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1 Flappy Bird
Be careful what you wish for, especially if you want to invent something new. Recently, Dong Nguyen, the designer of the mobile game Flappy Bird, pulled it from app stores, saying its success – it had been downloaded more than 50 million times, and was making him around £30,000 in advertising revenue each day – had ruined his simple life. He took to his Twitter account to say: “I cannot take this anymore.”
OK, so regretting making Flappy Bird isn’t quite the same as regretting making a rifle, but Nguyen is just the latest in a long line of inventors who wish they hadn’t created a monster.
2 The labradoodle
The labradoodle isn’t a monster – it’s adorable, obviously. But what’s monstrous is the way crossbreed dogs have been bred and marketed since the labradoodle’s inventor, Wally Conron, first created the breed in the 1980s. “I’ve done a lot of damage,” he told the Associated Press. “I’ve created a lot of problems. There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there.” Conron came up with the labradoodle when he was working for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia to provide a dog for a blind woman whose husband was allergic to dog hair. What he didn’t expect was that the labradoodle – and its other poodle-cross variants, many of which have health problems – would become so popular.
3 The AK-47
Six months before his death in December 2013, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the assault rifle, wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church: “My spiritual torment is unbearable. One and the same question: if my ri fl e killed people, does that mean that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, 93 years of age, the son of a peasant, Christian and Orthodox by faith, am responsible for people’s deaths, even if they were enemies?”
4 Electronic tagging
The electronic tag was originally conceived in the 1960s as a way of tracking former prisoners’ attendance at schools and workplaces, and rewarding them for good behaviour. Its inventors, Bob Gable and his brother Kirkland, were later horri fi ed that the tag had become a form of control and punishment. “It’s not pleasant,” Kirkland Gable told the Guardian in 2010, “but I’m not in control of the universe. I have to realize there are some things out of my control.”
5 Pepper spray
After police sprayed peaceful protesters with pepper spray at a University of California campus in 2011, one of the scientists who helped develop it in the 80s denounced its use. “I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents,” Kamran Loghman told The New York Times.
6 The office cubicle
In the late 60s, a new form of office was launched, designed to give workers privacy and increase productivity by providing more work space. Instead, it became a way for companies to cram employees into tighter spaces, a visual shorthand for uniformity and soulless work. Its inventor, Bob Propst, said in 1997, “the cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.” | 2 | Advance |
The last time she performed, we did not have mobile phones. Now, 35 years later, as she performs again, singer Kate Bush sees a very different world.
These days, most concerts are now lit up with phones and tablets, but Bush does not want her fans to watch her shows through a screen.
In August, before her concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Bush asked her fans to put down their mobile phones at her gigs.
Bush wrote on her website: “I have a request for all of you who are coming to the shows. We have chosen a theatre, not a large venue or stadium. Please do not take photos or videos during the shows.
“I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras.”
Bush is not the first singer or musician to say she doesn’t like phones at concerts. Roger Daltrey from The Who recently said it was “weird” that people looked at their screen and not the artist on stage.
He said: “I feel sorry for them, I really feel sorry for them. Looking at life through a screen and not being in the moment totally – if you’re doing that, you’re 50% there, right? It’s weird.”
In 2013, Beyoncé told a fan, “You can’t even sing because you’re too busy filming. Put that damn camera down!”
Recently, Dutch football fans at PSV Eindhoven protested against the introduction of wi-fi in their stadium. They held up banners that said “No wi-fi. Support the team,” and “You can sit at home.” Manchester United have also told fans to leave their “large electronic devices” at home.
Singer Jarvis Cocker said, “It seems stupid to have something happening in front of you and look at it on a screen that’s smaller than a cigarette packet.”
Even in the world of classical music, one of the world’s top pianists surprised the audience in June 2013 when he left the stage because a fan was filming his performance on a smartphone. Krystian Zimerman returned moments later and said: “The destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous.”
But Sam Watt says that filming at concerts makes the experience even better. He works for Vyclone, a phone app that puts together many videos uploaded by fans to create one long video of a show.
“Fans filming is now part of the concert experience – that is a just a fact. We take the videos that people are filming at concerts and mix them together with everybody else who was filming. The result is a really fantastic video,” he said.
“We think that filming at concerts adds to the experience, and I think that, if Kate Bush came round for a cup of tea, we could have a really interesting discussion about this,” he added. “People are going to film and they want those memories – you’ve got to accept it.” | 0 | Elementary |
Noise from ships may disturb animals such as killer whales and dolphins much more than we thought before. New research shows that underwater noise could stop these animals communicating and make it more difficult for them to find food. It is well known that noise from ships disturbs large whales. But, US researchers have found noise also disturbs smaller sea creatures such as killer whales, also known as orcas. Dolphins and porpoises may have the same problems.
“The main problem is that even a small increase in sound may make it more difficult for whales to find food using echo,” said Scott Veirs, who led the research. “That’s worrying because their food, a kind of salmon, is already quite scarce. Hearing a salmon’s click is probably one of the most difficult things a killer whale does. It is harder to hear that click if there’s a lot of noise around you.”
The researchers used underwater microphones to measure the noise made by about 1,600 ships as they passed through Haro Strait, in Washington State, USA. The two-year study recorded the sound made by 12 different types of ship, including cruise ships, container ships and military ships, that passed through the strait about 20 times a day.
Some ships are quieter than others but the average noise next to all the ships was 173 underwater decibels, the same as 111 decibels through the air – about the sound of a loud rock concert. Whales are not usually right next to ships and so would hear noise of about 60 to 90 decibels – around the level of a vacuum cleaner.
Veirs said scientists already knew about the effect of underwater noise on large whales. But, the new research shows the danger to smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises. “We think that ships make low-frequency noise, like the sound of lorries or trains,” he said. “Most noise is at that low frequency but there is more background noise in the high frequencies, too. This might be causing a big problem that we need to study more.”
Lots of underwater noise can cause many problems. Whales may have to stay closer together to hear each other. And, if they cannot find food easily, they will need to use their extra blubber. This is a problem because this blubber often contains manmade pollutants that are poisonous to whales if they get into their bodies.
Veirs said ships that pass near whales need to be quieter. “It should be easy to reduce noise pollution,” he said. “Military ships are much quieter and there could be simple ways of using that technology on normal ships. Another way to reduce noise is to slow down. Reducing speed by six knots could decrease noise by half.”
Some whale species are safer now because there is less whaling but other types of whale are still in danger for many different reasons. The US has recently protected nearly 40,000 square miles of the Atlantic to save a species of whale with just 500 individuals left.
In Europe, killer whales have dangerously high levels of illegal chemicals in their blubber. Scientists are still trying to find out if pollutants caused the deaths of five whales that were found on beaches on the east coast of Britain in January 2016. And, around the coast of Australia, whales are in danger from oil and gas drilling, as well as Japan’s recent decision to start whaling again in the seas of Antarctica. | 0 | Elementary |
The brand and logo of Apple have been named the most valuable in the world – worth nearly $119bn, or more than the entire gross domestic product of Morocco, Ecuador or Oman.
The Silicon Valley firm, already the world’s biggest company – with a stock market valuation of $591bn – has seen its brand value increase by 21% in 12 months, according to the closely followed Interbrand Best Global Brands annual report.
Apple, which is recognized the world over by its simple “Apple with a bite missing” emblem, led a surge of technology companies in the 2014 report, which has pushed more traditionally valuable brands – such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Gillette – down the table.
Google’s brand value rose by 15% to $107bn to take second place, followed by Coca-Cola, up 3% to $81.5bn, IBM ($72.2bn) and Microsoft ($45.5bn).
