Cleric Rouhani leads Iran vote count
By Anonymous on Jun 15, 2013 01:59 am 14 June 2013 Last updated at 18:40 ET 
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Voting was extended by five hours to accommodate the long queues of people who turned out to cast their ballot, as Kasra Naji reports
Iranians are waiting for the results from Friday's presidential election, likely to be later than expected after voting was extended for five hours.
Officials pushed back voting deadlines four times, with long queues outside polling stations well into the evening.
The election will decide a successor to outgoing leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
His eight years in power have been characterised by economic turmoil and Western sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear programme.
Although all six candidates are seen as conservatives, one of them - cleric Hassan Rouhani - has been reaching out to reformists in recent days.
Mr Rouhani has spoken publicly about the need to re-engage with the West and has promised to free political prisoners and reform the media.
The surge of support for him came after Mohammad Reza Aref, the only reformist candidate in the race, announced on Tuesday that he was withdrawing on the advice of pro-reform ex-President Mohammad Khatami.
Mr Rouhani now has the endorsement of two ex-presidents - Mr Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - who was disqualified from the race by the powerful Guardian Council.
However, Mr Rouhani faces a tough challenge from hardline candidates, including top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and Tehran's mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.
The remaining candidates are seen as conservatives close to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Polls eventually closed at 23:00 local time (18:30 GMT) and counting started soon afterwards. Results are due in the next 24 hours.
Continue reading the main story Iranian presidential elections
- Six candidates running
- Race is seen as contest between Ayatollah Ali Khamenei loyalists and moderate reformers
- About 50 million eligible voters
- If no candidate wins 50.1%, run-off held on 21 June
About 50 million people were eligible to vote and analysts predicted a high turnout.
If no candidate secures 50.1% or more of the vote a second round will be held in a week's time.
As polls closed, representatives of all six candidates issued a joint statement urging their supporters to remain calm until the official results are known.
"We ask people not to pay attention to rumours of victory parades being organised and to avoid gathering before the official results," the statement said.
Earlier, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar told state TV that any presidential candidates unhappy with the results would have three days to lodge complaints to the vetting body, the Guardian Council.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cast his ballot in Tehran accompanied by Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi and government spokesman Gholam Hoseyn Elham, Fars news agency reported.
Journalists detained Friday's presidential election is the first since 2009, when protesters took to the streets alleging the results had been rigged in favour of Mr Ahmadinejad.
No foreign observers have monitored the poll and there have also been concerns that media coverage in the run-up was unfair.
Many reform newspapers have been shut down, access to the internet and foreign broadcasters restricted, and journalists detained.
On Thursday, the BBC accused the Iranian authorities of putting "unprecedented levels of intimidation" on BBC employees' families.
It said Iran had warned the families of 15 BBC Persian Service staff that they must stop working for the BBC or their lives in London would be endangered.
Tehran has so far made no comment on the allegation.
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Blackadder pair on honours list
By Anonymous on Jun 14, 2013 05:30 pm 14 June 2013 Last updated at 17:30 ET 
Birthday Honours recipients include Rowan Atkinson, Adele, Anish Kapoor, Brendan Barber, PJ Harvey and Tony Robinson
Blackadder actor Tony Robinson has been knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours on a list that also includes his co-star Rowan Atkinson.
Sir Tony is famed for his role as long-suffering manservant Baldrick to Atkinson's Blackadder character on the BBC historical comedy series and his catchphrase "I have a cunning plan".
He is recognised for his public and political work, while Atkinson's CBE is for services to drama and charity.
Sculptor Anish Kapoor and former secretary general of the TUC, Brendan Barber, are among the other knights.
Chart-topper Adele follows up her best song Oscar win with an MBE, and the same honour goes to singer-songwriter PJ Harvey.
There are OBEs for broadcaster Clare Balding, golfer Paul Lawrie, Red Bull Formula One team principal Christian Horner and novelist Jackie Collins.
Blackadder stars Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson are reunited on the Honours List
Former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell joins the elite Companions of Honour, along with the director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota, for services to art.
A total of 1,180 people are named on the Birthday Honours list - nearly half of them women - and with 72% of the recipients people who are actively engaged in charitable or voluntary work within their local communities.
The list recognises 28 headteachers, with knighthoods or damehoods for five, including Kenneth Gibson, who leads two Tyneside schools described as "beacons of hope" in a deprived area.
Wendy Parry, who helped set up the Foundation for Peace after her 12-year-old son Tim - and three-year-old Johnathan Ball - were killed in the 1993 Warrington bombing by the IRA, is made an OBE.
