Australian DJs Behind Royal Prank May Face Police Probe

The two Australian DJs who pulled the prank call on the U.K. hospital where Kate Middleton was staying are now in hiding and may soon have to face police after the death of a nurse caught in the hoax.

This morning, there are also new questions about whether DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian, radio shock jocks at Sydney's 2Day FM broke laws after they recorded the private conversation when they pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles.

British police have also contacted Australian police about a possible probe into the prank call, The Associated Press reported Sunday.

Rhys Holleran, CEO of Southern Cross Austereo, the parent company of Sydney's 2Day FM radio station said no laws were broken.

The prank had been cleared by the Australian radio station's lawyers. Holleran said the DJs followed the company's procedures before broadcasting the call.

"I think the more important question here is that we're very confident that we haven't done anything illegal. Our main concern at this point in time is what has happened is incredibly tragic and we're deeply saddened and we're incredibly affected by that," Holleran said Saturday.

READ: Kate Middleton's Hospital Falls for Prank Call From Radio Station

The hoax has caused public outcry after the death of a nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, who connected the pair to the Duchess' room.

Saldanha was found dead Friday morning after police were called to an address near the hospital to "reports of a woman found unconscious," according to a statement from Scotland Yard.

Circumstances of her death are still being investigated, but are not suspicious at this stage, authorities said earlier.

Lord Glenarthur, the chairman of King Edward VII's Hospital, the U.K. hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was receiving treatment, condemned the prank Saturday in a letter to the Max Moore-Wilton, chairman of Southern Cross Austereo, the Australian radio station's parent company.

Glenarthur said the prank humiliated "two dedicated and caring nurses," and the consequences were "tragic beyond words," The Associated Press reported.

Max Moore-Wilton, the chairman of Southern Cross Austereo, said in a letter to Lord Glenarthur Sunday that the company is reviewing the station's broadcast policies, the AP reported.

"I can assure you we are taking immediate action and reviewing the broadcast and processes involved," Moore-Wilton said in the letter. "As we have said in our own statements on the matter, the outcome was unforeseeable and very regrettable."

Saldanha came to England from India nine years ago, with her husband and two children.

On Facebook, her 14-year-old daughter wrote this weekend, simply: "I miss you, I loveeee you."

Saldanha worked as a nurse at King Edward VII private hospital for four years. Her family lives 100 miles away in Bristol, but while on shift she slept in a residence for nurses.

With no receptionist on duty overnight she answered the prank call and put it through.

The hospital called her a "first-class nurse" and "a well-respected and popular member of the staff" and extended "deepest sympathies" to family and friends, saying that "everyone is shocked" at this "tragic event."

The duchess spent three days at the hospital undergoing treatment for hyperemesis gravidarum, severe or debilitating nausea and vomiting. She was released from the hospital Thursday morning.

The hospital apologized for the mistake.

"The call was transferred through to a ward, and a short conversation was held with one of the nursing staff," the hospital said in a statement. "King Edward VII's Hospital deeply regrets this incident."

The radio station also apologized for the prank call.

"2Day FM sincerely apologizes for any inconvenience caused by the inquiry to Kate's hospital. The radio segment was done with lighthearted intentions," the station said in a statement earlier.

DJs in Hiding

Greig and Christian are said to be in a fragile emotional state since Saldanha was found dead on Friday.

Station executives said the hosts are seeking the help of counselors.

"These people aren't machines, they're human beings," Holleran told reporters on Saturday. "We're all affected by this."

The DJs are in hiding and their Facebook and twitter accounts are now dark.

The Sydney radio station -- famous for its pranks and outrageousness -- has suspended all advertising in the face an advertising boycott and Greig and Christian have been pulled off the air.

Last spring, the station was warned by Australia's broadcast regulator about violations of the "decency provision" of the country's broadcast code.

Night Out Without Kate

Prince William was on his own Saturday night at a charity ball, for his first public function since his wife's pregnancy was announced.

