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When you think of junk mail you usually associate it with various risks. You fear hacking, scams, viruses, Trojan horses and other Internet-related hazards. You rarely think of the environment and carbon footprints. And yet…

When you print you know that you are causing direct damage to the environment, because paper and ink are tangible indicators of that, ones that are before your very eyes. Using computers and networks, even if only in electronic, digital format, consumes gigantic amounts of power and, therefore, affects the environment as well. 

You may not see your laptop as a threat to the environment — and it probably is but a very small one — but the powerful server computers that operate the web are true polluters with carbon footprints that have a severe impact on our planet. The problem is that you as a consumer, a computer and a web user, don’t see them. 

The countless servers’ farms in the world, those mammoth-size installations that consists of large numbers of servers operating together and that weave the web consume incredible amounts of energy, mainly fossil fuel.

Figures can help to better realise the impact and the size of the damage done. Take one of Dell’s most typical server computers, the PowerEdge 710. Its carbon footprint for the duration of its lifecycle is 6,360kg, which is a CO₂ mass that is equivalent to a family of four drinking about a 0.38-litre glass of orange juice every day for eight years (data and figures supplied by Dell). Can you imagine what a set of 1,000 servers, a very common size by the Internet standard, can do?

Of course a laptop’s carbon footprint would be much less and typically would be in the range 350kg, that is 18 times less than the above mentioned server.

The volume of junk mail is now such that it is taking a significant toll on servers, networks and computers, down to yours at home or at your workplace. You may install filters, firewalls, you may subscribe to the safest e-mail provider in the world and you may be avoiding all social networks so as to minimise your public exposure on the web with the aim of escaping unsolicited e-messages, you will still get some junk mail in your mailbox. Even those that are trapped and pushed in the junk folder by your system are a nuisance for in the end you are going to take a look at them before discarding them for good.

At the end of the day junk mail makes machines and networks work more, simply. Hence the terrible impact on nature.

Microsoft operates a little more than 1 million servers. Google, Amazon and the other giants working at similar scale employ, between 0.5 million and 1.5 million servers, each. It is mind boggling and… very much polluting.

If you’re wondering what the proportion of junk versus legitimate e-mail in the world is, you may want to take a deep breath before reading the figures: junk mail constitutes about 75 per cent of the whole, i.e. there is three times more junk than legitimate. Translate this into servers’ activity and then into carbon footprint and you can only conclude that it is an alarming, sad situation. “Three quarters of world’s e-mail traffic is spam,” says Alastair Stevenson of the v3.co.uk technology website.

No one has yet found a way to reduce the “emission” of junk mail at the source, and nothing indicates it is going to be reduced anytime soon. Diminishing its impact on your own mailbox is possible thanks to more or less smart software and filters of all kinds, but this doesn’t mean it was not sent in the first and that it has no impact on the environment.

ABU DHABI — Billionaire philanthropists Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates launched a joint fund in Abu Dhabi Wednesday to help developing countries pass tobacco-control laws in their legal battle with industry giants.

The Anti-Tobacco Trade Litigation Fund, backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims “to combat the tobacco industry’s use of international trade agreements to threaten and prevent countries from passing strong tobacco-control laws,” its creators say.

“We are at a critical moment in the global effort to reduce tobacco use, because the significant gains we have seen are at risk of being undermined by the tobacco industry’s use of trade agreements and litigation,” said former New York mayor Bloomberg.

“We will stand with nations as they work to protect their populations against the deadly health effects of tobacco use.”

The announcement was made on the second day of the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.

The World Health Organisation has warned that although smoker numbers are declining in many parts of the world, upward trends in African and Mediterranean countries mean the global total will not change much during the next decade.

About 80 per cent of the world’s 1 billion smokers, it says, live in low- and middle-income countries.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg granted governments and NGOs in Brazil, Nepal, Philippines, Russia, Ukraine and Uruguay his Philanthropies Awards for Global Tobacco Control for “significant strides” they have made in implementing tobacco control policies.

