Incentives for officials who hit target of winning 70% of tribunal cases include vouchers, cash bonuses and extra holidays

Home Office officials are being rewarded with shopping vouchers for helping to ensure failed asylum seekers lose their attempt to stay in the country, new documents reveal.

Official guidance obtained by the Guardian shows that immigration staff have been set a target of winning 70% of tribunal cases in which asylum seekers are appealing against government decisions that they should leave the UK.

These officers are also incentivised by Home Office reward schemes involving gift vouchers, cash bonuses and extra holidays, according to information received under freedom of information laws.

Asked what rewards were given to presenting officers and case owners in the fields of asylum and immigration, the department confirmed high-street vouchers for £25 or £50 were handed out to "recognise positive performance over a short period of time", including when officers "exceed their casework targets for a month".

Critics said it was a new low for officers to be rewarded for outcomes that meant asylum seekers being asked to leave the UK for countries where they claim to be facing persecution or war. The incentives undermine confidence in the fairness of the system, they say.

The president should be regretting not his personal follies but the failure of the French economic model

Of course it matters. A president is not just a professional figure. He is a head of state, briefly the embodiment of his people. If the Queen were sneaking off on a scooter each night to see a toyboy in Pimlico, Britons might regard it as a "purely private affair". But they would be aghast and agog. President Hollande's love life may be private. But is it really of no interest or concern to the French people? Pull the other one.

Behaviour, style, personal relationships may seem tangential to government as a business, but they cannot be divorced from government as an art. Most of the "unanswered" questions swirling around Hollande's press conference struggled to drag his private life into the public domain. Was there a security risk? Was the president vulnerable to attack or kidnap? Was a bodyguard with him at all times? The answers to these questions were trivial.

They were proxies for a different fascination, one that is bound to envelop the private lives of public figures. We all seek in the lives of celebrities some echo of our joys and sorrows. Personal emotion and behaviour may have no imprint on public action. But such is the secrecy of power that we crave any glimpse of the "man behind the mask". In a democracy, "the public interest" is to some degree whatever interests the public.

Hollande has swatted aside his ever deferential press corps with "no comment" on his private life. But he is asking his people to behave differently, to agree a "responsibility pact" to set aside decades of self-indulgence that is in part the legacy of his own French socialist movement. They must come together to liberate employment and accept a reduction in spending and business taxes. His apologists might argue that this is just a matter of laws and austerity. But he is asking for a change in outlook and behaviour. People are less likely to respond if they see the man asking as a fool or an object of ridicule.

Entourage includes 6 cabinet ministers, 30 business people and community leaders

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a sizable entourage have arrived for his first official state visit to Israel. The six-day Middle East tour will include stops in the West Bank and Jordan.

Harper's plane left Ottawa on Saturday evening, with six cabinet ministers on board, along with 30 business people and community leaders.

Harper and his wife, Laureen, were greeted by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign affairs minister, and by Vivian Bercovici, Canada's ambassador-designate to the Jewish state.

"The total delegation is probably about 250," said the CBC's Terry Milewski from Jerusalem. "That includes the RCMP and the media of course [and] about 21 rabbis by my count, some presidents of various companies also, who are paying their own way. It's a big, big delegation."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an official speech to the Canadian delegation calling Harper "a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people."

The Obama administration's ballyhooed military "pivot" to Asia is running into some frank talk from the top U.S. commander in the Pacific.

Three years after the Pentagon said it was de-emphasizing Europe in favor of the Asia-Pacific region, Navy Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III said this week that U.S. dominance has weakened in the shadow of a more aggressive China.

"Our historic dominance that most of us in this room have enjoyed is diminishing, no question," Adm. Locklear, chief of U.S. Pacific Command, said Wednesday at a naval conference in Virginia.

Although Adm. Locklear said it is obvious that Chinese military power is growing, he suggested that it is unclear whether China will seek to be a hard adversary to the U.S. in the long term, so Washington should be working overtime on steering Beijing toward a cooperative security posture.