Facebook is the biggest riser in the chart, increasing its brand value by 86% to $14.3bn and taking 29th place in the table, ahead of longstanding global corporate names such as Volkswagen, Kellogg’s and Ford.
Jez Frampton, chief executive of Interbrand, which is part of global advertising group Omnicom, said: “Benefitting immensely from the rise of digital and, later, mobile technology, savvy brands like Apple grew stronger. New category- killers like Google, Amazon and Facebook have reset customer expectations and significantly raised the bar for brand experiences.”
Apple, which former Chief Executive Steve Jobs founded in his Los Altos garage in 1976, only appeared in the top ten of the Interbrand annual study in 2011.
Its logo, created by advertising executive Rob Janoff in 1977, was designed with a bite taken out of it to avoid confusion with a cherry. “One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colours of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope and anarchy,” Janoff said.
Graham Hayles, Interbrand’s chief marketing officer, said it was “not out of kilter” that Apple’s brand could account for a fifth of the company’s entire market value. “Apple makes a lot of money because it has a very strong brand,” he said. “There is a very strong correlation between branding and profitability.”
Hayles said Interbrand, which has been carrying out the annual study since 2000, calculates brand value by examining companies’ financial performance, consumers’ “brand allegiance” and “brand-strength analysis ”.
While many technology companies rose up the chart, there were big fallers, too. Finnish mobile- phone company Nokia dropped 41 places to 98th at $4.1bn, just ahead of Nintendo in 100th place (down 33). “They’re both only just in the chart now,” Hayles said. “It shows the importance of getting innovation right. If you don’t keep pace, it is very penalizing.”
A Chinese company has made it into the top 100 for the first time, with mobile-phone and broadband firm Huawei entering the rankings in 94th place with a brand value of $4.3bn. Huawei has been partly banned by the US and Australian governments due to fears that its equipment could be used by the Chinese for cyber-espionage.
Most of the brands in the top 100 are US-owned, the highest-placed non-US brands being South Korea’s Samsung (6th), Japan’s Toyota (8th) and Germany’s Mercedes-Benz (10th). The highest- placed British brands are HSBC (33rd), Shell (65th) and Burberry (73rd).
Other fashion brands in the top 100 include Boss, Prada and Ralph Lauren. Designer label Louis Vuitton is the top-ranked fashion name, in 19th position, with a value of $23bn, just ahead of high-street clothing chain H&M, with a brand value of $21bn and ranked 21.
Sports brand Nike, ranked 22 with a brand valued at nearly $20bn, is rated way ahead of rival Adidas, at 59 in the top 100 with a value of $7bn.
Frampton said consumers’ ability to interact with and criticize brands on Twitter and other social media means companies must react faster to retain and improve their brands’ reputations.
“The customer, empowered by social media in the 'age of experience', now has more control than ever,” he said. “In this world of two-way conversations, advocacy, influence and engagement are the new rules for brand-building.
“Customers expect seamless interactions, responsiveness, 24/7 accessibility, customization options and high levels of personalization,” he said. “In a sense, they increasingly expect brands to know them.” | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Coal will probably rival oil as the worlds biggest source of energy in the next five years, with possible disastrous consequences for the climate, says the worlds leading authority on energy economics.
One of the biggest factors behind the rise in coal use has been the massive increase in the use of shale gas in the US.
New research from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that coal consumption is increasing all over the world even in countries and regions with carbon-cutting targets except in the US, where shale gas is now more popular than coal. The decline of coal consumption in the US has helped to cut prices for coal globally. This has made it more attractive, even in Europe where coal use was supposed to be discouraged by the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of the IEA, said that coal consumption continues to grow each year and, if no changes are made, coal will catch oil within a decade.
Coal is available in large amounts and found in most regions of the world, unlike conventional oil and gas, and can be cheaply extracted. According to the IEA, China and India will drive world coal use in the coming five years, with India likely to overtake the US as the worlds second biggest consumer. China is the biggest coal importer, and Indonesia the biggest exporter.
According to the IEAs Medium-Term Coal Market Report the world will burn 1.2bn more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared with today.
With the highest carbon emissions of any major fossil fuel, coal is a huge contributor to climate change, particularly when burned in old-fashioned, inefficient power stations. When these are not equipped with special scrubbing equipment to remove chemicals, coal can also produce sulphur emissions the leading cause of acid rain and mercury and soot-particle pollution.
Van der Hoeven said that, without a high carbon price to discourage the growth in coal use and encourage cleaner technologies such as renewable power, only competition from lower-priced gas could reduce demand for coal. This has happened in the US, due to the extraordinary increase in the production of shale gas in that market in the past five years.
She said: The US experience suggests that a more efficient gas market can reduce coal use, carbon dioxide emissions and consumers electricity bills. Europe, China and other regions should take note.
If something isnt done, the world faces an increased risk of climate change as a result of this fast-increasing consumption of the highest carbon fossil fuel. | 1 | Intermediate |
They are the darkness seekers – and they are growing in number. On Black Fell, looking down on Northumberland’s beautiful Kielder Water reservoir, a group of people wait in a car park next to a strange wooden building with a minimalist design beamed down from the future. This is Kielder Observatory, the centre of Britain’s nascent astrotourism industry. And those waiting outside were the lucky ones. Many more had applied for a night of stargazing at the observatory but numbers are strictly limited.
Inside, next to a woodburner and under dimmed lights, the observatory’s founder and lead astronomer, Gary Fildes, a former bricklayer with Tarzan hair, delivers a pep talk to his colleagues and volunteers. The team discusses the prospect of seeing the northern lights but Fildes is doubtful. Instead, they decide to train their powerful telescopes on Jupiter and Venus and later to pick out stars such as Capella and Betelgeuse. An additional attraction is the appearance of the International Space Station.
“Remember,” Fildes tells his team, “it’s about interaction, it’s about entertainment, it’s about inspiring people.” He puts on some music. Pink Floyd, the Jam, the Pogues. “By 9.30, the sky is going to be sexy,” Fildes says. “It’s going to be epic.”
Fildes, 49, is at the forefront of the UK’s burgeoning astrotourism industry. The pivotal moment for Northumberland came in 2013 when the entire national park housing Hadrian’s Wall, along with Kielder Water and Forest Park, some 1,500 sq km, was awarded Dark Sky Park status, the only one in England. Dark Sky Parks are rare. The 2013 Star Count revealed that only 5% of the UK population can see more than 31 stars on a good night.
The Tucson, Arizona-based International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) confers the status only on places that take major steps to avoid light pollution. Recipients must also prove their night skies are sufficiently dark. In Northumberland Dark Sky Park, as the area was rebadged, it is so dark that Venus casts a shadow on the Earth.
Duncan Wise, visitor development officer for the Northumberland National Park Authority, helped to spearhead the campaign for dark-sky status after the Council for the Protection of Rural England found it was one of Britain’s most tranquil places. “We tend to look at landscape as everything up to the horizon,” Wise said. “But what about what’s above it?” Wise and others spent years drawing up their submission to the IDA, collecting reams of light readings and forming an alliance of local councils, parks’ bodies and community groups to produce an exterior lighting master plan that influences the construction of new developments in the area.
Their efforts have been vindicated. Many of the 1.5 million who visit Northumberland each year are now aware of its Dark Sky status. “We get a lot of people coming here to see the sky now,” says the man at the car-hire firm in Newcastle. “They come in autumn and winter, when it’s darkest. Good for the B&Bs as they get business all year round now.” Local hoteliers now issue guests with night-vision torches and put out deckchairs at night. Those who have acquired some knowledge of astronomy can receive a badge confirming that their hotels are “Dark Sky Friendly”.
Wise acknowledges that Northumberland needs to do more to capitalize on its scarce resource and believes the region needs a couple more observatories to ensure that visitors will see what they came for. A £14m national landscape discovery centre, which he describes as the north’s answer to the Eden Project, will have an observatory when it is completed in a couple of years.