In conversation he quipped about his Kate's illness: "I don't know why they call it morning sickness -- they should call it all day and all night sickness."

PHOTOS: The Life and Times of Kate Middleton

He did not talk about the tragic death of the nurse who fell victim to the hoax call, but he and Kate have issued a statement of sympathy for the family.

"The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are deeply saddened to learn of the death of Jacintha Saldanha," a spokesman from St. James Palace said in a statement.

For Kate, it is yet another test of her new life as a very public royal. In September, a tabloid photographer using an extremely long lens photographed her topless on a private vacation.

"While she understood what she was taking on, there have been a couple of things that will have made them go oh my goodness and think we didn't think it would be that bad in this day and age," said Victoria Murphy, royal reporter with The Daily Mirror.

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Australia royal hoax radio station to review procedures

PERTH, Australia/LONDON (Reuters) - An Australian radio station under fire over a prank call to a hospital treating Prince William's pregnant wife Kate said on Sunday it would review its procedures after a nurse's apparent suicide.

New South Wales Police said they were in contact with London's police force and were ready to assist in any investigation, as the incident sparked fresh soul-searching over the behaviour of the media.

Jacintha Saldanha, 46, was found dead in staff accommodation near London's King Edward VII hospital on Friday after putting the hoax call through to a colleague who unwittingly disclosed details of Kate's morning sickness to 2DayFM's presenters.

A recording of the call, broadcast repeatedly by the station, rapidly became an internet hit and was reprinted as a transcript in many newspapers.

Public amusement at the prank turned to disgust after news of Saldanha's death swept around the globe. The station's owners pulled presenters Michael Christian and Mel Greig off the air as leading companies cancelled advertising.

The station's parent company, Southern Cross Austereo (SCA), said it would fully cooperate in any investigations in a letter to the head of the King Edward hospital.

"I can assure you we are taking immediate action and reviewing the broadcast and processes involved," SCA chairman Max Moore-Wilton said.

"We are all saddened by the events of the last few days. They are truly tragic... The outcome was unforeseeable and very regrettable," he added.

The station's presenters have come under attack from around the world on social media sites and were "extremely distressed", an SCA spokeswoman said.

Both were keen to speak publicly about the incident, but were in too fragile a condition to do so, the spokeswoman added.

The hospital's chairman Lord Glenarthur had described their actions as "appalling" in a letter to SCA on Saturday.

Saldanha, married with two children, was originally from India and came to Britain around 10 years ago.

Her husband's family in the southern Indian state of Karnataka said she had spoken regularly to them but neither she or her husband had mentioned the hoax call, they told Britain's Observer newspaper.

A post mortem into the cause of her death will be held early next week, possibly as soon as Monday. An inquest will follow, and London police may want statements from the two presenters, although they had yet to make a formal request.

"It's been indicated that the London Metropolitan Police may wish to speak to the people involved in the matter from 2DayFM," said New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner Nick Kaldas.

"But we haven't been asked to do anything yet, and we certainly have not been asked to interview anyone, or line up any interviews for the Met," he added.

The tragic fallout from the radio stunt has rekindled memories of the death of William's mother Diana in a Paris car crash in 1997 and threatens to cast a pall over the birth of his and Kate's first child.

The couple's baby will be third in line to the British throne after William and his father Prince Charles.

The royal family are enjoying a boost in popularity in Britain after a period when they were seen as dated and out of touch.

William and Kate's wedding at London's Westminster Abbey last year rekindled public enthusiasm for royalty, which has been sustained during this year's jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth's 60 years as monarch.

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NZ gov't: Building that collapsed in Christchurch quake was poorly built and designed

SYDNEY - A six-story office building that collapsed and killed 115 people in New Zealand's devastating earthquake last year was poorly designed by an inexperienced engineer, inadequately constructed and should never have been issued a building permit, a government report said Monday.

