Innovative do: Humans Are About To Land A Probe On A Comet For The First Time

Humans Are About To Land A Probe On A Comet For The First Time — Here's How To Watch Live

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Wednesday, Nov. 12 will either be history-making or heart-breaking.

That day will be the culmination of a ten-year project that has already taught us much about our solar system.

Ten years ago, the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta spacecraft to intercept a comet named 67P/Churyumox-Gerasimenko. For the last decade it has approached, orbited, smelled, and studied the comet, taking thousands of mind-blowing images along the way.

During all this time it's been carrying some very precious cargo.

On Nov. 12, Rosetta will deploy that cargo — the Philae lander — on humanity's mission to make physical contact with a comet for the first time ever.

The lander is scheduled to touch down on the comet at 10:35 am EST (7:35 am PST) on Wednesday, Nov. 12.

While we won't actually be able to see Philae land from Earth, we can experience this incredible moment through live broadcasts provided by ESA, NASA, and Slooh.

It will take Philae 7 hours to descend to the comet's surface — one of the most difficult maneuvers we've ever tried in space. For the scientists at the ESA and NASA — it will be 7 hours of terror.

Here's a handy infographic showing the steps of Philae's 7-hour descent, starting at 9:03 GMT (4:03 am EST) until the end, when Philae lands, at around 16:00 GMT (11:00 am EST). These events will actually take place about 27 minutes before we hear about them on Earth because comet 67P/Churyumox-Gerasimenko is roughly 300 million miles from us (also, wow).

rosetta philae lander ESA, NASA, and Slooh will offer broadcasts at different points during the event.

First up is ESA, which will begin a live broadcast tomorrow, Nov. 11 at 9:00 pm EST (7:00 PST). At this time, ESA will decide whether the mission is a "go" or a "no go." If it's a "go," that means the ESOC mission control will maneuver Rosetta into position to drop Philae.

For the next 24 hours, ESA will live stream (shown below) the ESOC Mission Control Room as it readies Philae for the drop. For a complete timeline of the events, visit ESA blog.

In addition to ESA, NASA will also broadcast the event. NASA's live stream, provided below, will begin Nov. 12 at 9:00 am EST and last until 11:30 am EST. It will include excerpts from ESA's broadcast and will include the crucial time, around 11:02 am EST, when we will know if Philae landed safely.

After Philae is scheduled to touch down, the live online observatory, Slooh, will host a special, one-hour broadcast starting Nov. 12 at 2:00 pm EST. The broadcast (embedded below) will include commentary from Slooh and ESA scientists as well as imagery of the comet from an observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands.

As Philae descends, it will take images of the comet and will continue snapping images after it lands. Philae will have enough battery power, scientists suspect, to obtain data for about two-and-a-half days after landing. During that time it will collect data from the surface to study the comet's composition.

According to the latest update from scientists involved with the Rosetta mission, both Rosetta and Philae are in "great shape" for Wednesday.

Comets, like 67P/Churyumox-Gerasimenko, could have supplied Earth with water that was essential for life. Discovering how the solar system evolved, including life on Earth, is one of the goals of the Rosetta mission.

CHECK OUT: Humans Just Got A First Close-Up Look At A Comet And It's Mind-Blowing

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Meet The Big Data Candidate Of The 2016 Presidential Race

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Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) believes he has discovered a "new way of governing" that could revolutionize Washington.

Throughout his political career, O'Malley has been obsessed with data. Now, he appears to be mulling whether to mount a potential primary challenger to 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton. If he does run, it seems his devotion to performance metrics could become a major part of his platform.

"It is not like the old way that was very often hierarchical, and bureaucratic, ideological — orders from on high that eventually make it to the bottom of the pyramid," O'Malley recently told Business Insider in his Annapolis office, which is adorned with historic paintings and war memorabilia. "It's relentlessly interactive. It is performance-measured."

Minutes before the interview, O'Malley completed one of his regular "StateStat" meetings where his data-centric methods were on full display.

During the meeting, the governor sat at the center of a table encircled by his top aides and uniformed state police troopers wielding tablets and laptops. Before a PowerPoint presentation began, two screen projectors displayed the motto: "A deadline is the difference between a dream and a goal."

Violent crime was the first item on the agenda. A map of Maryland showed a clear drop across various counties. However, there was one exception in the Western corner of the state: Garrett County, population roughly 30,000. The officers and O'Malley's team debated what caused the spike.