Fildes has grand designs. He is planning Britain’s first “astrovillage”, one that would house the largest public observatory in the world and boast a 100-seat auditorium, a 100-seat planetarium, a one-metre aperture telescope, and radiomagnetic and solar telescopes. The multimillion-pound project would feature a hotel and draw in 100,000 people a year, four times the number currently able to use the observatory. Fildes is cryptic about his backers but believes the astrovillage will be a reality by 2018.
However, Northumberland faces competition. Galloway Forest Park in Scotland also has Dark Sky Park status. Since Exmoor was designated Europe’s first International Dark Sky Reserve – one notch below Dark Sky Park – in 2011, a range of local businesses offering stargazing breaks and safaris has sprung up. The UK will have to go some way to eclipse northern Chile, which boasts more than a dozen tourist observatories and has some of the clearest skies in the world. The Teide National Park in Tenerife is also becoming a major astrotourism destination.
So, what is driving the desire to look upwards? The media have helped. TV presenters like Brian Cox have attracted a new generation of stargazers. “Brian Cox has made astronomy accessible,” says Wise. “It’s no longer seen as the province of professors in studies with brass telescopes.” Technology has also played a part. Apps such as Stellarium now turn smartphones into pocket-size planetariums. Ultimately, though, Fildes believes people are starting to appreciate what lies above. “If you had to build a visitor attraction from scratch, what could be better than the universe?” | 2 | Advance |
Scientists have put a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment. They hopethe results of the experiment will help to explain why people “remember” things that never happened.
False memories are sometimes a problem with eyewitness statements in courts of law.
Eyewitnesses often give evidence that leads to guilty verdicts, but later those verdicts may be changed when DNA or some other evidence is used.
Susumu Tonagawa, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his team wanted to study how these false memories form in the human brain. They put memories in the brains of mice by changing individual neurons.
In the experiment, Tonagawa’s team put the mice in a box and allowed them to explore it.
As they explored it, their brain cells created a memory. The next day, they put the same mice in a second box and gave them a small electric shock. This scared the mice. At the same time, the researchers shone light into the mouse brains to bring back their memories of the first box. That way, the mice associated fear of the electric shock with the memory of the first box.
In the final part of the experiment, the team put the mice back in the first box. The mice froze because they were scared. However, they had not received the shock in the first box and had no reason to be afraid.
A similar thing may happen when powerful false memories are created in humans. “Humans are very imaginative animals,” said Tonagawa. “So, just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we have in our mind with bad or good events. In other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you.”
He added: “Our study showed that the false memory and the real memory use very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult to tell the difference between them. We hope our future experiments will show legal experts how unreliable memory can be.”
Chris French, of the University of London, is a researcher in false memories in people. He said that the results of the experiments were an important first step in understanding false memories. He added that memory researchers have always known that memory does not work like a video camera, recording all the details of anything we experience. Instead, we build a memory from small pieces of memory of the event, as well as information from other places.
He warned that the false memories created in the mice in the experiments were far simpler than the complex false memories people have, such as false memories of childhood sexual abuse, abduction by aliens, or “past lives”. These complex false memories involve many parts of the brain. French says that it will be a long time before we understand how our brains make these memories.
The mouse models created by the MIT team will help scientists ask more complex questions about memories in people. “Now that we can change the contents of memories in the brain, we can begin asking questions that used to be philosophical questions,” said Steve Ramirez, who works with Tonagawa at MIT. “Can we create false memories? What about false memories for more than just places – false memories for objects, food or other mice? These used to be sci-fi questions but we can now research them in the lab.” | 0 | Elementary |
Benjamin Carle is 96.9% made in France, right down to his underpants and socks. Unfortunately, six Ikea forks, a Chinese guitar and unsourced wall paint stopped him being declared a 100% economic patriot, but nobody is perfect.
Carle, 26, set out, in 2013, to see if it was possible to live using only French-made products for ten months as part of a television documentary.
The idea was triggered by the Minister for Economic Renewal Arnaud Montebourg’s call for the public to buy French to save the country’s industrial production sector.
The experiment cost Carle his smartphone, television, refrigerator (all made in China); his spectacles (Italian); his underpants (Moroccan); morning coffee (Guatemalan) and his adored David Bowie music (British).
Fortunately, his long-suffering girlfriend, Anaïs, and cat, Loon, (both French) stuck with him.
“Politicians say all sorts of things and expect us to go along with it. I wanted to see if it was possible and feasible to do what the minister was asking us to do; to hold him to account for his words,” Carle told the Guardian over a non-French coffee in a Parisian café after finishing his documentary.
He set just three rules: eat only foods produced in France, eliminate contact with foreign-made goods and do so on €1,800 a month (above the minimum wage of €1,430 to cover the extra expense of living in Paris).
The journalist was shocked to find out at the start of the experiment that only 4.5% of the contents of his flat were made nationally – and that the rest would have to go, including the lightbulbs (China) and green beans (Kenya).
The removal men left his home almost bare.
Left without a refrigerator (none are made in France) or nail clippers, he was forced to chill his food on the window ledge and saw at his toenails with a penknife.
His foreign-made clothes, down to his underwear, were replaced with more expensive alternatives: French-produced underpants (€26), socks (€9), polo shirt (€75), espadrille sandals ( €26), but no jeans as none are produced in France.
During the experiment, Carle scoured supermarket shelves for 100% French-made products, learned to cook seasonal fruit and vegetables grown in France, proudly brushed his teeth with the last toothbrush made in France by a company in Picardie employing 29 people and hand-washed his smalls until he found the last French-made washing machine (which, being top opening, would not fit under the kitchen counter).
Going out with friends was problematic – no American films, no Belgian beer, no sushi or pizza. Staying home, with no sofa for the first few months and no television, meant listening to crooner Michel Sardou and reading French novels. French wine was, of course, allowed and French-Canadian singer Céline Dion, but not, according to his advisers, French bands such as Daft Punk, who sing in English.
Unable to use his British-made bicycle or even a French car after discovering the only affordable Peugeot, Renault and Citroën models are mostly made overseas, he invested in a fug-emitting orange Mobylette moped.
The last things to go were the computer, replaced by a Qooq, a recipe tablet that connects – slowly – to the internet and the iPhone, swapped for an old Sagem mobile.
The documentary shows Carle – realizing he is addicted to his iPhone – smashing it with a brand-new French-made Tefal saucepan, while his girlfriend shrieks: “Are you crazy? Those are new pans!”
Carle tells viewers his aim is to “save the French economy. After all, I like Mission Impossible”. He admits the experiment was part serious and part jest. At one point, he consults a French language expert to check if he should be using “cool” and other Anglicisms – he was advised to swap it for the nearest French equivalent: “chouette”.
On discovering France makes no refrigerators (apart from wine coolers) or televisions, but is big in aeroplane seats and windmills, he sighs and says: “Great. Nothing that will fit into my apartment.”
At the end of the experiment, Carle takes out a bank loan to refurnish his home and clothe himself. A special “auditor” declares him 96.9% “made in France” and Montebourg visits to present him with a medal.
Carle’s conclusion: “It’s not entirely possible or even desirable to live 100% made in France, particularly in terms of new technology. But that wasn’t the point.
“This wasn’t about French nationalism or patriotism. It was trying to show that we should reflect about the way we consume and make different choices, and that applies in all countries. If we want to save jobs and industries, wherever we are, we might think about supporting them.
“A T-shirt is more expensive in France but I can be sure it has been produced by workers who are correctly paid and have good working conditions. I cannot be sure about a cheaper T-shirt produced in Asia or Morocco.”