"China is going to rise, we all know that," Adm. Locklear said, as reported by Defense News, which included several quotes from his speech at the annual Surface Navy Association meeting.

"[But] how are they behaving? That is really the question," the admiral said, adding that the Pacific Command's goal is for China "to be a net provider of security, not a net user of security."

His remarks offered insight into the introspection at the Pentagon's highest levels about how the U.S. should tailor its military presence in the region, where Beijing and Moscow - regional powerhouses and former Cold War adversaries to Washington - are keen to challenge U.S. dominance.

A medical bill has been signed into law in Turkey that requires doctors to obtain government permission before administering emergency first aid. Critics have blasted the bill as a crackdown on doctors who treat activists injured during protests.

The bill, which was drawn up by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), punishes health care professionals with up to three years in prison or a fine of almost $1 million if they administer emergency first aid without government authorization.

It also bans doctors from practicing outside state medical institutions and aims to stop them from opening private clinics.

President Abdullah Gul signed the legislation into law Friday. It has prompted a flurry of accusations from rights groups, condemning it as an attempt to criminalize emergency health care and deter doctors from treating protesters.

The US-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) attacked the legislation as an attempt to quash dissent in Turkey, following last year's violent protests.

Coretta Scott King: "We have done what we can to reveal the truth, and we now urge you as members of the media, and we call upon elected officials, and other persons of influence to do what they can to share the revelation of this case to the widest possible audience." - King Family Press Conference, Dec. 9, 1999.

The assassination of Dr. King is just one OBVIOUS crime from among ~100 of the US "1% oligarchy" of crucial importance. The crimes center in wars, money, and media; and call for arrests of obvious "leaders" orchestrating these crimes, or a Truth & Reconciliation process.

Dr. Martin Luther King's family and personal friend/attorney, William F. Pepper, won a civil trial that found US government agencies guilty in the wrongful death of Martin Luther King. The 1999 trial, King Family versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators, is the only trial ever conducted on the assassination of Dr. King. The King Center fully documents the case, with full trial transcript.

The King family's attempts for a criminal trial were denied, as suspect James Ray's recant of a guilty plea were denied. Mr. Ray said that his government-appointed attorney told him to sign a guilty plea to prevent the death penalty for his part in delivering the murder weapon for Dr. King's assassination, and to prevent arrests of his father and brother as probable co-conspirators. Mr. Ray produced a letter from his attorney stating the promise that Mr. Ray would receive a trial. When Mr. Ray discovered that he was solely blamed for Dr. King's assassination and would never receive a trial, the King family's and Mr. Ray's subsequent requests for a trial were denied.

The US government also denied the King family's requests for independent investigation of the assassination.

Therefore, and importantly, the US government has never presented any evidence subject to challenge that substantiates their claim that Mr. Ray assassinated Dr. King.

US corporate media did not cover the trial, interview the King family, and textbooks omit this information. Journalist and author, James Douglass:

"I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it.

After critical testimony was given in the trial's second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson's trial was the trial of the century. Clinton's trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who's here?" "

President Obama vowed to use his executive authority to usher in a "year of action" even if Congress remains gridlocked, he said in his weekly address.

"Where Congress isn't acting, I'll act on my own to put opportunity within reach for anyone who's willing to work for it," the president said.

Obama pointed to a recent trip to North Carolina to announce the formation of a new public-private manufacturing institute as evidence of how he could act alone to spur economic activity.

"It's a partnership between companies, colleges, and the federal government focused on making sure American businesses and American workers win the race for high-tech manufacturing and the jobs that come with it - jobs that can help people and communities willing to work hard punch their ticket into the middle class," Obama said.

In recent weeks, the White House has stressed that Obama would use a mixture of executive action and the bully pulpit - a "pen and phone strategy" - to rally the nation around his economic agenda.