The Canterbury Television (CTV) building crumbled to the ground during the 6.1-magnitude earthquake that rocked Christchurch on Feb. 22, 2011. The building's collapse was responsible for nearly two-thirds of the 185 deaths from the quake.

Monday's report was the final release from the government-ordered commission that spent months investigating the buildings damaged in the quake. Findings the commission released in February concluded that the CTV building was made of weak columns and concrete and did not meet standards when it was built in 1986. The building's designer contested those findings.

Prime Minister John Key said building failures were responsible for 175 of the 185 deaths from the quake.

"We owed it to them, their loved ones left behind, and those people badly injured in the earthquake, to find answers as to why some buildings failed so severely," Key said in a statement.

The report found several deficiencies in the CTV building's engineering design and said the city council should never have issued the building a permit because the design did not comply with the standards at the time. The commission also concluded that there were problems with the building's construction.

The commission blamed the engineers from Alan Reay Consultants Ltd. for developing an inadequate and noncompliant design and city officials for not noticing the problems.

The report said the structural design was completed by engineer David Harding, who had no experience designing multistory buildings like the CTV and was "working beyond his competence." Yet Harding never sought assistance from his boss, Alan Reay. The report blamed Reay for leaving Harding to work unsupervised, despite knowing that Harding lacked experience.

The report also found that Reay pressured city officials to approve the building despite them having some reservations about it.

Harding's lawyer, Michael Kirkland, said neither he nor his client had read through the report so they couldn't comment. Reay also declined to comment.

The report noted that the building had been issued a "green sticker" following a magnitude-7.0 earthquake in September 2010, signalling authorities had given it the thumbs-up for people to continue using it.

An investigation by The Associated Press last year found that inspection checks routinely used across the world to verify the safety of buildings following earthquakes fail to account for how well those buildings will withstand future quakes. The AP found that building occupants and public officials in Christchurch did not understand that a "green sticker" doesn't mean the building has undergone a thorough analysis of its structural health, nor that it will stay intact during future quakes.

The commission's report found that the CTV building was given a green sticker after being inspected by just three building officials, none of whom was an engineer. The commission recommended that in the future, only trained building safety evaluators be authorized to inspect buildings after earthquakes, and that government agencies should research how to account for aftershocks.

Maan Alkaisi, whose wife Maysoon Abbas died in the building's collapse, praised the commission for its thorough investigation.

"Now we know that there were many design deficiencies in the CTV building and we know who was responsible for these design deficiencies and why," Alkaisi told the AP. "I don't want to see this happening again, so we have to make sure that the recommendation made by the royal commission is adopted, that much better building standard is adopted and much better engineering practice is also adopted."

Brian Kennedy, whose wife Faye died when the building fell, said the report had brought him a measure of closure and that he was not interested in punishing the engineers or construction team involved.

"I think (I'm) trying to look forward a little more positively now," Kennedy told the AP. "Time heals a wee bit — not everything, but it makes it a little easier."

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Rugby-Lock Williams named Blues captain in Mealamu's absence

Dec 10 (Reuters) - All Black lock Ali Williams will captain the Blues during the 2013 Super Rugby season in the absence of Keven Mealamu, the Auckland-based team said on Monday.

Veteran hooker Mealamu is on extended leave and will not return until mid-March as he recovers from the rigours of a hectic 2012 season with the All Blacks and the Blues, who finished last in the New Zealand conference.

"I think it's an incredibly important time for Ali Williams," Blues head coach John Kirwan said in a statement.

"I think he's got a heck of a lot to offer this franchise, he's a world class lock with the ability to lead a team and I'm extremely enthusiastic and positive about this decision."

Kirwan said the 31-year-old Williams' recent history of injuries was taken into consideration before selecting the 77-test veteran for the job.

"He's had a bad run of injuries but I think he's ready for this because he's had a bad run and some people think he's finished. I don't believe that and neither does he," the coach said after the side's first official day of pre-season training.

Williams himself was no less excited.