He added: “It’s hypocrisy to go around blaming capitalists for a country’s economic decline when people could be doing more as consumers.”
Carle says he hopes to continue supporting French industry and producers, but not 100%. “It is a full-time job just finding the stuff,” he said.
The first thing he did when the experiment ended was invite his friends around for the evening to enjoy “a plate of cheese and listen to the David Bowie album Aladdin Sane”.
“It was difficult not being able to invite people around because there was nowhere to sit ... but I’d choose the Bowie over a sofa any day.” | 2 | Advance |
The Virunga National Park, home to rare mountain gorillas but targeted for oil exploration by a British company, could earn trouble-torn DR Congo $400m a year from tourism, hydropower and carbon credits, said a WWF report.
But, if the UNESCO World Heritage Site that straddles the equator is exploited for oil, as the Congolese government and exploration firm SOCO International are hoping, it could lead to devastating pollution and permanent conflict in an already unstable region, says the conservation body.
SOCO International is the only company seeking to explore inside the boundaries of the Virunga park. SOCO insist that their operations in Congo would be confined to an area in the park known as Block V, and would not affect the gorillas.
SOCO Chairman Rui de Sousa said: “Despite the views of WWF, SOCO is extremely sensitive to the environmental significance of the Virunga National Park. It is irrefutable that oil companies still have a central role in today’s global energy supply and a successful oil project has the potential to transform the economic and social well-being of a whole country.”
He added: “The park has sadly been in decline for many years, officially falling below the standards required for a World Heritage Site. The potential for development just might be the catalyst that reverses this trend.”
However, Raymond Lumbuenamo, country director for WWF Democratic Republic of the Congo, based in Kinshassa, said that security in and around the park would deteriorate further if SOCO went ahead with its exploration plans.
“The security situation is already bad. The UN is involved with fighting units and the M23 rebel force is inside the park. Oil would be a curse. It always increases conflict. It would attract human sabotage. The park might become like the Niger Delta. Developing Virunga for oil will not make anything better.
“The population there is already very dense, with over 350 people per square kilometre. When you take part of the land (for oil), you put more pressure on the rest. Oil would not provide many jobs; people would flood in looking for work,” he said.
One fear is that the area is seismically active and another eruption of one of the volcanoes in the park could damage oil company infrastructure and lead to oil spills in the lakes. “Virunga’s rich natural resources are for the benefit of the Congolese people, not for foreign oil prospectors to drain away. Our country’s future depends on sustainable economic development,” said Lumbuenamo.
“For me, choosing the conservation option is the best option. Once you have started drilling for oil, there’s no turning back,” he said.
But Lumbuenamo accepted that, while the gorillas were safe at present, the chances of the park generating its potential of $400m a year were remote. “It would be difficult to make the kind of money that the report talks of. Virunga used to be a very peaceful place and can be again. The security situation right now is bad. The UN is involved with fighting units. It’s not as quiet as it used to be.”
According to the WWF report, ecosystems in the park could support hydropower generation, fishing and ecotourism, and play an important role in providing secure water supplies, regulating climate and preventing soil erosion.
The park, Africa’s oldest and most diverse, is home to over 3,000 different kinds of animals, but is now heavily populated with desperately poor people, many of whom fled there after the Rwanda massacre in 1994.
“In all, the park could support in the region of 45,000 permanent jobs. In addition, people around the world could get an immense value from simply knowing that the park is well managed and is safe for future generations,” says the report.
“Virunga represents a valuable asset to DR Congo and contributes to Africa’s heritage as the oldest and most biodiverse park on the continent,” the report continues. “Plans to explore for oil and exploit oil reserves put Virunga’s potential value at risk,” it says.
“This is where we draw the line. Oil companies are standing on the doorstep of one of the world’s most precious and fragile places, but we will not rest until Virunga is safe from this potential environmental disaster,” said Lasse Gustavsson, executive director of WWF International. “Virunga has snow fields and lava fields, but it should not have oil fields.”
The UNESCO World Heritage Committee called for the cancellation of all Virunga oil permits and appealed to concession holders Total SA and SOCO International plc not to undertake exploration in World Heritage Sites. Total has committed to respecting Virunga’s current boundary, leaving UK-based SOCO as the only oil company with plans to explore inside the park. | 2 | Advance |
Two mothers in South Africa have discovered they are raising each other’s daughters after they were mistakenly switched at birth in a hospital in 2010.
But, while one of the women wants to correct the error and reclaim her biological child, the other is refusing to give back the girl she has raised as her own, posing a huge legal dilemma.
Henk Strydom, a lawyer for one of the mothers, who cannot be identified because of a court order, described the inadvertent swap as a travesty and tragedy that is unlikely to have a happy ending.
Both mothers gave birth at the Tambo Memorial Hospital in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on the same day in 2010. “Nobody suspected anything,” Strydom said.
But, in 2013, one of the mothers, who is 33 and unemployed, sued her ex-partner for maintenance for her daughter. Strydom continued: “The man denied he was the father. A DNA test was done and it was found it was not his baby and not her baby. She was devastated. She didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, she met the other mother and, since December 2013, they have been attending joint counselling sessions, arranged by the hospital. This has included meeting their biological daughters.
Strydom said of his client: “She said there are resemblances to herself. She conveyed to me that it was traumatic. You can see it’s not easy for her. She has to care for a child that is not hers on her own while her child is with someone else.”
The woman reportedly became unhappy with the process and approached the children’s court in a bid to gain custody of her biological child, but the other mother refused. Strydom agreed to represent the woman, who has one elder child, pro bono.
“It’s a tragedy. She wants the baby back but it seems the other mother is reluctant. It’s four years later: you can understand she doesn’t want to give up her baby.”
The High Court in Pretoria has appointed the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Child Law to investigate what will now be in the best interests of the children, which is the guiding principle under South African law. It must report back within 90 days.
Strydom added: “Your guess is as good as mine what the court may decide. It’s a travesty. How do you rectify it after four years? The longer you wait, the more traumatic it will be. But, whatever happens, someone won’t be happy.”
He said at this point, he and his client do not want to sue the hospital or government health department, which is currently helping with the case and providing counselling.
The Centre for Child Law will now interview the mothers and fathers, as well as any other person with a “significant relationship” with either of the girls. The children and mothers will undergo “full and thorough” clinical assessments and may be seen by a psychologist.
Karabo Ngidi, a lawyer with the centre, said “What’s going to happen must be in the best interests of the children. Biology is an important aspect but not the only one.”
The families are of Zulu ethnicity and so Zulu tradition, culture and customary law will be a factor, she added. It is also still possible the ex- partner of the mother taking legal action could be the biological father of the girl who was switched.
It is not the first child-swap case to come to light in South Africa. In 1995, two mothers were awarded damages after their sons, born in 1989, were accidentally switched at the Johannesburg hospital where they were born.
In 2009, in Oregon in the United States, Dee Ann Angell and Kay Rene Reed discovered that they had been mistakenly mixed up at birth in 1953 when a nurse brought them back from bathing. In 2013, in Japan, a 60-year-old man swapped at birth from his rich parents to a poor family was given compensation. He grew up on welfare and became a truck driver, whereas his biological siblings – and the boy brought up in his place – attended private secondary schools and universities.
Bruce Laing, a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg, said the long-term effects of a baby swap could be “profound”, “terrifying” and “incredibly traumatizing”. He told The Times of South Africa: “An increasingly complicated situation is that some resentment towards a child that is not yours might occur. The parents might always be thinking 'What if?'” | 2 | Advance |
In 2005, BlackBerry brought instant messaging to the mobile phone and the company was just entering its period of success. Then, the iPhone was still just an idea and BlackBerry’s innovations made its smartphone one of Canada’s biggest exports.