Uruguay was the first country in Latin America to ban smoking in public spaces, a measure it enacted in 2006.

Cigarette packs carry graphic pictures of cancer patients to warn smokers of the dangers, tobacco firms are forbidden from using marketing terms such as “light” or “mild”, and cigarette ads are banned from television, radio and newspapers.

The crackdown has prompted industry giant Philip Morris to hit back by suing Uruguay for $25 million at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in 2010, alleging that the country had violated treaties by devaluing its trademarks and investments. 

Technical, financial support 

Several other countries have been threatened by similar measures.

“Country leaders who are trying to protect their citizens from the harms of tobacco should not be deterred by threats of costly legal challenges from huge tobacco companies,” said Microsoft co-founder Gates.

“Australia won its first case, which sends a strong message. But smaller, developing countries don’t have the same resources. That’s why we are supporting the Anti-Tobacco Trade Litigation Fund with Bloomberg Philanthropies,” Gates said in a televised statement during the awards ceremony.

Among its several means of support, the fund offers “technical assistance in legislative drafting and documentation to avoid legal challenges and potential trade disputes from the passage of tobacco-control laws,” its founders say.

In addition, it supports global tobacco-control efforts, coordinates efforts in fighting the industry and offers low- and medium- income countries with financial support and access to “high quality legal assistance.”

According to the WHO, one person dies every six seconds due to tobacco — nearly 6 million people each year.

Smoking could kill 1 billion people this century, it says.

Participants at the conference have warned that unless urgent action is taken, the annual death toll could rise to 8 million by 2030.

“April is the cruellest month”, said TS. Eliot in his epic poem “The Waste Land”. But for me personally, I pick March. To be the most cruel month in the annual calendar, that is. 

There are two things that contribute towards it being so bittersweet. The first is that Mother’s Day is celebrated throughout the world on this particular month. And secondly, the Ides of March, the exact date on which I lost my own mom, also falls in this month. So, while the rest of the world is applauding their mums I find myself mourning mine. 

The soothsayer in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” warningly predicted, “beware the Ides of March”. The Roman emperor shrugged it off but was stabbed to death before the end of the day. Nobody cautioned me of its perils but even if they had, how could I prepare myself to deal with it? 

My dearest mother, struggling with an incurable cancer, was in immense pain. Part of me, who was nursing her, would pray for her release but another part of me would selfishly want her to live on. At least she was there, in front of me, in flesh and blood, though with her eyes closed and breathing laboured, she was there. She existed. But in the early hours of that evening, she ceased to be so. 

I firmly believe that the umbilical cord that attaches an infant to its mother does not get severed at the birth of the baby. Although the doctors cut it off physically, in a metaphorical sense, it lingers on. It is invisible to the rest of mankind but it transmutes itself to a sixth sense that every mother has for her offspring.

It’s this bond that wakes them up in the middle of the night when their child is sick in another city, thousands of kilometres apart. It’s this intuition that makes their ears perk up when a “hello mom” is intoned in a different note from the usual, over the telephone. It’s the perception that makes them record your fever exactly by simply feeling your forehead with the palm of their hand. 

My mother was no different. When she was admitted into the ICU and was non responsive to the rest of the world, she could hear me. I spoke to her all the time. I combed her hair and trimmed her toenails and held her hand at length. It is not my imagination that I felt her press my fingers in response. However feeble the gesture was, I could feel it. 

But the numbness came when she passed away. That is when the link that tied me so firmly to my mother was slashed. I felt as if I was being suffocated and for sometime I could not function. My life as I knew it, had changed forever. 

In this transient world, one learns to cope with intense grief also. I internalised the pain but every March the wound sort of resurfaces, and I find myself longing for my mother. 

“You got my card?” our daughter was on the phone. 

“Hello,” I replied. 

‘”You’ve been crying!” she declared. 

“Not at all,” I sniffed. 

“Don’t lie to me,” she scolded. 

“Don’t mother me,” I retorted. 

“Somebody has to,” she stated. 

