains little-developed.
[Asia-Pcific]
Page last updated at 00:53 GMT, Saturday, 5 September 2009 01:53 UK
Delays hit Aboriginal homes plan
A report into an ambitious housing scheme for Australia's Aboriginals has found that not one dwelling has been built in the year since it began.
By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney
The A$660m (US$562m; £342m) scheme is designed to address chronic housing problems in Aboriginal communities.
The project aims to construct 750 homes in the Northern Territory and refurbish hundreds of others.
Officials blamed "administration problems" for the delays - which prompted one minister to quit.
The slow pace of this ambitious programme to help Aboriginal families almost brought down the Northern Territory government when a former minister quit in disgust at the lack of progress.
A review has recommended that federal agencies take more control of the scheme and that administration costs be reduced.
{Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house
Nigel Scullion
Senator}
It has all been an embarrassment to the government of Kevin Rudd in Canberra and his indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, who has insisted that the building work will be completed within budget and on time by 2013.
Critics, though, are not convinced.
Nigel Scullion, a conservative senator for the Northern Territory, says the whole affair has been a disaster.
"The minister has taken absolutely no responsibility for this.
"This was a fundamental of Kevin Rudd's undertaking and promises to indigenous people of Australia and he has failed and it has failed under the leadership of Jenny Macklin.
"And I cannot understand why Mr Rudd would allow her to stay and preside over the second stage of this complete and unmitigated disaster.
"Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house."
The delays mean that the amount of money earmarked for each new dwelling has been cut by 20%.
For generations, poor housing has blighted many Aboriginal communities.
Australia's original inhabitants often suffer squalid and over-cramped living conditions which contribute to the 17-year gap in life expectancy between them and their non-indigenous counterparts.
[Science , Environment & Technology]
Page last updated at 16:28 GMT, Friday, 4 September 2009 17:28 UK
Google trick tracks extinctions
Google's algorithm for ranking web pages can be adapted to determine which species are critical for sustaining ecosystems, say researchers.
By Judith Burns
Science and Environment Producer BBC News
According to a paper in PLoS Computational Biology, "PageRank" can be applied to the study of food webs.
These are the complex networks of who eats whom in an ecosystem.
The scientists say their version of PageRank could be a simple way of working out which extinctions would lead to ecosystem collapse.
Every species is embedded in a complex network of relationships with others. So a single extinction can cascade into the loss of seemingly unrelated species.
Investigating when this might happen using more conventional methods is complicated as even in simple ecosystems, the number of combinations exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. So it would be impossible to try them all.
Co-author Dr Stefano Allesina realised he could apply PageRank to the problem when he stumbled across an article in a journal of applied mathematics describing the Google algorithm.
The researchers say they had to make minor changes to it to adapt it for ecology.
Dr Allesina, of the University of Chicago's department of ecology and Evolution, told BBC News: "First of all we had to reverse the definition of the algorithm.
"In PageRank, a web page is important if important pages point to it. In our approach a species is important if it points to important species."
Cyclical element
They also had to design in a cyclical element into the food web system in order to make it applicable to the algorithm.
They did this by including what Dr Allesina terms the "detritus pool". He said: "When an organism dies it goes into the detritus pool and in turn gets cycled back into the food web through the primary producers, the plants.
"Each species points to the detritus and the detritus points only to the plants. This makes the web circular and therefore leads to the application of the algorithm."
Dr Allesina and co-author Dr Mercedes Pascual of University of Michigan have tested their method against published food webs, using it to rank species according to the damage they would cause if they were removed from the ecosystem.
They also tested algorithms already in use in computational biology to find a solution to the same problem.
They found that PageRank gave them exactly the same solution as these much more complicated algorithms.
Dr Glyn Davies, director of programmes at WWF-UK, welcomed the work. He said: "As the rate of species extinction increases, conservation organisations strive to build political support for maintaining healthy and productive ecosystems which hold a full complement of species.
"Any research that strengthens our understanding of the complex web of ecological processes that bind us all is welcome."
[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 05:10 GMT, Saturday, 5 September 2009 06:10 UK
Police patrol after China unrest
Riot police have been deployed again on the streets of the western Chinese city of Urumqi, to try to prevent further protests over a spate of stabbings.
Several roads have been blocked to cars after days of demonstrations by thousands of residents from the majority Han Chinese community.
The biggest protests about the syringe stabbings were on Thursday when five people died and 14 were injured.
Local officials have blamed Uighur Muslim separatists for the attacks.
They accused them of trying to damage ethnic unity.
China's top security official, Meng Jianzhu, has arrived in the city to try to restore order.
On his arrival he was quoted by state-run news agency Xinhua as saying the syringe attacks were a continuation of the July unrest in which 200 people - mostly Han Chinese - were killed in ethnic riots.
Zhang Hong, vice-mayor of Urumqi, confirmed to reporters that there had been casualties in the latest unrest, but did not explain how they died.
"On Thursday, 14 people were injured and sent to hospital and five people were killed in the incidents including two innocent people," he said.
Xinjiang's population is evenly split between Uighurs and Han Chinese - the country's majority ethnic group. But Hans make up three-quarters of Urumqi's population.
Tension between Xinjiang's Uighur and Han communities has been simmering for many years, but July's ethnic unrest was the worst in China for decades.
It began when crowds of Uighurs took the streets to protest about mistreatment - but their rally spiralled out of control and days of violent clashes followed.
[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 18:08 GMT, Friday, 4 September 2009 19:08 UK
US 'concern' over N Korea uranium
The US says it is "very concerned" at reports that North Korea has entered the final phase of uranium enrichment.