Six years later, in the summer of 2011, there were riots in London and other UK cities. Rioters used BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and politicians wanted the service to shut down. But, two years later, the users themselves are leaving BBM.
Fewer and fewer people want BlackBerry phones. There are now many alternative products, from Facebook’s and Apple’s instant messaging applications to independent apps such as WhatsApp and Kik (which is also Canadian). They are free to download and use, and they use the internet to swap text messages, pictures, voice clips, 'stickers' and even videos between most types of phones.
BBM is trying to keep its customers and you can now use it on Android and Apple phones. There are many other apps people can use, but lots of people want to use the BBM app – more than 20 million people downloaded it. But many people believe BBM will not survive. “The move to bring BlackBerry to the iPhone is four or five years too late,” says James Gooderson, a technology blogger. “WhatsApp has made BlackBerrys unnecessary for young people.”
BBM says it has 80 million monthly users after its upgrade, but WhatsApp has 300 million. Other services show BBM’s weaknesses: Skype and Viber have video or voice calls, but BBM doesn’t; Path does location sharing, but BBM doesn’t; there is no video sharing, as on iMessage; and the stickers (a more sophisticated version of the smiley face), that kids around the world adore, are also absent. Even the contacts and calendar sharing that BBM made possible on BlackBerry phones are not on the Apple and Android versions.
Messaging is now becoming visual. Photos that are uploaded to Instagram get instant comments and Snapchat’s pictures have opened a world of other possibilities. Like BBM, all of these services are free for any phone with an internet connection. But, in 2011, BBM was so powerful that it helped to start a revolution in Egypt; and at the time of the London riots, people used BBM, not their televisions, to find out quickly what was happening.
Nearly 80% of young smartphone owners regularly use a social networking application but two-thirds use more than one. 60% of 16- to 24-year-olds use Facebook every day, but 46% use alternatives. “It’s much more complex,” says Benedict Evans, a digital media specialist. “All of these apps use your smartphone. Apps rise and fall like fireworks. Some, like Instagram, last; others just disappear.”
Thirteen-year-old Bennett has three phones. He keeps his BlackBerry for messaging, he uses an iPhone to play games, and he makes phone calls on an Android phone. His friends are still on BBM. At the touch of a few buttons, you can send a single BlackBerry message to several hundred people; on WhatsApp, the limit is 50. But, for Bennett, Instagram is now a major social network. “Instagram is Facebook without parents,” he says. “Facebook is now for older people.” The low cost of buying and using a BlackBerry is still an advantage. Anyone with a second-hand phone and a £7-a-month deal from a telecoms company can use unlimited BBM messages. But people no longer trust the privacy of BBM. Business people, revolutionaries, demonstrators and rioters used to believe that their messages were secret. The arrests that followed the riots showed that wasn’t true.
In the rich London district of South Kensington, the older pupils at one school all have Apple phones. They all use WhatsApp. For many, BBM is a distant memory. “I still have a Blackberry, but I’m the only one,” says one teenager. And how does that make him feel? “Isolated,” he says. | 0 | Elementary |
An atmosphere of melancholy and changing times pervades the opening to the final series of Downton Abbey. The year is 1925 and there are already the first rumblings of the economic storms that will blight the end of the decade. The neighbours are selling up their own stately home, while Lord Grantham seeks to cut back on servants after declaring that under-butlers are no longer affordable.
But at the real Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle – a stately home owned by George “Geordie” Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon – the financial outlook has rarely been brighter. According to Lady Fiona Carnarvon, the huge global success of Downton has funded a rolling programme of building repairs aimed at safeguarding Highclere for the next generation.
“It’s been an amazing magic carpet ride for all of us,” she said. “It’s given us a wonderful marketing platform, an international profile. I’m hugely grateful. My husband and I love the house, and the people here. Now, without doubt, it is loved by millions of other people.”
Currently, only the ground and first floors of Highclere, on the borders of Hampshire, are used. But, a restoration project of derelict tower rooms has begun that will eventually allow visitors to climb up into the tower to an exhibition showcasing the work of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Sir Charles Barry, who rebuilt the house between 1839 and 1842.
When the Downton Abbey producers first approached Highclere in 2009, the family faced a near £12m repair bill, with urgent work priced at £1.8m. But, by 2012, the Downton effect had begun to take the pressure off. Lord Carnarvon said then: “It was just after the banking crisis and it was gloom in all directions. We had been doing corporate functions but it all became pretty sparse after that. Then, Downton came along and it became a major tourist attraction.”
Visitor numbers doubled, to 1,200 a day, as Downton Abbey, scripted by Julian Fellowes, came to be screened around the world after becoming a hit in the UK in 2010 and, then, in the US. It is now broadcast in 250 countries. The formerly somewhat basic ticketing policy has become a computerized advance booking system, helping to guarantee foreign visitors admission. The accounts of Highclere Enterprises for 2014-15 show current assets have almost trebled to around £1m since 2012. Gareth Neame, the executive producer for the series, said: “I think Downton Abbey secured Highclere’s future.”
Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television, recalls the moment when Highclere was booked. “I thought, 'So what?', because I had never heard of Highclere Castle. One stately home looks much the same as another. How wrong I was. The castle has been one enormous character as well.”
The Downton tourists are part of a growing phenomenon. VisitBritain estimates that nearly 30% of foreign visitors, or nearly nine million people, include castles and historic houses on their itineraries. Almost half of potential visitors to Britain now say they want to indulge in “set jetting ”, visiting places featured in films or on TV. More than a million embark on a tour of historic buildings each year, spending in excess of £1bn. From the biggest emerging tourist markets, 51% of Brazilians, 42% of Russians and Chinese, and 35% of Indian visitors are likely to include a visit to a site of interest in their trips. VisitBritain’s director, Patricia Yates, said: “The links between tourism, films and TV are potent ones.” She added that period dramas have also raised the popularity of regions outside of London.
Neame is now an ambassador for the GREAT Britain campaign, which is backed by government departments and the British Council, using it to promote the UK around the world. Events include special Downton -themed receptions at British embassies.
Neame said: “They approached me because of the reach. A lot of people here think of it as soapy entertainment. In other parts of the world, people revere our actors, our writing and production talent. It is something I am passionate about; I am a really strong believer in soft power. We are not nearly as proud of our achievements as we should be.
“Downton Abbey is iconic for expressing Britishness. Really, it is a fantasy world, based in a particular time in history. It’s the first TV period drama that has really leapt out of the screen and become part of popular culture.”
Lady Carnarvon is still keen to emphasize that the long-term future of Highclere is not necessarily secure. “The bottom line is quite thin,” she said. “The programme has allowed us to spend faster on the buildings, have the follies restored.”
In the pipeline is a Tutankhamun centenary event in 2022, 100 years after the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, together with Howard Carter, discovered the tomb that revolutionized our understanding of Egyptology. Another opportunity to keep Highclere in the public mind is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed the grounds.
“What you do is never sit on your laurels. Every single day, don’t take anything for granted,” said Lady Carnarvon. “For all these great houses, you have to invest in them. And, there has been a deficit since the 1930s. Perhaps, in the past, an estate and house defined and supported the family and their lifestyle but, today, it is quite the reverse: the challenge is how Geordie and I seek to support and look after Highclere.
“From my point of view, I’ve tried to persuade people it is fun and have specific events they can engage with, not just a wander around a dusty house. We have to compete with attractions like the London Dungeon.” | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
The High Court in London has ruled that three elderly Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion have the right to sue. Now the British government is afraid that thousands of legal claims may follow, from people who were imprisoned and who say they were treated badly during the final days of the British Empire.