“What do you want?” I asked. 

“I miss Nani too you know,” she confessed. 

“Happy Mother’s Day,” I said

“You sound like her, ditto,” she announced. 

“And you sound like me, ditto,” I smiled.

HANNOVER, Germany — Somewhere on Earth a computer hacker types a malicious command and hits enter. Half a world away, an urban commuter train speeds out of control, derails and crashes into a building.

Happily the kind of scenario that makes for Hollywood blockbusters and keeps public security officials awake at night would, in this case, only damage a model train set at a German IT industry fair.

Internet security experts have set up “Project Honey Train” with an online railway control system as bait, hoping to “get inside the heads of cyber criminals” — but without the real-life casualties.

“The goal is to provide an environment where we can study how people may try to attack public infrastructure projects where they could put public safety at risk,” said Chester Wisniewski, of security company Sophos.

“I suspect that this is a pretty good copy of some of the worst of public security that we see in real life... systems that were designed in a simpler time when people weren’t trying to attack them, which is what makes them vulnerable.”

Their miniature rail system at the CeBIT IT business fair in Hannover is built on a scale of 1:87 and set in a fictitious German city, with street names chosen from the board game Monopoly.

To an online attacker it’s all meant to look real, with original software components and inbuilt vulnerabilities which are advertised in known hackers’ chatrooms.

Critical infrastructure

Online users have long been exposed to risks from ID theft, “phishing” and scams by mafia groups, to mass data collection by social media giants and snooping by secret services.

But some fear we haven’t seen the worst of it yet, in an age when urban transport systems, chemical plants and power stations are considered potentially vulnerable to digital sabotage.

“I’m surprised that not more has happened already,” said Christoph Meinel, head of German IT university the Hasso Plattner Institute.

“It’s urgently necessary to do something about this. Some say ‘don’t worry, it won’t happen’, but that’s the wrong approach. Once someone has done it successfully, you can quickly expect to see copycats.”

Security experts have warned of vulnerabilities in the systems that run, for example, factories, oil pipelines and water networks — the so-called supervisory control and data acquisition or SCADA systems.

A real-life example is the computer worm Stuxnet, which was used to clandestinely attack Iran’s nuclear programme in 2010 by ordering centrifuges to speed up and spin out of control until they ripped apart.

In his 2012 best-selling novel “Blackout”, journalist Mark Elsberg describes how hackers attack European power grids, sparking the collapse of transport, communication and food distribution and even triggering a nuclear reactor meltdown.

Marco di Filippo, of Sophos, said he considers the book’s premise and technical explanations “very valid”.

“The greatest vulnerability is that automation now speaks TCP/IP and has ended up online, unprotected,” he said, referring to the communication standard Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.

“This includes everything, be it power grids, power stations, wind farms, dams but also traffic management systems.”

‘Bad guys’

Andrey Nikishin, head of future technologies at Moscow-based software security group Kaspersky Lab, agreed there were theoretical risks but said a successful attack was difficult.

“If something is connected to the Internet it is theoretically possible to hack it,” he said.

But he stressed that governments are aware of risks to critical national infrastructure, take steps to protect it and that many systems have a manual backup.

“And you can’t hack the manual switch, fortunately,” he said.

Kaspersky Lab has identified four main types of attackers — teenager hackers showing off, cyber criminals out for money, extremists seeking to sabotage, and state actors whose main goal is espionage.

While operating on the same technical basis, the big difference is the resources they have to hand, Nikishin said.

He added that potential threats would multiply in the era of the “Internet of Things”, when not just PCs, laptops and phones but also houses, cars and appliances have IP addresses.

“The world is changing,” he said, predicting, however, that one thing would stay the same — “The actor, the bad guy... they have existed, they do exist, and they will exist.”

NEW YORK — Mike Rinder had spent virtually all of his life in the Church of Scientology. From the age of six he was raised in the church, eventually rising to become its chief spokesman. Everyone he knew was a scientologist, including his wife, his two children, his mother, his brother and his sister.