The charity co-founded with her husband Colin, who received the same honour himself in 2004, helps support people harmed by political violence and terrorism and Mrs Parry said: "Everything we have done in the past has been to keep Tim and Jonathan's names alive. This could be another thing that will help do that."
Olympic designs Sir Tony's knighthood recognises his "lifetime of public and political service with a career as an actor, theatre director, children's author and television presenter".
The 66-year-old said he had been left "a little gob-smacked".
"I also pledge that from this day on I'll slaughter all unruly dragons, and rescue any damsels in distress who request my help."
The one-time member of Labour Party's National Executive Committee added: "I'll use my new title with abandon to highlight the causes I believe in, particularly the importance of culture, the arts and heritage in our society, and the plight of the infirm elderly and their carers."
Among the sporting honours is an OBE for Red Bull Formula One team principal Christian Horner
Rowan Atkinson, who first found fame as part of the team behind Not The Nine O'Clock News in 1979 before going on to star in Blackadder - transmitted by the BBC for the first time exactly 30 years ago on Saturday - went on to find international stardom as the bumbling Mr Bean.
He said his CBE was a "genuine surprise and... a great honour".
The same honour also goes to ceramic artist Grayson Perry and veteran screen and stage actress Claire Bloom, who suggested her years in the limelight would not prevent her being nervous about attending an investiture at Buckingham Palace.
Brendan Barber, 62, led the TUC from June 2003 until his retirement at the end of 2012 and his knighthood was said to be for his work as "the most visible ambassador and champion for the trade union movement over the last decade".
India-born Sir Anish's achievements include the ArcelorMittal Orbit - the 115m (377ft)-high twisted steel tower in the Olympic Park in Stratford.
Others whose designs became synonymous with the 2012 London Games are also on the list.
Thomas Heatherwick, the designer behind the Olympic cauldron, has been made a CBE, while there are OBEs for Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, who designed the London Olympics and Paralympics torch.
Wales' richest man Two MPs are knighted - former Public Accounts Committee chairman Edward Leigh, and Lib Dem Andrew Stunell, who helped negotiate the government's Coalition Agreement - and there is a CBE for former Scottish Tory leader David McLetchie.
A knighthood goes to Scotland's most senior policeman Stephen House, the first chief constable of the Police Scotland national force, and ex-Met Police deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who led the investigations into phone hacking until her retirement last year, is made a CBE.
Colin and Wendy Parry set up their charity almost 20 years ago
Other new peers include Nigel Bogle, co-founder of advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty; John Lewis chairman Charlie Mayfield, and Wales' richest man, billionaire venture capitalist and philanthropist Michael Moritz, whose donation of £75m kicked off a scholarship programme at Oxford University.
Diana Ellis, executive chair of British Rowing; Nicola Anne Cullum, professor of nursing at the University of Manchester; author Hermione Lee, professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, and collector and philanthropist Janet Wolfson De Botton are among the Dames.
Others appointed OBE include fashion journalist Hilary Alexander, GQ magazine editor Dylan Jones, and Labyrinth author and founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Kate Mosse.
Singer and broadcaster Aled Jones; comedian Rob Brydon; actor, director and playwright David Haig, and Chocolat author Joanne Harris., all become MBEs.
Continue reading the main story The Honours System
Commonly awarded ranks:
- Companion of order - Limited to 65 people. Recipients wear the initials CH after their name
- Knight or Dame
- CBE - Commander of the Order of the British Empire
- OBE - Officer of the Order of the British Empire
- MBE - Member of the Order of the British Empire
- BEM - British Empire Medal
From the field of health, there is a knighthood for Professor Peng Tee Khaw, from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and one of the foremost ophthalmologist researchers in the field of glaucoma and ocula healing.
A scientist who identified one of the genes that causes breast cancer has also been knighted. Prof Michael Stratton's research on the Cancer Genome Project at the Sanger Institute has improved diagnosis and treatment.
Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, is made a CBE and Stephen Myers, the Belfast physicist who helped find the Higgs boson particle, an OBE.
University of Southampton Professor Nigel Shadbolt an expert in web science and co-founder of the Open Data Institute with world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is knighted, along with David Scott who led the UK's digital TV switchover project.
The birthday honours are the second time the Cabinet Office has published details of why recipients of the highest awards have been chosen. The citations followed a complaint from MPs on the Public Administration Select Committee that the process should be more transparent.
The sporting honours also include MBEs for nine-time women's World Professional Darts champion Catrina Gulliver, and former England cricket player Wasim Khan, for services to the sport and the community.
Ceramic artist Grayson Perry has been made a CBE
Among the others made MBEs are Mark Edwards, master boatbuilder whose team created the Gloriana rowbarge that led the Diamond Jubilee river pageant, and Clare Smyth, chef patron at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and the first British female to hold three Michelin stars.