The governments lawyers said that too much time had passed since the seven-year insurgency in the 1950s and it was no longer possible to hold a fair trial, but the court rejected these claims. In 2011 the same judge rejected the governments claim that the three claimants should sue the Kenyan government because it had inherited Britains legal responsibilities on independence in 1963.
Human rights activists in Kenya estimate more than 5,000 of the 70,000 people detained by the British colonial authorities are still alive. Many may bring claims against the British government. The ruling may also make it possible for victims of colonial atrocities in other parts of the world to sue.
The Foreign Office said that the ruling had potentially significant legal implications, and said it was planning to appeal. The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is three to six years, a spokesman said. In this case, that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision makers are dead and unable to give their view of what happened.
The historic victory for Paulo Muoka Nzili, 85, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, 84, and Jane Muthoni Mara, 73, was the result of a three-year battle in the courts. Their lawyers said they had suffered unspeakable acts of brutality. In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, Nyingi and Mara, heard the news by mobile phone. They had been sitting silently with their supporters in a garden and reacted with joy when the word came, hugging, dancing and raising their hands to the sky to pray.
Nyingi, who was detained for about nine years, beaten unconscious and still has the scars, said: For me I just wanted the truth to be out. Even the children of my children should know what happened. What should happen is that people should be compensated so they can begin to forgive the British government. Mara said: Im very happy and my heart is clean. When she was asked what she would tell her four children, she said simply: I will tell them I won.
The judge said in 2011 that there was ample evidence that there may have been systematic torture of detainees. On Friday he ruled that a fair trial was possible, and highlighted the fact that thousands of secret files from the colonial era appeared in 2011.
The British governments lawyers tried to have the claims rejected but they accepted that all three of the elderly Kenyans were tortured by the colonial authorities. The claimants lawyer said: The British government has admitted that these three Kenyans were brutally tortured but they have been trying to avoid any legal responsibility. There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care.
A number of veterans of the insurgency in Cyprus in the 1950s watched the case closely. One has already met the Mau Mau claimants lawyers. Any Cypriot claimants could rely not only on British documents, but also on the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Those files are kept secret for 40 years, and then opened to public examination. The Red Cross documented hundreds of torture cases in Cyprus.
There may also be claims from Malaysia, where large numbers of people were detained during the 12-year war with communist insurgents and their supporters that began in 1948. Relatives of 24 unarmed rubber plantation workers who were killed by British troops are currently fighting through the British courts for a public inquiry. Many former prisoners of the British in Aden may also have claims against the British government, although Aden is now part of Yemen, and British lawyers may have problems making contact with possible clients there. | 1 | Intermediate |
Health warnings covering nearly two-thirds of cigarette packs and a ban on menthol cigarettes across the EU have come a step nearer following a vote in the European Parliament. Menthol and other flavours will be banned from 2022, but, in a blow to the UK government, MEPs decided that most electronic cigarettes, increasingly popular as alternatives to tobacco products, need not be regulated in the same way as medicines.
Health officials and the e-cigarette industry in Britain are seeking to clarify what this mean – for instance, whether companies in the fast-expanding market face the same bans on sponsorship and promotion at sports events as tobacco firms.
The Department of Health would not comment on the advertising issue until officials had studied the MEPs’ decisions. But, in a statement, the DH said: “We are very pleased to see the move towards tougher action on tobacco, with Europe-wide controls banning flavoured cigarettes and the introduction of stricter rules on front-of-pack health warnings. “However, we are disappointed with the decision to reject the proposal to regulate nicotine-containing products (NCPs), including e-cigarettes, as medicines. We believe these products need to be regulated as medicines and will continue to make this point during further negotiations.
“Figures show smoking levels in England are at their lowest since records began – 19.5 per cent – but we are determined to further reduce rates of smoking and believe this important step will help.”
The UK e-cigarette industry, which broadly welcomed the parliament’s vote, said it was already in talks with the Advertising Standards Authority, but added that it would not be “sensible, proportionate, reasonable or useful” to ban all advertising.
MEPs decided e-cigarettes should only be regulated as medical products if manufacturers claimed they could prevent tobacco smoking – a decision criticized by the government’s main medicines regulator.
They want to put the products, used by an estimated 1.3 million people in Britain by 2014, on the same legal basis as gums, patches and mouth sprays aimed at helping smokers to quit, but the industry says the expensive process of licensing would help force alternatives to tobacco off the shelves.
The MEPs voted to put health warnings on 65% of each cigarette pack, as opposed to a proposed 75%. At present, the warnings cover at least 30% on the front and 40% on the back. The UK government has delayed a decision on whether to follow Australia by introducing standardized packaging until there is evidence that such measures cut tobacco use.
The MEPs’ votes in the first reading of the draft tobacco directive, which could become law in 2014, will be followed by negotiations with the EU Council of Ministers.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority had already invited manufacturers to cooperate by opting for voluntary regulation in June 2013 in advance of what it still hopes will be compulsory across Europe. “The legislative process is still not complete and there will be further negotiation. The UK continues to believe that medicinal regulation of NCPs is the best way to deliver a benefit to public health,” said a spokesman.
Linda McAvan, Labour MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and spokesperson on tobacco issues for the parliament’s Socialists & Democrats group, said: “We know that it is children, not adults, who start smoking. And, despite the downward trend in most member states of adult smokers, the World Health Organization figures show worrying upward trends in a number of our member states of young smokers.
“We need to stop tobacco companies targeting young people with an array of gimmicky products and we need to make sure that cigarette packs carry effective warnings.”
Martin Callanan, the Conservative MEP for North East England, said: “Forcing e-cigs off the shelves would have been totally crazy. These are products that have helped countless people stop smoking more harmful cigarettes and yet some MEPs wanted to make them harder to manufacture than ordinary tobacco.”
Katherine Devlin, president of ECITA, the e-cigarette industry association, said “the really important” decision by MEPs not to support medicines regulation meant that was now off the table.
British American Tobacco claimed the larger health warnings demanded by MEPs went “well beyond” what was needed to inform consumers of health risks from smoking, while a ban on mentholated cigarettes would increase demand for black-market goods. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
What surprised researchers was not how hard people found the challenge but how far they would go to avoid it. The task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
Some found it so unbearable that they took the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks to break the tedium.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button that gave them a painful shock during a 15-minute period of solitude.
Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The difference, scientists suspect, is that men are typically more sensation-seeking than women.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities tries to answer the question of why most of us nd it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount of time they spent on smartphones or social media.
Timothy Wilson, who led the work, said the ndings were not necessarily due to the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant need to do something rather than nothing.
In the rst experiments, students were taken alone, without phones, books or anything to write with into a room and told to think. The only rules were that they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. They were told that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned when the time was up. On average, they did not enjoy the experience. They struggled to concentrate. Their minds wandered even with nothing to distract them.
In case the unfamiliar setting reduced the ability to think, the researchers did the experiment again with people at home.
They got similar results. In fact, people found the experience even more miserable and cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
To see if the effect was found only in students, the scientists tested more than 100 other people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers market. They also disliked being left to their thoughts.
But, the most surprising result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of giving themselves a mild electric shock.
They had been asked earlier to say how unpleasant the shocks were, compared to other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.
All the students chosen for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks.
To the researchers surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks and six of 24 women did the same.
The scientists said that the most surprising thing was that being alone with their thoughts was so hard for many people that they gave themselves an electric shock something the participants had earlier said they would pay to avoid.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably give themselves an electric shock to cheer up a tedious lecture. But, she says we need to know more about the motivation of the shockers in Wilsons study.
Imagine a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will deliver a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there with their thoughts, she said.