But after spending more than a year in a disciplinary facility known as “the hole”, where Rinder says he and other Scientology executives were confined, an increasingly disillusioned Rinder left the church in 2007. It was while in that Los Angeles compound that Rinder, now 59, says he realised the church was “a road to hell” and that he had to get out, even if penniless and without his family.

“I literally walked away with a briefcase,” says Rinder, who now lives what he calls “an entirely new life” in Florida with a new wife, a son and a step-son. “A briefcase with nothing in it, but a briefcase.”

Rinder’s story is one of eight from former church members that make up the emotional arc of the documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, which opened in theatres last Friday and will air on HBO on March 29.

Directed by the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney and based on the acclaimed book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright, “Going Clear” is the highest-profile expose yet of the controversial religion founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

Substantially on the basis of former members like Rinder speaking out, the film paints a disturbing portrait of Scientology, claiming physical abuse happens regularly; that the church drives wedges between families by labelling non-scientologist spouses and parents “suppressive persons”; and that the Internal Revenue Service deemed the church a tax-exempt religion in 1993 only because of an avalanche of lawsuits. The documentary also singles out several of Scientology’s most famous faces — including Tom Cruise and John Travolta — for not using their power to change the organisation.

The church, which declined interview requests for the documentary, has mounted a considerable campaign against the film, including full-page ads in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and a series of Internet videos. In response to a request for an interview for this story, the church pointed towards videos posted by the Freedom Magazine, which the church publishes.

In those posts and others, the documentary’s sources are derided as “bitter, vengeful apostates.” The church alleges Gibney didn’t present the film’s allegations to them for response and calls the film “a one-sided false diatribe”. Representatives for the church did meet with Wright, though the church labelled his book “so ludicrous it belongs in a supermarket tabloid”.

“Their sources are the usual collection of obsessive, disgruntled former church members kicked out as long as 30 years ago for malfeasance, who have a documented history of making up lies about the church for money,” said the church in a statement.

The church has also vigorously denied allegations of physical abuse or confinement. It has previously said that managers like Rinder were never held against their will, but were subject to “ecclesiastical discipline”.

But Wright and Gibney, with the backing of HBO and The New Yorker (for which Wright writes), bring some heft to their face-off with the church. Wright’s New Yorker profile on “Crash” director Paul Haggis, arguably the most famous Scientologist to leave the church, was the magazine’s most fact-checked story ever. His book brought rare scrutiny to an organisation that has regularly repelled it. “I envisioned that I would have to defend every single word in there,” he says. “It’s one reason there are very few adjectives.”

In a recent interview at HBO’s Manhattan offices, just a stone’s throw from Scientology’s Manhattan office, Gibney, Wright and Rinder spoke of “Going Clear” as empathetic toward those lured to the church, but critical of its enablers.

“We’re not attacking the beliefs of the church,” says Wright, who previously collaborated with Gibney on the documentary “My Trip to Al Qaeda”. “You can believe whatever you want to believe and that’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy; there are a lot of crazy religions. It’s the practices and abuses that are going on in Scientology that I think the book and the film shed light on.”

Much of “Going Clear” depends on the testimony of former church members. They do so despite the likelihood of aggressive responses from the church. The church’s Freedom Magazine has published harsh appraisals of those it terms “discredited sources”. Rinder is labelled “the lady killer”. Haggis is called “the Hollywood hypocrite.”

Gibney says private investigators have recently tailed several sources from the film. Many also struggle with a sense of shame at having been members of a church they now speak against.

“I spent a lot of time on the idea of auditing because it’s a kind of talking cure,” Gibney says, referring to Scientology’s therapy-like practice. “So the beginning of the film, people talk their way in. By the end, they talk their way out. Speaking out has become their way of not only leaving the church but helping others who might be suffering under the abuses. The idea of speaking out is fundamental to the film.”

Former members are seen in the film as sensible, curious people who only learn of the church’s more idiosyncratic beliefs and practices after years of indoctrination.

