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ETHICS

Swedish UK TV star warned over phone hacking

Ulrika Jonsson, a Swedish UK TV personality, has claimed that she was warned by an executive of the now defunct British tabloid The News of the World to exert caution when leaving voicemail messages.

Swedish UK TV star warned over phone hacking

The Swede said that she was given a warning over the phone hacking at the newspaper, according to a report in the UK Daily Telegraph daily on Friday.

“Someone told me not to leave voicemails,” Jonsson said in an interview for broadcaster ITV’s Tonight programme, to be broadcast this evening, the newspaper reported.

Ulrika Jonsson is a well-known face on British TV having developed a career since leaving her native Sweden in her early twenties.

Her love life has long been the subject of intense interest from the UK tabloids and her alleged relationship with former England football coach Sven-Göran Eriksson brought her back into the spotlight in the mid-2000s.

In her ITV interview, which forms part of a programme entitled “Rupert Murdoch, The Power and The Story”, Jonsson talks of “feeling sick” when told by police that she was one of the celebrities involved in the phone hacking scandal.

”I felt immediately like my stomach was turning. I felt really scared – somebody’s been watching or certainly somebody’s been listening to my life,” Jonsson said, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The News of the World was the Sunday sister paper of The Sun, the UK’s best-selling newspaper, until it was closed on July 10th. It had a reputation for exposing the private lives of celebrities.

The developing phone hacking scandal, which ultimately led to the newspaper’s closure, has led to a very public backlash in the UK and a broader discussion over press ethics.

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FARMING

Germany allows slaughter of male chicks to continue

Germany's top administrative court ruled Thursday that the slaughtering of male chicks may continue in the poultry industry until a method is found to determine the sex of an embryo in the egg.

Germany allows slaughter of male chicks to continue
Photo: DPA

According to the Federal Ministry of Agriculture around 45 million male chicks are slaughtered in Germany each year.

The killings are highly controversial and opposed by Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner in Angela Merkel's government.

“Chick killing is ethically unacceptable and must be stopped as soon as possible,” Klöckner told daily Rheinische Post, adding that €8 million had been allocated to help find alternatives.

Several methods for the testing of a chick embryo's sex — which would allow the destruction of eggs before hatching — are being tested, but not yet ready for use on an industrial scale.

SEE ALSO: Keep shredding male chicks, court tells farms 

On Thursday, Leipzig's Federal Administrative court decided the killing of male chicks is in accordance with the first article of the Animal Protection Act, which stipulates “no one is entitled to inflict pain, suffering or damage on animals without reasonable cause”.

Judge Renate Philipp said there were “reasonable grounds” for the current practise to continue “until methods to determine sex in the egg” are ready.

Young male hatchlings are usually condemned to a violent end simply because of their sex, as roosters are deemed largely useless in the world of livestock farming.

In many cases, they are mechanically shredded, gassed or crushed to death and used as animal feed.

Just as in the two previous cases, the court in Leipzig ruled that the economic interests of the egg industry took precedent in the immediate future.

The dispute dates back to 2013 when the state of North Rhine-Westphalia outlawed the killing of male chicks under the Animal Protection Act.

However, two hatcheries challenged the decision at district level, which took the matter up to federal court.

The Central Association of the German Poultry Industry (ZDG) has warned against hastily banning the killing of male chicks.

The industry also wants to end the unethical killings, said association president Friedrich-Otto Ripke, but a mass method of identifying sex in the egg had to be found first.

The German Animal Welfare Association reacted with disappointment to Thursday's decision.

“We would have wished for an immediate ban,” said president Thomas Schröder, who criticized the court for not setting a deadline for when the killing should be banned.

Consumer organization Foodwatch said the basic problem remains “that the chickens are either bred for egg producing or fattening up on a massive scale”.

The industry wants to “get out of chick killing today rather than tomorrow, but without practical alternatives this would not work,” he said.

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