As they sit there, their mind starts to wander and it naturally goes to that shock was it really that bad? | 1 | Intermediate |
It is hard to tell exactly where the noise is coming from, but impossible to miss it from anywhere in Damascus: all day and night you can hear the dull thud and boom of artillery, rockets or planes pounding rebel positions – the sound of war getting closer to Syria’s capital. But just over two years into the Syrian crisis – the longest and bloodiest of the Arab uprisings – ignoring the sound of death and destruction nearby has become the new normal for Damascenes.
Over the weekend, men could be seen puffing on water pipes in a palm-shaded park, children playing between the flowerbeds and couples chatting on benches as the unmistakable thunderclap of high explosive could be heard a few miles away – smoke rising between the minarets of a nearby Ottoman-era mosque. No one seemed to notice.
“Actually you do get used to it after a while,” said George, an IT technician from a village on the coast. “But you never know exactly what they are hitting.” That usually becomes clear later from video clips posted by opposition media outlets on YouTube.
The sinister background noise is doubly disturbing because the government tries so hard to preserve a jaunty air of business as usual. “As you can see, everything here is fine but we have to hit the terrorists, these extremists,” an army officer announced. An official, whose route home has come under attack from rebels in Daraya, said: “If I was afraid, I would just shut my door and stay inside. I have to work and I am not afraid. If I don’t defend my country, who will?”
Ordinary citizens, in private conversation, are less defiant. In the centre of town, a shopkeeper complained sadly that his baby daughter cries at the sound of shelling. Zeina, a twenty-something student, fears becoming desensitized to suffering – and perhaps to danger too. “In the beginning, when there started to be explosions, I used to have nightmares,” she reflected. “Now I can sleep through anything.”
And, the risks are multiplying even closer to home. In Sabaa Bahrat Square, in what was supposed to be the safest part of Damascus, a car bomb detonated, leaving a blackened concrete facade, broken windows and mangled metal as well as blast damage to the imposing structure of the Syrian Central Bank next door. Mourning notices for two of the 15 victims – Muhammad al-Sufi and Manal al-Tahan – are stuck to the wall opposite. Scruffy, machine-gun toting militiamen mill around the square, often used for televised pro-regime rallies with civil servants bussed in en masse to chant slogans under giant banners of President Bashar al-Assad.
That bombing was not the worst Damascus has experienced as the situation has deteriorated. In February, 80 people, including schoolchildren, reportedly died near the ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters in Mazraa. The crater is still visible, marked by an enormous patch of fresh asphalt on the main road going north. “I live nearby but luckily I wasn’t there,” recalled Munir, a university lecturer.
Mortar bombs, fired from rebel-held areas now within easy range of the city, have become an ominous novelty. The bombs killed 15 students in a university cafeteria on 28 March. The intended target is thought to have been a government building.
Security measures have intensified since the devastating bombing of the national security crisis cell in July 2012, when four of Assad’s most senior aides were killed. Concrete blast barriers – often painted in the Syrian flag’s black, red and white – now protect official premises, not just the military or defence installations that are obvious targets. The Iranian Embassy in Mezze, its turquoise mosaic front giving an exotic glimpse of Isfahan or Shiraz, looks like a fortress. “The regime did manage to set up a ring of steel round Damascus,” a foreign diplomat said. “But for whatever reason the perimeter is starting to be punctured and that brings home the reality of the war.”
All this means that moving around has become difficult, unpredictable and time-consuming – another aspect of the new normal across an understandably nervous city. Checkpoints on main roads funnel traffic for ID checks and baggage searches with handheld explosive detectors – vital to stop future bombers. Only drivers with an official security clearance can use special fast lanes to avoid the wait.
It is hard, however, to avoid the question on everyone’s mind: will there be a battle for Damascus – the world’s oldest continually inhabited city, as the guidebooks say – like the one that has so damaged Aleppo? Parts of the city already feel like a war zone: its ritziest hotel is eerily deserted though many rooms are being used as offices by international agencies drawn by the deepening crisis – blue helmets and flak jackets piled up on Persian carpets in an ornate reception room, white UN vehicles parked behind the blast barriers outside. The streets empty soon after 9pm.
One view is that the fight for Syria’s capital is coming, but not quite yet – in the summer perhaps, some predict, when the rebels have consolidated their gains in the south. Others argue that outright victory by either side is unlikely and hope for a political solution imposed from abroad. But few here seem to expect things to get any better. | 2 | Advance |
Police and intelligence agencies around the world have, for almost 100 years, used the polygraph, a lie-detector test, to help catch criminals and spies.
But, now, researchers in Britain and the Netherlands have developed a new method, which is correct (in tests) over 70% of the time. Police stations around the world might begin using this new method within ten years. It doesn’t monitor movements in the face, talking too much or waving arms – all signs that someone is lying. The new method monitors movements in the whole body, which can show that the person is feeling guilty.
The polygraph is often used in the US in criminal cases and by the FBI and CIA but is much less popular in Europe. Many people do not believe that it is reliable.
The basic idea behind the new method is that liars fidget more and that an all-body motion suit – the kind used in films to create computer-generated characters – will record this.
The new method is over 70% reliable – the polygraph is only 55% reliable. In some tests, the success rate of the new method was more than 80%.
Ross Anderson, one of the research team, said: “Guilty people fidget more and we can now measure this.”
The polygraph was created in 1921 by policeman John Larson. It records changes in pulse, blood pressure, sweating and breathing to find out if someone is lying.
In movies, the polygraph is always correct but, in 1998, the US Supreme Court decided that there was no agreement that the polygraph was reliable. The US National Academy of Scientists said the same thing in 2003.
The tests Anderson and his colleagues did involved 180 students and employees at Lancaster University. Half of the people were told to tell the truth and half to lie.
The researchers interviewed some of the people about a computer game called Never End that they played for seven minutes. Others lied about playing it.
The second test involved a lost wallet with £5 inside. Some people had to bring the wallet to a lost-and-found box. Others hid it and lied about it.
The new body-suit method was correct 82.2% of the time. Researchers monitored how much the people moved their arms and legs, to decide if they were telling the truth or lying.
All-body suits are expensive – they cost about £30,000 – and they can be uncomfortable, so Anderson and his colleagues are now looking at cheaper alternatives. These include using motion-sensing technology from computer games, such as the Kinect devices developed by Microsoft for the Xbox console. | 0 | Elementary |
1 Passing clouds
One of the pleasures of flying is seeing clouds close up. Even though they seem insubstantial they carry a considerable weight of water – around 500 tonnes in a small cumulus cloud. And water is denser than air. So why don’t clouds fall out of the sky like rain? They do. But the droplets take a long time to sink. An average cloud would take a year to fall one metre.
2 On cloud nine
Most of us are happy to label clouds “fluffy ones” or “nasty black ones ”, but meteorologists identify more than 50 cloud types based on shape and altitude. These fit into categories given numbers from one to nine. Cloud nine is the vast, towering cumulonimbus, so to be “on cloud nine” implies being on top of the world.
3 Around the rainbow
There’s no better place to see a rainbow than from a plane. Rainbows are produced when sunlight hits raindrops. We see a bow because the Earth gets in the way, but, from a plane, a rainbow is a complete circle. When passing over clouds, the plane’s shadow appears neatly in the centre of the effect.
4 Mr blue sky
Sunlight is white, containing all the colours of the spectrum but, as it passes through air, some of the light is scattered when it interacts with the gas molecules. Blue light scatters more than the lower-energy colours, so the blue appears to come from the sky.
5 There’s life out there
Apart from clouds and other planes, we don’t expect to see much directly outside a flying aircraft’s window, but the air is seething with bacterial life – as many as 1,800 different types of bacteria have been detected over cities and they can reach twice the cruising height of a plane.