“Everything about Scientology isn’t bad,” says Rinder. “It’s the boiling frog problem of you start with something, it seems kind of nice. You’re in the pot of water. It’s kind of cool in here. But the heat keeps turning up and turning up and turning up. And pretty soon you’re a boiled frog.”

Not lost on anyone is the irony that Wright and Gibney find themselves sitting alongside the former spokesman Rinder, who would have previously been waging a public relations battle against the film. “If you were still there,” chuckles Wright, “you’d be dealing with us.”

Gibney and Wright are pushing for change on two fronts: that the IRS might reconsider its classification of Scientology, and that the church’s celebrity members act against the alleged abuses.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s the end of the line for Internet Explorer.

The much maligned browser that battled Netscape to guide people around the World Wide Web was consigned to history this week by Microsoft, joining Palm Pilots, flip phones and Myspace as relics of a distant digital age.

A staple of the Internet for nearly two decades, the Explorer brand will be replaced by a flashier, speedier browser codenamed Project Spartan that will run on phones, tablets and personal computers but is expressly made for a new era of mobile devices.

Junking the Explorer brand is part of a new game plan at Microsoft. CEO Satya Nadella is determined to remake the aging technology giant as an innovator rather than a follower.

Even when it debuted, Explorer was a me-too product. Browser pioneer Netscape Navigator was the world’s first commercial Web browser. It ignited the Internet boom and had already transformed how people roamed the Web. Even the Explorer name was derived from Navigator.

“Explorer was never a cool brand,” Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo says. “It’s like one step from AOL.”

Nonetheless, bundled with its ubiquitous Windows operating system, Explorer crushed Netscape in the 1990s. The bundling triggered a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and a settlement with Microsoft.

With the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox, Netscape all but faded away. Netscape sold itself to AOL in 1999. In 2007, AOL stopped supporting it.

Yet, despite Microsoft’s considerable might, Explorer never managed to win the hearts and minds of consumers, who in recent years defected in droves to a new wave of sleeker browsers.

“In a way, the introduction of Explorer marked the beginning of the downfall of Windows and Microsoft. It was not an attempt to innovate. It was an attempt to stay relevant,” Saffo says. “In that era, Microsoft was a fast follower: Let someone else pioneer and then come into the market with muscle and take over. But they didn’t succeed with the Internet.”

Microsoft’s warning shot

Never one to throw in the towel, Microsoft is now ready to rumble. Cue up the browser wars version 2.0. This time it’s all about mobile devices that are populating people’s lives and consuming their time and attention.

In retiring the Explorer brand, Microsoft is looking to get its mojo back with consumers, especially those frustrated office workers who loved to hate Microsoft’s sluggish browser.

And, in distancing itself from a mainstay of desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft is also firing a warning shot that it plans to compete anew with Google’s Chrome, Firefox and Apple’s Safari browsers.

“At one point Internet Explorer commanded north of 80 per cent share of the browser market, but with the explosion in mobility, that market share has dwindled to 30 per cent,” said S&P Capital analyst Angelo Zino. “The platform isn’t cutting it on mobile devices and that’s where the focus is today.”

Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s head of marketing, says Microsoft is researching a new name for the Project Spartan browser, which will be released later this year with Windows 10.

Can Microsoft regain ground it has ceded?

It’s possible, says Zino, “but it’s going to be really difficult”.

VANCOUVER — Brilliant minds wrapped around heady notions ranging from injecting medicine by laser to cherishing life on Earth while seeking a future in the stars as the TED conference began Monday.

The weeklong annual gathering known for blending innovation, inspiration and imagination kicked off with presentations by fresh young visionaries brought in as Fellows.

Videos of Fellows “talks” available online at Ted.com have been viewed more than 71 million times since the programme was launched in 2009, according to TED Fellows director Tom Rielly.

Fellows took the stage in rapid-fire succession on Monday, opening with synthetic biologist Tal Danino describe work to train bacteria to attack cancer cells and ending with Kristen Marhaver revealing promising progress bringing precious coral reefs back to life.