The BBC's Sue Lloyd-Roberts becomes a CBE for services to journalism while news presenter Julia Somerville's OBE recognises her work chairing the advisory committee on the government art collection.
Helen Butler, the president of the Red Squirrel Trust, becomes an MBE for her work helping to conserve the animals on the Isle of Wight, while Robert Bryant, founder of a club supporting people recovering from strokes in Cheshire, and Anne Bickmore, who founded the charity abcfund to help underprivileged children in East Sussex ,are among the 297 recipients of the British Empire Medal.
Britons named on the Diplomatic Service and Overseas list for work aboard include Kevin Fitzgerald, chief of the Copyright Licensing Agency and chairman of the charity, Prisoners Abroad, who is knighted; Jane Nicholson, founder and chairwoman of the UK-Romanian children's charity, Fara, who becomes an MBE, and the UK ambassador to Algerian, Martyn Roper, an OBE in recognition of his response to the In Amenas hostage crisis.
Read in browser » Google beams internet from balloons
By Anonymous on Jun 15, 2013 12:19 am 15 June 2013 Last updated at 00:19 ET By Leo Kelion Technology reporter, BBC News 
Google plans to launch about 30 balloons from New Zealand's South Island in the first stage of its trial
Google is launching balloons into near space to provide internet access to buildings below on the ground.
About 30 of the superpressure balloons are being launched from New Zealand from where they will drift around the world on a controlled path.
Attached equipment will offer 3G-like speeds to 50 testers in the country.
Access will be intermittent, but in time the firm hopes to build a big enough fleet to offer reliable links to people living in remote areas.
It says that balloons could one day be diverted to disaster-hit areas to aid rescue efforts in situations where ground communication equipment has been damaged.
But one expert warns that trying to simultaneously navigate thousands of the high-altitude balloons around the globe's wind patterns will prove a difficult task to get right.
Airborne for months Google calls the effort Project Loon and acknowledges it is "highly experimental" at this stage.
Continue reading the main story What are superpressure balloons?
Superpressure balloons are made out of tightly sealed plastic capable of containing highly pressurised lighter-than-air gases.
The aim is to keep the volume of the balloon relatively stable even if there are changes in temperature.
This allows them to stay aloft longer and be better at maintaining a specific altitude than balloons which stretch and contract.
In particular it avoids the problem of balloons descending at night when their gases cool.
The concept was first developed for the US Air Force in the 1950s using a stretched polyester film called Mylar.
The effort resulted in the Ghost (global horizontal sounding technique) programme which launched superpressure balloons from Christchurch, New Zealand to gather wind and temperature data over remote regions of the planet.
Over the following decade 88 balloons were launched, the longest staying aloft for 744 days.
More recently, Nasa has experimented with the technology and suggested superpressure balloons could one day be deployed into Mars's atmosphere.
Each balloon is 15m (49.2ft) in diameter - the length of a small plane - and filled with lifting gases. Electronic equipment hangs underneath including radio antennae, a flight computer, an altitude control system and solar panels to power the gear.
Google aims to fly the balloons in the stratosphere, 20km (12 miles) or more above the ground, which is about double the altitude used by commercial aircraft and above controlled airspace.
Google says each should stay aloft for about 100 days and provide connectivity to an area stretching 40km in diameter below as they travel in a west-to-east direction.
The firm says the concept could offer a way to connect the two-thirds of the world's population which does not have affordable net connections.
"It's pretty hard to get the internet to lots of parts of the world," Richard DeVaul, chief technical architect at Google[x] - the division behind the scheme - told the BBC.
"Just because in principle you could take a satellite phone to sub-Saharan Africa and get a connection there, it doesn't mean the people have a cost-effective way of getting online.
"The idea behind Loon was that it might be easier to tie the world together by using what it has in common - the skies - than the process of laying fibre and trying to put up cellphone infrastructure."
A group of about 50 testers based in Christchurch and Canterbury, New Zealand, have had special antennae fitted to their properties to receive the balloons' signals.
Google now plans to partner with other organisations to fit similar equipment to other buildings in countries on a similar latitude, so that people in Argentina, Chile, South Africa and Australia can also take part in the trial.
However, they typically remain airborne for up to a few days at a time rather than for months, and are not as wide-ranging. One expert cautioned that Google might find it harder to control its fleet than it hoped.
"The practicalities of controlling lighter-than-air machines are well known because of the vagaries of the weather," said Prof Alan Woodward, visiting professor at the University of Surrey's department of computing.
"It's going to take a lot of effort to make these things wander in an autonomous way and I think it may take them a little longer to get right than they might believe."