"I am a hugely passionate man when it comes to the Blues and it is a great honour to lead the team next year," Williams said.

"It's an extremely tough job and I respect that. There have been many great leaders of this team before me and my job along with the team is to strengthen the strong traditions that the Blues have."

The Blues kick off their 2013 Super Rugby campaign against the Hurricanes in a Feb. 23 match in Auckland.

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Australian DJs behind royal hoax call tearfully apologize following nurse's death

SYDNEY - The Australian radio hosts behind a hoax phone call to the British hospital where the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge was staying said through tears that they were shattered upon learning that the nurse who was duped by their prank had died.

2DayFM radio DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian have faced worldwide outrage over the hoax. They spoke publicly about the prank for the first time Monday in a televised interview with Australia's "A Current Affair."

Nurse Jacintha Saldanha answered the phone last week when the pair called, impersonating Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles. They received and broadcast confidential information about the duchess's medical condition.

Saldanha died three days later. The cause is not yet known, but critics of the DJs assume stress from the prank played a role.

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UN chief urges faster response to global warming

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday urged governments to speed up talks to forge a joint response to global warming, describing it as an "existential challenge for the whole human race."

Ban addressed the opening of the high-level segment of annual U.N. climate talks, involving environment ministers and climate officials from nearly 200 countries. They're discussing future emissions reductions and climate aid to poor countries.

Pointing to the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in North America and the Caribbean in late October, along with other weather disasters this year, Ban said "abnormal" has become the new normal as the world warms, presenting a "crisis, a threat to us all, our economies, our security and the well-being of our children."

Climate scientists say it's difficult to link a single weather event to global warming, but some say the damage caused by Sandy was made worse by the rise of sea level.

"No one is immune to climate change, rich or poor," Ban said. "It is an existential challenge for the whole human race." He warned, "the pace and scale of action are still not enough."

Ban said countries are "in a race against time" to reach their goal of keeping the temperature rise below a threshold of 2 degrees C (3.6 F), compared to preindustrial times, when fossil fuels were not being used on today's massive scale, fueling engines of all sizes.

Climate scientists have observed changes including melting Arctic ice and permafrost, rising sea levels and acid content of oceans, shifting rainfall patterns with impacts on floods and droughts.

They say low-lying Pacific island states, in particular, are losing shoreline to rising seas, expanding from heat and the runoff of melting ice.

Ban noted that time is running out for governments to act, citing recent reports showing rising emissions of greenhouse gases, which most scientists say are causing the warming trend. A small minority of climate scientists still reject that.

"Let us avoid all the skepticism. Let us prove wrong all these doubts on climate change," Ban said at a side event earlier Tuesday.

Governments represented at the Doha conference have started talks on crafting a new global climate treaty that would take effect in 2020. They are also discussing how to rein in greenhouse gas emissions before then, partly by extending the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty limiting the emissions of most industrialized countries that expires this year.

One of the most hotly debated issues in the talks that started last week has been the pledges by rich countries three years ago to deliver financing to help poor countries to switch to cleaner energy sources and adapt to climate change.

Developing countries complained of the lack of firm commitments on financing in Doha. On Tuesday, Britain on announced three initiatives totaling 133 million pounds over the next three years for climate-related projects in developing countries.

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Texas teen takes home $100K national science prize

WASHINGTON (AP) — A high school student from Texas  has won a $100,000 scholarship for a developing a computer algorithm that helps robots navigate around obstacles, an algorithm that could be used in applications like driverless cars.

The Siemens Foundation announced the winners of its annual science competition for high school students during a ceremony in Washington on Tuesday. Top individual honors went to 17-year-old Kensen Shi of College Station, Texas. He combined two previous algorithms into a new and more efficient one that helps robots find a safe path around obstacles.

Shi, a senior at A&M Consolidated High School, said his algorithm could also be used in robots in factories and in animation and video game design to create more realistic motion for virtual characters.