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"I know it's a drop in the bucket," one aide admitted while pressing for more details.

They moved on to other crime statistics. Each PowerPoint slide had either a colorful map or chart. Maryland’s governor was full of questions.

"Do we fund that?" he asked about domestic abuse coordinators at hospitals. "Have the frontline people seen that graph?"

O'Malley's queries continued throughout the meeting.

"Have you ever sat them down as a group and asked what they could be doing better?"

"Where are we on traffic fatalities? It's down, but what's the number?"

"What do the numbers say? This is our best graph?"

Afterwards, O'Malley told Business Insider visualizing data is a key component of his management style.

"I think I've always had a knack for the spatial and for understanding things spatially — how things are connected," he explained. "I think it's really illuminating and clarifying when you can actually chart, graph, and map problems, and opportunities, and interventions, and actions."

'Nothing Short of Confrontational'

O'Malley's interest in data-centric governing was inspired by a program associated with an unlikely role model for a progressive Democrat — former New York City mayor and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani.

During Giuliani's administration in the mid-1990s, the mayor and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton revolutionized the city's crime-fighting policy with a program known as CompStat that has been described as both a tool and a management philosophy. Short for "compare stats," CompStat isn't an especially complicated concept. Its central tenets are that police departments should track the specifics of crime data and complaints, deploy resources to troubled locations, and hold local commanders accountable for the results.

Bratton credited the program for helping him achieve record-breaking drops in crime. According to Newsday, hundreds of police agencies around the country now use a CompStat-like system.

"CompStat was one of the most revolutionary developments in policing in the last century," Vincent Henry, a former NYPD officer who worked with Bratton, told the paper. "It was revolutionary, it changed the way people do business, changed the way police think about crime."

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O'Malley, who was then a Baltimore city councilman, made a surprising bid for mayor in 1999 and reportedly campaigned on halving Baltimore's crippling crime rate. This would be no small feat: Constant homicides had painfully earned the city nicknames like "Bodymore, Murdaland" and "Bulletmore, Murderland." O'Malley has said Baltimore was then "the most violent and addicted big city in America."

As a white politician facing a majority-black electorate, it initially seemed the odds were against him. (He was an inspiration for the Tommy Carcetti character in "The Wire" but is said to still hate the show with a "taut fury.") In an election focused on crime, O'Malley nevertheless surged, got the support of important black leaders, and easily won his primary.

According to the Baltimore Sun, O'Malley never reached his goal of cutting the city's homicide rate from more than 300 to 175 annually. However, "he drove the killings down to 253 in 2003, and for the next six years Baltimore experienced the sharpest reduction in violent crime of any city in the country."

But O'Malley wasn't content to just apply the data-centered approach to crime, as Matt Gallagher, his former chief of staff, recalled.

"As things began to work on the policing side because of CompStat, then-Mayor O'Malley began to ask us questions. Like, 'Boy, I wish I had something like CompStat for the rest of the city," Gallagher told Business Insider.

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O'Malley ended up doing exactly that. Gallagher, who became director of the new "CitiStat" program, said O'Malley started with the department of public works but soon monitored everything from overtime hours to the time it took to fill potholes after a complaint.

Of course, O'Malley's administration didn't solely rely on statistics and charts. CitiStat also involved on-the-ground assessments of local agencies — and there were some surprises along the way.

"After we studied potholes for a while, we learned that ... only one in 10 potholes was being filled as the result of a complaint. We came out and gave the '48-hour pothole guarantee,'" Gallagher said. "People were really happy. We kind of took that same approach and applied it to things like graffiti and abandoned vehicle removal."

Gallagher said the program sometimes led O'Malley's staff to uncover waste and abuse in unexpected places.

"Site visits used to be a really big part of what we did — try and get out in the field and see what is going on. I remember in City Hall we went to a garage one day where vehicles were being worked on. We found a team of people who were grilling food, having a barbecue in the middle of the workday," he recalled. "Some were fired; some were disciplined. The barbecue equipment was moved."

CitiStat was credited as a massive success and was considered both effective and aggressive. In 2004, Baltimore won an "Innovations in American Government" award from Harvard's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovations, which called the city's program "nothing short of confrontational."

"In biweekly meetings, the manager of each city agency must stand at a podium and answer questions from a panel led by the mayor or his appointed inquisitor," the Ash Center said at the time. "CitiStat's primary innovation is its ability to tailor performance evaluations to each agency: the animal control manager must explain an increase in strays and propose a solution; the housing manager must explain a chart of vacant houses and the plans to resolve this problem; all managers may be asked to explain each hour of their department's overtime."