Read in browser » UK to 'sweep away' tax secrecy - PM
By Anonymous on Jun 15, 2013 12:43 am 15 June 2013 Last updated at 00:43 ET 
David Cameron described shell companies used for tax purposes as "shadowy"
The government will "sweep away" tax secrecy by forcing so-called shell companies to declare who makes money out of them, David Cameron has said.
The prime minister told the Guardian that "secretive companies in secretive locations" were used to avoid tax.
Businesses would have to have adequate, accurate and current information registered at Companies House by law.
Tax evasion and avoidance may be a key issue at the G8 meeting of world leaders in County Fermanagh this week.
'Shadowy' firms In an interview, Mr Cameron said: "We need to know more about who owns which company - beneficial ownership - because that is how a lot of people and a lot of companies avoid tax, using secretive companies in secretive locations.
"The way to sweep away the secrecy and get to the bottom of tax avoidance and tax evasion and cracking down on corruption is to have a register of beneficial ownerships so the tax authorities can see who owns beneficially every company."
The prime minister described such shell companies as "shadowy".
The register would be available only to authorities such as HM Revenue and Customs in the first instance but the government would consult on making it public.
Mr Cameron said he would like the register to be available to everyone but "I do not want to disadvantage Britain by doing something others won't do".
At summit talks in Brussels last month, EU leaders said they were committed to tackling tax evasion.
European Council president Herman Van Rompuy said there was a "strong political will" in Europe to make tax systems fairer.
A key goal was to prevent multinational firms exploiting legal loopholes on tax.
British territories Mr Cameron is expected to ask leaders including US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to sign up to a new set of core principles on tax at the G8 summit at Loch Erne.
Forty-eight hours before the meeting the prime minister will call on businesses, governments and society in general to back the G8's priorities, under its UK presidency, aimed at boosting jobs and growth and reducing poverty.
Mr Cameron will also tell the leaders of Britain's Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to clamp down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance when they meet in Downing Street before the Prime Minister flies off to Northern Ireland.
Places such as Bermuda, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man will be represented at the meeting.
Christian Aid has said that banking practices in tax havens linked to the UK are costing the world's poor billions of pounds.
In a report, the charity said the territories were the largest source of investment to developing countries.
But it estimated that these nations were losing tax worth £100bn a year because of the way money was moved through havens.
Christian Aid called on Mr Cameron to tighten financial controls on the UK's territories.
Read in browser » Facebook reveals US data requests
By Anonymous on Jun 14, 2013 11:59 pm 14 June 2013 Last updated at 21:45 ET 
Facebook received 9,000-10,000 requests for user data from US government entities in the second half of 2012, the company has revealed.
The firm said the requests related to 18,000-19,000 user accounts and covered criminal and national security issues.
Leaks by an ex-government worker this month suggested a much larger electronic spying operation than had previously been admitted.
The US maintains the programme helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks.
Read in browser » Energy firm urges 'petrol' pricing
By Anonymous on Jun 15, 2013 01:38 am 15 June 2013 Last updated at 00:16 ET 
EDF Energy compared the idea to a petrol forecourt where there is a single-pricing system for fuel
One of the UK's biggest energy suppliers has called for single-unit pricing for gas and electricity to help consumers compare tariffs as easily as they currently shop around for petrol.
EDF Energy said it would introduce the system if all other suppliers did too.
The energy regulator Ofgem said the proposed scheme would not be as easy to implement as it might appear.
This was because of the number of payment options and special "dual fuel" packages that currently existed.
A plan by Ofgem to simplify the energy market will be included in the forthcoming Energy Bill.
It will require companies to limit the number of tariffs on offer to four for each of gas and electricity.
But EDF said that plan was still too complicated.
'Simple way' The French-owned firm called for all companies to set a single-unit price for gas and another for electricity.
It compared the idea to a petrol forecourt, saying it would mean customers could easily spot who was offering the lowest prices for fuel - just as easily as customers who drive between different petrol stations can instantly see where the best prices are offered.
But EDF said it would only implement such a pricing scheme if all the other energy firms followed suit.
Richard Lloyd, executive director of consumer group Which?, said simplifying tariffs would help customers.
"When we've tested prices being presented in this simple way we've found eight in 10 consumers can readily spot the best price for them," he said.
"So the current system is too complicated, the regulator and the government want to simplify the energy market for consumers, and the reforms they're proposing at the moment are still too complex."
However, the UK's largest energy supplier, British Gas, rejected the proposal.
BBC business correspondent Joe Lynam said normally consumer choice was a good thing but the hundreds of different types of tariffs had left consumers confused.
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