Top team honors went to a trio of students from George W. Hewlett High School in Hewlett, N.Y., for their research on a protein linked to tumor formation. Seniors Jeremy Appelbaum, William Gil and Allen Shin, all 17, will share a $100,000 scholarship.

Six individuals and six teams were competing for awards. The students were the winners of regional competitions.

The runners-up in the team and individual competitions went home with $50,000 scholarships. Jiayi Peng, 17, a senior at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y., won second place for her work building and studying a model that simulates the neuron network in the brain. Peng, the only female competing for individual honors, said she's interested in studying math or physics in college.

Second place team honors went to Daniel Fu and Patrick Tan of Indiana, who created new math techniques that make it easier to analyze networks of genes and proteins in the body. The networks are responsible for body rhythms involved in things like sleep. The 16-year-old juniors got the idea for their project after watching the 2010 movie "Inception," which is about sleep and dreams.

The Siemens Foundation is a philanthropic arm of Siemens USA, which is a subsidiary of German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG. The Siemens Competition began in 1998. This year more than 1,500 projects were submitted to the competition, which is funded by the Siemens Foundation and administered by the College Board.

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Women can tell a cheating man just by looking at them - study

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Women can tell with some accuracy whether an unfamiliar male is faithful simply by looking at his face, but men seem to lack the same ability when checking out women, according to an Australian study published on Wednesday.

In a paper that appeared in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that women tended to make that judgement based on how masculine-looking the man was.

"Women's ratings of unfaithfulness showed small-moderate, significant correlations with measures of actual infidelity," wrote the team, led by Gillian Rhodes at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

"More masculine-looking men (were) rated as more probable to be unfaithful and having a sexual history of being more unfaithful."

Attractiveness was not a factor in the women making the link.

In the study, 34 men and 34 women were shown colour photographs of 189 Caucasian adult faces and asked to rate them for faithfulness.

The researchers compared their answers to the self-reported sexual histories of the 189 individuals and found that the women participants were better able to tell who was faithful and who was not.

"We provide the first evidence that faithfulness judgements, based solely on facial appearance, have a kernel of truth," they wrote in the paper.

Men, on the other hand, seemed to have no clue. They tended to perceive attractive, feminine women to be unfaithful, when there was no evidence that they were, the scientists noted.

Faithfulness is seen as important in the context of sexual relationships and mate choice, the scientists wrote in the paper. Men with unfaithful partners risk raising another man's child, while women with unfaithful partners risk losing some, or even all, parental and other resources to competitors.

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Government finds extra money for science in austere times

LONDON (Reuters) - Intense lobbying by Britain's science community seems to be paying off as Chancellor George Osborne announced an extra 600 million pounds for capital investment in science over the next three years.

The new money follows a string of recent decisions to spend more on science, including 50 million pounds for a graphene research centre in Manchester and a 30 percent increase in Britain's contribution to the European Space Agency.

Osborne's announcement in an Autumn budget update to parliament on Wednesday goes some way to reversing previous cuts and was welcomed by campaigners and leaders of British science.

"The announcement today of an additional 600 million pounds of capital investment will hopefully help ensure that our world leading scientists have world leading facilities with which to work," said Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, Britain's national science academy.

Mark Walport, head of the Wellcome Trust medical research charity, said Osborne was "right to recognise that investment in world-class science and the world-class infrastructure it requires must be integral to any strategy for driving growth, even in times of austerity."

The latest investment is in stark contrast to the cuts in other areas of government spending aimed at paying down the debts from the financial crisis.

The new funds will be used to back what the government sees as areas of scientific research that offer the best economic return.

Priority areas like advanced materials research, energy efficient computing and energy storage were outlined by Osborne in a speech at the Royal Society last month.

After that speech, Paul Nurse told Osborne: "Please remember to put your money where your mouth is."

Nurse welcomed Wednesday's announcement, saying innovation is key to economic growth and science is the raw material for that innovation.

"The Chancellor clearly understands this and his ongoing commitment to investing in science, despite the difficult financial circumstances, is very welcome."