According to Gallagher, O'Malley was eager to apply CitiStat on an even bigger scale. In the 2006 governor's race, he earned the chance to fulfill this ambition when he rode that year's Democratic wave and unseated incumbent Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R).

"I think most people would say it was his signature management accomplishment as mayor of Baltimore. Fast forward to 2006, when the mayor ran for governor, he pledged that he was going to bring CitiStat to the state," Gallagher said. "He got inaugurated in January of 2007; two months later you had the first 'StateStat' meeting."

Bob Behn, a Harvard Professor who wrote a book about the CompStat and CitiStat programs, The PerformanceStat Potential, told Business Insider the transition from city to state analytical programs wasn't simple. Many city services are relatively direct and easily converted into statistics — such as the number of potholes filled, or abandoned houses renovated — while state services involve more relatively complex outcomes.

"The city was filling potholes, right? That's very operational, easy to count, easy for citizens to see, easy for citizens to complain about. ... They had to make the leap to the state where they weren't doing the same sort of operational thing," Behn said. "The ability to make that transition was not something that everybody could have done, let's just put it that way."

statestat baystat Still, today, StateStat has expanded to cover a plethora of wide-ranging issues with specific policy goals. They include: reducing the nitrogen and phosphorous in the Chesapeake Bay through "Baystat," reducing infant mortality 10% by 2017, and doubling transit ridership by 2020. Touting O'Malley's analytics, Governing magazine put him on the cover in 2009.

Of course, by presenting specific goals, O'Malley also sets himself up to fail when they aren't achieved.

For example, progress on the transit ridership goal is lagging. The StateStat website has a red downward arrow next to the substance abuse section, noting: "-7.4% Progress towards Accidental or Undetermined Intoxication Death Reduction Goal of 20 percent in Maryland."

"There's lots of political people that would say, 'Don't do that, you have an election coming up,'" O'Malley said of the potential for public failure inherent in his program. "The reality is what the reality is: We're losing too many people to heroin overdoses, but it's not for lack of being aware of it. It's not for lack of doing things to combat it."

He soon added: "It was the rare mayor — man or woman — who would already have a term under their belt that would be willing to embrace this. So, I've found newer mayors did this more freely because they did not have to own the past performance and the past numbers."

'What Would It Take to Do It on the Federal Level?'

When asked about creating a "stat" program for the federal government, O'Malley recalled a conversation he once had with Jack Maple, the architect of CompStat in New York who worked with him to bring the program to Baltimore.

"I said, 'Jack, we should do this in a few departments of Baltimore City.' And Jack said that, 'You should do it for the entire city.' I said, 'Well the city might be too big.' He says, 'No. It's not too big. But because it's big, that should mean you want to do it throughout the city,' ... It's even more urgently needed the larger an organization, because the number of combinations of actions become more multiple and more layered. All the more important that there be a management discipline, a management rhythm — a visible, measurable way to determine where our dollars go," O'Malley recounted.

AP090511020506 It's difficult to know what exactly is in O'Malley's head when it comes to his presidential ambitions, but it's clear he has them. Unlike every other Democrat — including Clinton — O'Malley is attending local, small-ball campaign events and deploying political staff to key presidential primary states' local races. Some speculate he could be aiming for something more modest, such as the vice presidency or a cabinet position in a Clinton administration.

O'Malley will only say he is "seriously considering" a run for president. In spite of this, O'Malley was willing to offer some not-so-subtle hints that he's contemplating bringing his data-based approach to the White House.

"What would it take to do it on the federal level? The same thing it takes to do at the mayoral level or the gubernatorial level. And that's executive commitment," said O'Malley. "If the executive, the man or woman standing at the center of the circle, isn't committed to create this new way of governing and this new executive method, it's not going to happen. The bureaucracies will wait you out. You might have a press conference. You might even give a good speech about it. But if you're not doing it everyday, in every way, you're not going to change the culture."

However, O'Malley's critics argue his record in Maryland doesn't actually withstand rigorous analysis

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R), who worked under Ehrlich and went on to head the GOP's national committee, mocked O'Malley's data-based approach with his own take on the numbers.

"He didn't turn sh-- around. He made it worse. We left him with a $2 billion surplus in the rainy day fund. There's now a $2 billion deficit," Steele told Business Insider.