The White House said it would "strongly implement" tougher sanctions passed by the United Nations after a nuclear test conducted by Pyongyang in May.
The US said it wanted a denuclearised Korean peninsula.
Uranium enrichment would give Pyongyang a second way to make a nuclear bomb. The North says it is also continuing to weaponise plutonium.
US state department spokesman Ian Kelly said it was unclear how true the latest statements from North Korea were.
But he added: "In general, we are very concerned by these claims that they're moving closer to the weaponisation of nuclear materials."
'Extra drive'
Earlier, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "We continue to be committed to ensuring that North Korea upholds its international obligations and we continue to strongly implement the sanctions that were approved."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said there needed to be a unified international response to North Korea's moves.
He said: "It shows that 2009 and 2010 are the years when the Non-Proliferation Treaty is being tested as never before and when there needs to be extra drive from all of us."
The two tests carried out by the North - in May and in 2006 - were understood to have been carried out with plutonium.
The BBC's John Sudworth in South Korea says the worry is that uranium enrichment is a process that can be easily hidden, and in addition, North Korea has ample natural reserves of the raw material.
The North's KCNA state media said Pyongyang's delegation at the UN had written to the Security Council on the issue.
"If some permanent members of the UN Security Council wish to put sanctions first before dialogue, we would respond with bolstering our nuclear deterrence first before we meet them in a dialogue," the delegation wrote.
South Korea's foreign ministry condemned what it calls "threats and provocative acts".
North Korea's plutonium programme is based on the Yongbyon reactor, which is under US satellite observation.
Observers say the US has long suspected the existence of a secret uranium enrichment programme in the North, though experts say it remains little-developed.
[Asia-Pcific]
Page last updated at 00:53 GMT, Saturday, 5 September 2009 01:53 UK
Delays hit Aboriginal homes plan
A report into an ambitious housing scheme for Australia's Aboriginals has found that not one dwelling has been built in the year since it began.
By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney
The A$660m (US$562m; £342m) scheme is designed to address chronic housing problems in Aboriginal communities.
The project aims to construct 750 homes in the Northern Territory and refurbish hundreds of others.
Officials blamed "administration problems" for the delays - which prompted one minister to quit.
The slow pace of this ambitious programme to help Aboriginal families almost brought down the Northern Territory government when a former minister quit in disgust at the lack of progress.
A review has recommended that federal agencies take more control of the scheme and that administration costs be reduced.
{Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house
Nigel Scullion
Senator}
It has all been an embarrassment to the government of Kevin Rudd in Canberra and his indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, who has insisted that the building work will be completed within budget and on time by 2013.
Critics, though, are not convinced.
Nigel Scullion, a conservative senator for the Northern Territory, says the whole affair has been a disaster.
"The minister has taken absolutely no responsibility for this.
"This was a fundamental of Kevin Rudd's undertaking and promises to indigenous people of Australia and he has failed and it has failed under the leadership of Jenny Macklin.
"And I cannot understand why Mr Rudd would allow her to stay and preside over the second stage of this complete and unmitigated disaster.
"Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house."
The delays mean that the amount of money earmarked for each new dwelling has been cut by 20%.
For generations, poor housing has blighted many Aboriginal communities.
Australia's original inhabitants often suffer squalid and over-cramped living conditions which contribute to the 17-year gap in life expectancy between them and their non-indigenous counterparts.
[Science , Environment & Technology]
Page last updated at 16:28 GMT, Friday, 4 September 2009 17:28 UK
Google trick tracks extinctions
Google's algorithm for ranking web pages can be adapted to determine which species are critical for sustaining ecosystems, say researchers.
By Judith Burns
Science and Environment Producer BBC News
According to a paper in PLoS Computational Biology, "PageRank" can be applied to the study of food webs.
These are the complex networks of who eats whom in an ecosystem.
The scientists say their version of PageRank could be a simple way of working out which extinctions would lead to ecosystem collapse.
Every species is embedded in a complex network of relationships with others. So a single extinction can cascade into the loss of seemingly unrelated species.
Investigating when this might happen using more conventional methods is complicated as even in simple ecosystems, the number of combinations exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. So it would be impossible to try them all.
Co-author Dr Stefano Allesina realised he could apply PageRank to the problem when he stumbled across an article in a journal of applied mathematics describing the Google algorithm.
The researchers say they had to make minor changes to it to adapt it for ecology.
Dr Allesina, of the University of Chicago's department of ecology and Evolution, told BBC News: "First of all we had to reverse the definition of the algorithm.
"In PageRank, a web page is important if important pages point to it. In our approach a species is important if it points to important species."
Cyclical element
They also had to design in a cyclical element into the food web system in order to make it applicable to the algorithm.
They did this by including what Dr Allesina terms the "detritus pool". He said: "When an organism dies it goes into the detritus pool and in turn gets cycled back into the food web through the primary producers, the plants.
"Each species points to the detritus and the detritus points only to the plants. This makes the web circular and therefore leads to the application of the algorithm."
Dr Allesina and co-author Dr Mercedes Pascual of University of Michigan have tested their method against published food webs, using it to rank species according to the damage they would cause if they were removed from the ecosystem.
They also tested algorithms already in use in computational biology to find a solution to the same problem.
They found that PageRank gave them exactly the same solution as these much more complicated algorithms.
Dr Glyn Davies, director of programmes at WWF-UK, welcomed the work. He said: "As the rate of species extinction increases, conservation organisations strive to build political support for maintaining healthy and productive ecosystems which hold a full complement of species.
"Any research that strengthens our understanding of the complex web of ecological processes that bind us all is welcome."
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