“There are more bacteria in our bodies than stars in our entire galaxy,” Danino said during his talk.

“Today, we can programme these bacteria like we programme computers.”

Research showed the potential for programmed bacteria to grow naturally in the liver, signal discovery of tumours and even produce chemicals to shrink them, according to Danino.

“Imagine, in the future, taking a programmed probiotic that could detect and treat cancer as well as other diseases,” he told the audience.

Tipping point

Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer and artist, worried that thoughts of finding planets outside this solar system with the potential to support human life may be diverting attention from passionately striving to keep Earth blissfully habitable.

“We are at a tipping point in human history; a species poised between gaining the stars and losing the planet we call home,” Walkowicz said.

“It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonisation alone will save us from ourselves.”

The more she looks for habitable planets, the more she appreciates what the Earth has to offer.

Landmine rats

Biologist and TED Fellow Danielle Lee was doing her part to make the world safer as part of a project aimed at training the African pouch rat to sniff out landmines.

The rats are easy to care for, eat nearly anything, live as long as eight years, and can find buried landmines in much the same way dogs can use scent to detect hidden drugs, according to Lee.

“Pouch rats scratch at the ground to signal a find, but are too light to detonate devices,” Lee said.

“And, unlike dogs, they don’t attach to their handlers.”

Rats work for treats and aren’t concerned who they are working for. Lee’s focus is to pinpoint ideal rats for the job and help them multiply.

Laser-targeted medicine

For Fellow Patience Mthunzi of Africa, TED was a chance to share effort to use lasers to deliver HIV/AIDS medicine directly to targeted cells as a more direct and effective method than swallowing doses.

Her test, in a lab thus far, involve bathing cells in medicine and then using laser flashes to punch tiny holes that let the drug slip in before quickly resealing.

“The goal is to get the technology applied to the human body,” Mthunzi said.

During the session, neuroscientist fellow Greg Gage and co-founder of start-up Backyard Brains used human-to-human interface gear to let a woman from the audience use her mind to control the arm of a man from the audience.

Another fellow described a quantum computer he was building that could be powerful enough to crack even the current gold-standard in data encryption.

TED’s first fellow from Vietnam shared how she and friends figured out a way farmers could make money by growing edible mushrooms in left-over rice straw that is typically burned, causing pollution.

“With mushrooms, we could clean the air, add income to rice farmers and grow healthy food,” said Trang Tran.

“I hope this will inspire you to eat more mushroom as a super-food. Dare to go far by going green, it is possible.”

The fellows session marked the start of a week of TED talks, recorded version of which have won a global following, centred on ideas worth spreading. Speakers this year include longtime “tedster” and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates along with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd.

LÉSIGNY, France — Back in the day, the prospect of a French king speaking English would have been enough to trigger a century-long war.

Not any more, as evidenced by what will be France’s most-expensive TV series ever, “Versailles”, a period mini-series of 10 episodes that will come out at the end of this year.

The makers of the series, about the famous Palace of Versailles outside Paris and King Louis XIV who had it built, have bowed before the inescapable domination of English as the global language of international entertainment.

Thus their French king — one of history’s most iconic monarchs — is British. Indeed, most of the cast is British or Canadian. French performers are relegated to supporting roles or in the background.

The reason for such sacrilege in a country known for jealously protecting its language and culture is simple: France no longer wants to sit on the sidelines of the international resurgence in television.

It has seen the revolution sweeping the small screen, with cinema-grade productions being made by new players including Netflix and Amazon, and it wants to be part of it. And that means adopting English.

It also means spending big. At 27 million euros ($30 million) — around 2.7 million euros per episode, each taking 12 days to film — “Versailles” is the costliest TV production put on in France.

That’s the sort of cash an “American super-production” would throw at the screen, boasts George Blagden, the English actor who incarnates the 28-year-old Louis XIV.

The only other French co-produced series that came close were “Borgia”, a 25-million-euro epic series about a ruthless 15th century pope, and “The Tunnel”, a 19-million-euro French-British contemporary crime drama based on the Danish-Swedish series “The Bridge”.