Steele scoffed: "So much for analytics."

O'Malley, who would be the unquestioned underdog against a candidate like Clinton, may have become even more of a presidential long-shot in recent weeks. His handpicked successor, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown (D), was upset on Election Day by Republican businessman Larry Hogan despite the Democratic tilt of the state. Hogan's campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues like state tax increases — not StateStat. Still, Brown's defeat could be a sign O'Malley's statistics-based management style won't be enough win over voters.

Asked for comment on Brown's loss, O'Malley spokeswoman Lis Smith pointed to the governor's decisive 2010 re-election campaign, a rematch against Ehrlich.

"In 2010, Governor O'Malley ran on the results his data-driven approach achieved for the people of Maryland. He bucked the national trend and won by 14 points," Smith said in a statement. "His data-driven approach resonates most prominently in cities, where dozens of mayors have adopted the CitiStat program then-Mayor O’Malley pioneered in Baltimore. Especially in this time of anxiety, Americans want more results, transparency, and accountability in government, not less."

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O'Malley appears to be similarly framing his data-centric approach for a national audience. In addition to racking up a laundry list of progressive achievements — including same-sex marriage, gun control, and immigration reform laws — O'Malley is offering some soft criticism of the Democratic Party's loyalty to government programs that may not be cost-effective.

"I think sometimes the one party undercuts its arguments for accountability and fiscal responsibility by its mad drive to dismantle government," he said, referring to Republicans. "In the same way, I think sometimes our own party undercuts our arguments for effective governance by not be willing to make our actions accountable. ... If they don't work we should stop doing them and find something new that works better."

Though that sort of tough talk against wasteful government programs is more common among conservatives, O'Malley insisted there's no conflict between being liberal and being focused on data.

"I don't find anything contradictory with wanting a government to work more effectively," O'Malley said.

He paused before explaining himself again in less wonky terms.

"How can I say it in a pithier, more quotable kind of way?" he asked. "I borrowed this idea from Giuliani's administration in New York. And I really could give a rat's ass that it was a Republican administration at the time. It was an idea that worked."

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Liberia, Mali see crucial gains in Ebola fight

Monrovia (AFP) - Liberia has announced a dramatic drop in new Ebola infections as Mali prepared to lift quarantine restrictions on dozens of people put at risk of exposure to the deadly virus.

Liberian assistant health minister Tolbert Nyenswah said new cases had dropped from a daily peak of more than 500 to around 50, confirming tentative announcements by experts worldwide of an apparent slowdown in the epidemic.

"It's not the number of Ebola cases we were reporting two months ago... The numbers of cases are reducing," he told AFP late on Monday, adding however that there were still new cases emerging across the country. 

The largest Ebola outbreak on record has killed some 5,000 people, with Liberia hit hardest and the contagion still raging in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said late Monday that it had released from isolation 25 of more than 100 people thought to have come into contact with Mali's sole case.

The victim, a two-year-old girl from Guinea, was diagnosed with Ebola after journeying to the western town of Kayes on October 23 and died the following day.

The toddler had travelled by bus and taxi with her grandmother, sister and uncle, making frequent stops on a trip of more than 1,200 kilometres (750 miles).

- 'Growing confidence' -

They also spent two hours in the capital, Bamako, visiting relatives in a house of 25 people.

When Malian authorities became aware of the case, they mounted an emergency response helped by the WHO, US experts and several aid organisations, identifying 108 contacts.

These included fellow bus passengers found as far away as France and Senegal, and 33 health care workers, the WHO said in a statement.

"Of the 108 contacts, 25 have been followed for 21 days and have been released from the surveillance system," it added.

"Seventy-nine contacts were at the hospital where the child was treated and in the Kayes community. All have been monitored.

"To date, no one has shown signs of Ebola or tested positive for the disease."

Abdoulaye Nene Coulibaly, a doctor in the medical team sent to lead the response, said everyone in isolation in Kayes would be released on Tuesday if they were still showing no symptoms.

"The grandmother of the deceased child is doing well. Everyone else too," he told AFP.

"We took every precaution to assist those under observation, and in reality all the way through the girl's journey contagion risks were very low."

The WHO said there was growing confidence that Ebola would not spread within Mali, adding that the toddler "had haemorrhagic symptoms but no diarrhoea or vomiting during her travels".

- New York doctor cured -

There was good news in the US too, where health officials said a New York doctor who became America's last known Ebola case had been cured.