On Thursday, Obama held a conference at the White House with university presidents and nonprofit groups designed to improve college access for low-income students.

Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients - including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits - once a single English database of medical data has been created.

Harvested from GP and hospital records, medical data covering the entire population will be uploaded to the repository controlled by a new arms-length NHS information centre, starting in March. Never before has the entire medical history of the nation been digitised and stored in one place.

Advocates say that sharing data will make medical advances easier and ultimately save lives because it will allow researchers to investigate drug side effects or the performance of hospital surgical units by tracking the impact on patients.

But privacy experts warn there will be no way for the public to work out who has their medical records or to what use their data will be put. The extracted information will contain NHS numbers, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender.

Once live, organisations such as university research departments - but also insurers and drug companies - will be able apply to the new Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) to gain access to the database, called care.data.

If an application is approved then firms will have to pay to extract this information, which will be scrubbed of some personal identifiers but not enough to make the information completely anonymous - a process known as "pseudonymisation".

However, Mark Davies, the centre's public assurance director, told the Guardian there was a "small risk" certain patients could be "re-identified" because insurers, pharmaceutical groups and other health sector companies had their own medical data that could be matched against the "pseudonymised" records. "You may be able to identify people if you had a lot of data. It depends on how people will use the data once they have it. But I think it is a small, theoretical risk," he said.

Bill Maher acknowledged his respect for former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden during Real Time's return episode on Friday, while comparing him to former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) during an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald.

"I agree with what he says, I nod along," Maher said. "And then he says something totally batsh*t."

Maher then quoted from Snowden's "open letter to the people of Brazil" last month, in which Snowden said programs like the NSA's surveillance efforts "were never about terrorism" but were instead about "social control, and diplomatic manipulation."

"That's crazy," Maher told Greenwald. "They were about stopping terrorism. They may have gone too far. But everybody in the government isn't out to get you."

After reading Snowden's allegation that the government can "go back in time" to chart a person's online history, Maher asked Greenwald, "This is nuts, right?"

"No, Bill, what's nuts is the fact that you think that's nuts," said Greenwald, who published several articles based on knowledge seized by Snowden. "A lot of the stories we reported had nothing to do with terrorism. They're spying on economic summits in Latin America, oil companies in Brazil, democratically-elected leaders of our closest allies who have nothing to do with terrorism."

Greenwald further argued that the reporting enabled by Snowden's information showed that the NSA had the ability to "slow down the internet" by storing data long enough to search through a person's search history and correspondence.

For those who think the NSA the worst invader of privacy, I invite you to share an afternoon with Aiden and Foster, two 11-year-old boys, as they wrap up a Friday at school. Aiden invites his friend home to hang out and they text their parents, who agree to the plan.

As they ride on the bus Foster's phone and a sensor on a wristband alert the school and his parents of a deviation from his normal route. The school has been notified that he is heading to Aiden's house so the police are not called.

As they enter the house, the integrated home network recognises Aiden and pings an advisory to his parents, both out at work, who receive the messages on phones and tablets.

The system also sends Foster's data - physical description, address, relatives, health indicators, social media profile - to Aiden's parents, who note he has a laptop. Might the boys visit unsuitable sites? No, because Foster's parental rating access, according to his profile, is limited to PG13, as is Aiden's.

Foster spots a cookie jar and reaches in. Beep beep! His wristband vibrates to warn him the cookies contain gluten, and he is allergic.

Aiden's mother notes this and consults a menu of her fridge and pantry, all connected to the network, for non-gluten ingredients. There aren't enough so she orders a gluten-free pizza.

The boys turn on the TV. Rather, it turns itself on as Aiden approaches and it lists his favourite channels. The TV notes the boys have a basketball, which has a sensor, and so suggests an NBA game. As they watch, tailored advertising invites Aiden to put a Miami Heat shirt on a personal wishlist connected to a chain store. He does so and a ping is sent to his mother, who simultaneously receives a reminder of the date of his birthday.