Gamble on global sales

The producers of “Versailles” — France’s Canal+, Capa Drama and Zodiak Fiction allied with with Canada’s Incendo — are gambling their new series can win the same sort of worldwide business generated by the British-Irish-Canadian TV hit “The Tudors” or the British drama “Downton Abbey”.

Claude Chelli, of Capa Drama, makes no bones about it. He says the decision to film “Versailles” in English was “to ensure the biggest international distribution possible”.

The script itself is also crafted in English by Simon Mirren (former executive producer of the US series “Criminal Minds”) and David Wolstencroft (who created the well-received spy series “Spooks”).

It focuses on the early years of the reign of Louis XIV — the grand and self-proclaimed “Sun King” — when he ordered the vast and vastly expensive Palace of Versailles be built to house his court away from Paris and its intrigues.

Six months of filming wrapped up last week with a torture scene in the underground of a castle watched over by Blagden, 25, who exudes regal airs under a wig of long curls and a vest adorned with braids.

“Even pros from American television would have immediately thought themselves on a film set,” the blue-eyed actor tells AFP afterwards.

The scene, in which the king observes the suffering inflicted on a traitor to the throne, is meant to take place in the bowels of the Louvre in 1667.

Days earlier, all the pomp and elegance of Louis’ court was on display in front of the actual Palace of Versailles in another scene, in which nobles and aristocrats rolled up in fine carriages — all testament to the costume and set design detail that chewed up 12 per cent of the total budget.

Another scene, shot in Versailles’ spectacular Hall of Mirrors, brought together technical mastery and fortuitousness in a way to forever mark the London actor.

“There were only a few minutes of permitted filming left and then suddenly the sun burst out from behind the clouds, the outside pond started shining, the light lit up all the mirrors — and there was me, in the middle of it all, doing my monologue. It was magical,” Blagden recalls.

No ‘ideal’ French actor

One of Canal+’s senior executives, Maxime Saada, said that, despite the decision to make the series in English, there was no predilection to choose a British actor for the lead role.

“We didn’t find an ideal French actor for the role. We weren’t looking for a British actor but rather for a young king — and George is great,” Saada says.

Blagden himself believes he got to wear the crown because he saw himself having a “somewhat gentle” character.

“There’s not an ounce of violence in me,” he says. “I’ve never fought in my life. But to play a character so powerful, a little bit of violence has to come through.”

So he took up daily training in boxing, which injected confidence into his performance.

“You have to be able to see Louis’ character change as he becomes the Sun King,” he says.

The writers of the series confirmed that the king they imagined was “a vulnerable man” so that “what happens in his head” had to be seen by the camera.

As well as starting and parrying plots and intrigues, the young King Louis XIV had to handle a complex relationship with his brother and rival Philippe d’Orleans — played in the series by Welsh actor Alexander Vlahos.

For the writers, the show aims to topple the “giant marble statue” image of the French king known by all and to reveal him as a man.

WASHINGTON — Young adults want news, but few want to read a newspaper. And most stumble onto news while on Facebook or other social networks.

Those are among the findings of a survey released Monday of 18- to 34-year olds by a project of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research.

Some 85 per cent of “millennials” surveyed said that keeping up with news is important to them and 69 per cent said they get news daily.

The researchers said the study appears to allay concerns that young adults are apathetic about the world around them.

The millennial generation “spends more time on social networks, often on mobile devices. The worry is that millennials’ awareness of the world, as a result, is narrow”, the authors said.

But the findings showed “that this newest generation of American adults is anything but ‘newsless,’ passive or civically uninterested”.

The study found that young adults don’t get news in the same way as their parents and grandparents.

“This generation tends not to consume news in discrete sessions or by going directly to news providers,” the report said.

“Instead, news and information are woven into an often continuous but mindful way that millennials connect to the world generally, which mixes news with social connection, problem solving, social action and entertainment.”