Craig Spencer, 33, contracted Ebola while caring for patients in Guinea. He is due to be discharged from the hospital Tuesday.

"After a rigorous course of treatment and testing, Dr Craig Spencer -- the patient admitted and diagnosed with Ebola disease virus at HHC Bellevue Hospital Center -- has been declared free of the virus," officials said in a statement.

The US has treated nine victims of the virus, which spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids.

The US government has been at the forefront of the international response to the outbreak, committing hundreds of millions of dollars and announcing plans for Ebola treatment units across Liberia.

The first US-built centre opened on Monday in Tubmanburg, around 70 kilometres (45 miles) northwest of Monrovia.

Gorbee Logan , a health officer for the area, put the drop in cases down to efforts to raise awareness of Ebola within communities across the country and better investigation of outbreaks.

"A lot more case-finding, contact-tracing, case investigation and surveillance activities -- all of these have helped," he said."

The claim chimes with the advice of global medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders, which has called for a more localised response to the epidemic, favouring deployment of rapid response teams to new outbreaks over the construction of large centralised medical units.

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Apple Is Staffing Up In The UK: Here's A Look At Its New Cambridge Office

Apple Cambridge

Apple is building up its UK presence. The company is opening a new office in Cambridge with a capacity for 40 people and has secretly hired the entire staff of a London company called Caffeinehit that made a mapping app called PinDrop, according to TechCrunch.

One interesting thing about PinDrop is that an announcement of the move was published on Facebook and then partially deleted after it happened, TechCrunch notes:

... there was an extra paragraph in the original version of Ashburner’s blog post on PinDrop’s site (no longer online) that noted,

“My biggest concern was making sure that the core Caffeinehit / Pin Drop team (Tom, Giacomo, Donal and Andrea) got jobs. I’m happy to say they’ve all been snapped up and have (rightfully so) landed themselves dream jobs. Super proud of them all and excited to see how they’re going to change all of our worlds in the future.”

That paragraph, and an excited Tweet from one of the employees mentioning that he was moving to Apple, were both quickly deleted that day.

Apple Cambridge The staff later updated their LinkedIn profiles to indicate they were now employed at Apple in London.

In addition, Apple has taken space in Cambridge for about 40 people, according to Business Weekly:

"The UK government has been working hard behind the scenes for the best part of 25 years to persuade Apple to take the leap of faith in Britain."

Tech City News says Apple's Cambridge space will be used for R&D.

Cambridge is becoming Britain's mini Silicon Valley. It doesn't lack for research talent coming from the university, of course. Spotify and Google also have presences in the city. The latter company acquired Deep Mind, its artificial intelligence unit, from the area. The Cambridge area has about 1,400 companies with more than 53,000 staff, according to The Telegraph.

Here is a look at Apple's new Cambridge space, at 90 Hills Road, courtesy of a marketing brochure from Savills, the estate agency:

It has a really nice party deck on the roof:

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Here is the view from the back:

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Lots of space and light, just the way Jony Ive likes it:

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Here is the floor plan:

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That's about 3,800 square feet of space on this floor:

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Another 4,000 square feet here:

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It's about 9,000 square feet in total.

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Top EU court rules against 'welfare tourism'

Britain has vowed to limit immigration and has urged France to clamp down on migrants trying to board UK-bound trucks at Calais

Luxembourg (AFP) - The EU's top court ruled on Tuesday that member states do not have to provide social welfare payments to EU citizens moving to their country solely to claim benefits.

Charges that the European Union's core freedom of movement principle has been abused by so-called "social welfare tourists" have helped drive recent gains for anti-EU parties who have campaigned for sharp immigration curbs.

The problem has become acute in Britain where Prime Minister David Cameron, fearing further inroads by the UK Independence Party to his right, has promised to limit immigration -- only to be rebuffed by the powerful British business community and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the European of Court of Justice said that an EU citizen going to another member state could only expect to receive social welfare benefits if his or her stay complied with the conditions of the EU directive on free movement.

"One of the conditions ... for a right of residence is that economically inactive persons must have sufficient resources of their own," it said.

"The directive thus seeks to prevent economically inactive EU citizens from using the host member state's welfare system to fund their means of subsistence."

So an EU member state would not be obliged to pay social welfare to "economically inactive EU citizens who exercise their right to freedom of movement solely in order to obtain another member state’s social assistance," the court said.

Ruling on a case brought by Germany, the ECJ said it was the national authorities who decide the payment of non-contributory social benefits.