In the wake of Osborne's November speech some critics warned of the danger of government trying to pick scientific "winners" and argued that focusing on particular areas could backfire.

Nurse echoed those fears on Wednesday, warning: "We must also make sure that we maintain capital and other support across a broad range of science."

Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering and a strong critic of the government's previous cuts to the science capital budget, welcomed the new money and told Reuters it means previous cuts have "mostly" been reversed.

"In the coming decades we won't be able to compete internationally on natural resources or cheap labour, so the government's plan to build British excellence in areas like synthetic biology and energy-efficient computing instead is absolutely critical," said Khan. ($1 = 0.6209 British pounds)

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Arctic's Record Melt Worries Scientists

 SAN FRANCISCO — Arctic glaciers retreated at record levels in 2012, while summer snow melted in the region much more rapidly than it has in the past, according to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).

The findings, presented here Wednesday (Dec. 5) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are part of the annual "Arctic Report Card," which was assembled by more than 140 scientists to assess the state of the North Pole.

The report found that Greenland's Arctic sea ice and glaciers were melting at a record rate and that sea-level rise has accelerated in the region. That has caused a population boom in lower-level organisms such as plankton, but has disrupted the life cycles of animals ranging from lemmings to the Arctic fox.

But the impacts of the warming Arctic may reach beyond the northern latitudes, said Jane Lubchenco, the undersecretary of commerce for oceans and the atmosphere for NOAA, during a press conference.

"What happens in the Arctic doesn't always stay in the Arctic. We're seeing Arctic changes in the ocean and the atmosphere that affect weather patterns elsewhere," she said.

Major melt

In 2012, Greenland saw the warmest summer in 170 years, said Jason E. Box, of the Byrd Polar Research Center.

And September sea-ice extent — the area of water with at least 15 percent sea ice — throughout the Arctic is the lowest on record (which dates to 1979), beating the previous record set in just 2007.

Melting of the Greenland ice sheet also beat previous records set in 2010, with almost the entire sheet melting by mid-July, Box said.

"The 40 largest glaciers lost an area about twice that of the previous decade average," he said. "Extensive surface melting was documented for the first time at the highest elevations of the ice sheet." [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

That's contributing to fast-rising seas and warmer ocean waters, Box added.

In addition, the higher melting has reduced the reflectivity of the ice surface, causing land areas to absorb more heat, which causes more melt in a self-reinforcing cycle, he said.

Summer snowmelt in the Northern Hemisphere also accelerated further decreasing the reflectivity of the land — as snow reflects more sunlight back to space than exposed land — and causing the land to trap more heat in a positive feedback cycle.

Life changes

All this warming has caused a change in the organisms that live in the North, said Martin Jeffries, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska and an editor of the report card.

"Unexpectedly large phytoplankton blooms have been observed this summertime," Jeffries said. Prior estimates of how much plankton was blooming may have been 10 times too low, he added.

In areas near melting sea ice, the tundra's permafrost, or permanently frozen soil, is also greening, with a longer summer season and warmer summers, he said. Permafrost temperatures 66 feet (20 meters) below the surface were the highest on record at eight of 10 observatories in Alaska, and matched the 2011 records at two sites.

That soil warming is affecting some of the iconic species of the Arctic, such as the lemmings or small rodents, whose life cycles are getting more chaotic and unpredictable, Jeffries said. Warming weather has also increased pressure on the Arctic fox, which relies on the lemming as its main food source.

"The larger red fox has been expanding its range northward, leading to predation on and competition with the Arctic fox for food and resources," he said.

These changes could impact areas other than the Arctic, Lubchenco said.

"We know that melting ice in Greenland can contribute to sea-level rise around the world, and many of the biological changes we are seeing around the world affect systems elsewhere, for instance migratory birds."

For instance, rising sea levels may have contributed to record surge heights along the U.S. coastline during Hurricane Sandy, Lubchenco told LiveScience.

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