Much of the news young adults get is from social networks such as Facebook, even though they often go to these platforms for other reasons.

Just 39 per cent said they went online to seek out news or information and 60 per cent said they “mostly bump into news” during unrelated online activity, the report said.

Facebook news

As a result, Facebook has become a key source of news for the 18-to-34 generation: some 88 per cent said they get news from the social network regularly.

Some 47 per cent said they got most of their news on national politics and government from Facebook, 62 per cent said the social network was their primary source for news on social issues and 41 per cent for international news.

Facebook was the top source of news for 13 of 24 news topics, the survey found.

The report said these social news consumers are often drawn into topics they might otherwise have ignored because peers are recommending and commenting on them.

Despite the notion that social media creates a polarising “filter bubble”, some 70 per cent of millennials said their social media feeds are comprised of diverse viewpoints — evenly mixed between those who agree and disagree with them.

Who pays?

The survey offers a bleak outlook for traditional media like newspapers hoping to boost paid subscribers.

Just 12 per cent of the respondents said they paid for a print newspaper subscription in the past year, while another 13 per cent said they read a newspaper for which someone else pays. 

Just 7 per cent in the survey said they paid for a digital subscription to a newspaper.

The authors said many of the respondents felt they should not have to pay for news.

“We heard the notion that, because news is important for democracy, people feel they should not have to pay for it,” the study said.

“It should be more of a civic right because it is a civic good.”

The report is based on a survey of 1,046 young adults between January 5 and February 2, with a margin of error estimated at 3.8 percentage points.

WASHINGTON — Facebook on Monday updated its "community standards" guidelines, giving users more clarity on acceptable posts relating to nudity, violence, hate speech and other contentious topics.

The world's biggest social network said it does not allow a presence from groups advocating "terrorist activity, organised criminal activity or promoting hate".

The new guidelines say Facebook will take down "graphic images when they are shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence”.

Nudity is also removed in many cases but allowed for images of breastfeeding, art or medical conditions.

"These standards are designed to create an environment where people feel motivated and empowered to treat each other with empathy and respect," said a blog post from Facebook global policy chief Monika Bickert and deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby.

"While our policies and standards themselves are not changing, we have heard from people that it would be helpful to provide more clarity and examples, so we are doing so with today's update."

The new guidelines say Facebook members should use their "authentic name", a move that appears to head off criticism from people who used stage or performance names instead of their legal name.

In October Facebook said it would ease its "real names" policy that prompted drag queen performers to quit the social network and sparked wider protests in the gay community and beyond.

'Risk of physical harm' 

Facebook's new guidelines said it would remove content, disable accounts and work with law enforcement "when we believe that there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety".

But it also pointed out "that something that may be disagreeable or disturbing to you may not violate our community standards".

The move comes with Facebook and other social media struggling with defining acceptable content and freedom of expression.

"It's a challenge to maintain one set of standards that meets the needs of a diverse global community," the blog post said.

"This is particularly challenging for issues such as hate speech. Hate speech has always been banned on Facebook, and in our new community standards, we explain our efforts to keep our community free from this kind of abusive language."

Facebook said earlier this year it was putting warnings on "graphic content", which would also be banned for users under 18. In 2013, Facebook ended up banning a beheading video after outrage followed a lifting of the ban.

Twitter meanwhile has become the latest online platform to ban "revenge porn", or the posting of sexually explicit images of a person without consent.

Twitter faced threats after blocking accounts linked to supporters of the Daesh, but one study showed at least 46,000 Twitter accounts have been linked to the group.

Facebook at the same time released its report on government requests for user data in the second half of 2014, showing a modest uptick to 35,051 from 34,946 in the prior period.

"There was an increase in data requests from certain governments such as India, and decline in requests from countries such as the United States and Germany," the blog post said.

The amount of content restricted for violating local law increased by 11 per cent 9,707 cases from 8,774.

"We saw a rise in content restriction requests from countries like Turkey and Russia, and declines in places like Pakistan," Facebook said.