As such, they were implementing national laws and not EU legislation, it added.

Tuesday's ruling comes the day after the head of the Confederation of British Industry told Cameron directly that EU membership was "overwhelmingly in our national interest."

Britain could look inwards, shutting itself off from the world or it could "embrace the openness which has always been the foundation of Britain's success," CBI head Mike Rake said.

In reply, Cameron rejected any idea that his promise of an in-or-out membership referendum in 2017 was causing uncertainty that could hurt the economy.

"Britain's future in Europe matters to our country and it isn't working properly at the moment and that is why we need to make changes," he said.

Earlier this month, Germany's Merkel went on record to say that the EU principle of the free movement of people was non-negotiable.

Der Spiegel news weekly said Merkel had told Cameron in October that he was approaching a "point of no return" with the EU over his immigration proposals.

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Chinese Media Tried To Censor This Moment Between Putin And China's First Lady

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Peng Liyuan, the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, seemed to have a nice time at the official leaders' dinner at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Beijing.

The two seemed to chat politely before something interesting happened.

"Then Mr. Putin, a former Soviet spymaster who rides horses bare-chested, made his move," as described by The New York Times. "He whipped a tan coat from beneath the table and slipped it over Ms. Peng’s shoulders as she stood up."

Times Editor Rick Gladstone said that the moment looked "more like Putin chivalrous charm, not an inappropriate pass at Chinese host's wife, but still pretty wild."

You can see the scene play out at around 0:32 on CCTV footage that Chinese censors did their best to scrub from the web:

An interesting note is that this is not the first time Putin has charmed a powerful woman in this way:

Putin, the blanket man: http://t.co/hHcKIGkfiN Remeber St Petersburg and Merkel? pic.twitter.com/LFdUnh1PwU
— Nikolaus von Twickel (@niktwick) November 11, 2014

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Home Office Publishes Inquiry Into Missing Child Abuse Dossier

Theresa May

The Home Office has published the results of an inquiry by Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam into a missing dossier detailing child abuse allegations compiled by late Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens.

It found that there was “no basis” for believing that the Home Office deliberately hidden or destroyed the file to cover up wrongdoing by senior figures in the establishment.

Here is the key passage from the report:

...based on registered papers we have seen, and our wider enquiries, we found nothing to support a concern that files had been deliberately or systematically removed or destroyed to cover up organised child abuse. We found nothing specific to support a concern that the Home Office had failed in any organised or deliberate way to identify and refer individual allegations of child abuse to the police.

The missing dossier is said to have contained the names of senior politicians that the former Conservative MP, who died in 1995, alleged were involved in child abuse in the 1980s. His son told the BBC that his father had said the file would "blow the lid off" the secret lives of a number of prominent individuals.

In its final report last year on what happened to the Dickens dossier the government concluded:

The Independent Investigator is satisfied that the Home Office did pass on to the appropriate authorities any information received about child abuse in the period 1979 to 1999 which was credible and which had any realistic potential for further investigation. The Investigator believes that the risk of any undisclosed material remaining in files from that period is extremely low.

However, a number of questions remain. In July the Daily Mail revealed that Labour peer Barbara Castle compiled her own dossier of child abuse in the 1980s that the paper claims also implicated a number of senior figures. Don Hale, the local newspaper editor who was handed the dossier, claims that the papers were seized by Special Branch officers.

The Home Affairs Committee is holding a hearing on the report today with Wanless and Whittam due to appear at 12:15pm GMT.

Here is an excerpt from Home Secretary Theresa May's statement on the report:

[Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam] have concluded that, in respect of the first Review commissioned by the Permanent Secretary, “the conclusions were reasonably available to the Reviewer on the information then available” and that they “agree with recommendations made”. In respect of the second Review commissioned by the Permanent Secretary, Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam QC make clear that they “have seen no evidence to suggest PIE was ever funded by the Home Office because of sympathy for its aims”. Their Review makes three recommendations for the Department, all of which have been accepted. These were that:

They endorse the recommendations made in the first Review.
Where an allegation of child abuse is made it must be recorded and the file marked as significant. That significance should then inform the Department as to how to handle that file, its retention and the need to record when [if at all] it is destroyed. This approach is relevant, not only to the Home Office, but could usefully be adopted across Government as well.
There should be a system within the Home Office of recording what information is sent to the police and then a formal procedure of confirming what the result of that reference is.

This page will be updated with the latest information. Click here to refresh.

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