6 Turbulence terror
Even the most experienced flyer can be turned green by turbulence. The outcome can be anything from repeated bumping to sudden, dramatic plunges. The good news for nervous flyers is that no modern airliner has ever been brought down by turbulence. People have been injured and occasionally killed when they are not strapped in, or get struck by poorly secured luggage – but the plane is not going to be knocked out of the sky.
7 In-flight radiation
When body scanners were introduced at airports there were radiation scares but the level produced is the same as passengers receive in one minute of flight. The Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, natural radiation from space that has more impact at altitude.
8 You can’t cure jet lag
The world is divided into time zones. The result is that long-haul travel results in a difference between local time and your body’s time, causing jet lag. However, its effects can be minimized by keeping food bland for 24 hours before travel, drinking plenty of fluids and living on your destination time from the moment you reach the aircraft.
9 Supersonic 747s
Many of us have travelled faster than sound. There are a number of jet streams in the upper atmosphere, notably on the journey from the US to Europe, where a temperature inversion causes a corridor of air to move as fast as 250mph. If an airliner with an airspeed of 550mph enters a jet stream, the result can be to fly at 800mph, above sound’s 740mph.
10 Flying through time
Time zones provide an artificial journey through time – but special relativity means that a flight involves actual time travel. It’s so minimal, though, that crossing the Atlantic weekly for 40 years would only move you 1/1,000th of a second into the future.
11 Terrible tea
Don’t blame the cabin attendant if your tea isn’t great. Water should be just under 100°C when it is poured on to tea leaves – but that isn’t possible on a plane. It’s impossible to get water beyond 90°C during flight – so choose coffee.
12 I can’t hear my food
Airline food has a reputation for being bland and tasteless. Some of the problem may not be poor catering, though. A plane is a noisy environment and there is evidence that food loses some of its savour when we are exposed to loud noises.
13 Needle in a haystack
With modern technology, it seems strange that Malaysian flight MH370 could disappear without a trace – yet, finding a missing aircraft is a needle- in-a-haystack problem. The plane knows its location, both from GPS and inertial tracking, but this information is not relayed elsewhere in real time. That would be perfectly possible. Ocean- going ships have had tracking since the 1980s – the limitation is not technology but a lack of legislation requiring it.
14 Volcanic fallout
Air travel can be cancelled by volcanic activity. Glass-like ash particles melt in the heat of the engine, then solidify on the rotors. A clear-skies policy in an ash cloud may be inconvenient – but the risks of ignoring the ash are clear.
15 The wing myth
For many years, we taught the wrong explanation for the way wings keep planes in the air. In fact, almost all a plane’s lift comes from Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The wing is shaped to push air downwards. As the air is pushed down, the wing gets an equal and opposite push upwards, lifting the plane.
16 Forget electric planes
When we see ultra-light, experimental, electric planes, it’s easy to assume there will soon be clean, green, electric airliners, but it won’t happen any time soon. Aircraft fuel packs in a remarkable amount of energy. Batteries are much less efficient. To provide the same energy as a tonne of fuel would take 100 tonnes of batteries – and a 747 uses 150 to 200 tonnes of fuel. Unless battery technology is made vastly more efficient, electric airliners won’t get off the ground.
17 Beware the vortex
Pilots often wait a long time to get clearance. This is to allow the air to settle after a previous take-off, as a plane’s wingtips generate vortices in the air, which can take two or three minutes to disperse. If the following aircraft set off immediately, the rapidly moving air would make the plane difficult to handle. The delay gives the air time to recover from the miniature whirlwinds caused by the preceding plane.
18 The doors aren’t locked
In practice, the doors on a plane don’t need to be locked. If you watch an aircraft door being opened, it swings in an unusual way. It first has to be opened inwards before manoeuvring it out of the way. Once the plane has taken off, a significant pressure difference soon builds up between the inside of the plane and the outside. This differential forces the door into place. To open it, you would have to pull against the air pressure, well beyond the capabilities of human muscles. | 2 | Advance |
When the Taliban sent a gunman to shoot Malala Yousafzai in October 2012 as she rode home on a bus after school, they made clear their intention: to silence the teenager and kill off her campaign for girls’ education.
Nine months and countless surgical operations later, she stood up at the United Nations on her 16th birthday on Friday to deliver a defiant riposte. “They thought that the bullet would silence us. But they failed,” she said.
As 16th birthdays go, it was among the more unusual. Instead of blowing out candles on a cake, Malala sat in one of the main council chambers at the United Nations in the central seat usually reserved for world leaders.
She listened quietly as Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, described her as “our hero, our champion”; and as the former British prime minister and now UN education envoy, Gordon Brown, uttered what he called “the words the Taliban never wanted her to hear: happy 16th birthday, Malala ”.
The event, dubbed Malala Day, was the culmination of an extraordinary four years for the girl from Mingora, in the troubled Swat valley of Pakistan. She was thrust into the public glare after she wrote a blog for the BBC Urdu service describing her experiences struggling to get an education under the rising power of Taliban militants.
By 11, she was showing exceptional determination, calling personally on the US special representative to Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to use his influence to combat the Taliban’s drive against education for girls. By 14, she was on the radar of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who put her forward for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and, by 15, she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee in history.
But such dizzying global attention came at a price. Death threats followed her growing recognition, and, on 9 October 2012, following a meeting of Pakistani Taliban leaders, the gunman was dispatched to remove what they called the “symbol of infidels and obscenity ”.
Multiple operations in Pakistan and the UK followed the attack on the bus, including the fitting of a titanium plate on her left forehead and a cochlear implant to restore her hearing. She now lives with her family in Birmingham and does what the Taliban tried to stop her doing: goes to school every day. “I am not against anyone,” she said in the UN chamber, having taken this day out from the classroom. “Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group.”
Malala responded to the violence of the Taliban with her own countervailing force: words against bullets. “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him.”
She spoke confidently, with only an injured eye and a slightly drooping left side of her face to hint at such fresh traumas. There was one other unstated allusion to the horror of her past: she wore a white shawl belonging to a woman who was also targeted by extremists but who, unlike Malala, did not survive to tell the tale: Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan.
“The extremists are afraid of books and pens,” the teenager continued. “The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them.”
She cited the attack in June on a hospital in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan, and killings of female teachers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “That is why they are blasting schools every day – because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society.”
And she gave her own opposing interpretation of Islam to the Taliban’s. “They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to hell just because of going to school. The terrorists are misusing the name of Islam and Pashtun society for their own personal benefits. Islam is a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood. Islam says that it is not only each child’s right to get education, rather it is their duty and responsibility.”
Such ability to articulate what normally remains unarticulated – to give voice to young people normally silenced – has generated its own response. The “Stand with Malala” petition, calling for education for the 57 million children around the world who do not go to school, has attracted more than four million signatures – more than a million having been added shortly after Malala’s speech.
At the start of her speech, Malala said: “I don’t know where to begin my speech. I don’t know what people would be expecting me to say.” She need not have worried. | 2 | Advance |
It was not so much how hard people found the challenge but how far they would go to avoid it that left researchers gobsmacked. The task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
So unbearable did some find it that they took up the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks in an attempt to break the tedium.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button to deliver a painful jolt during a 15-minute spell of solitude.
Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The difference, scientists suspect, is that men tend to be more sensation-seeking than women.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities is one of a surprising few to tackle the question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount of time they spent using smartphones or social media.
Timothy Wilson, who led the work, said the findings were not necessarily a reflection of the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant urge to do something rather than nothing.
The first run of experiments began with students being ushered – alone, without phones, books or anything to write with – into an unadorned room and told to think. The only rules were they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. They were informed – specifically or vaguely – that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned when the time was up. On average, they did not enjoy the experience. They struggled to concentrate. Their minds wandered even with nothing to distract them. Even giving them time to think about what to think about did not help.
In case the unfamiliar setting hampered the ability to think, the researchers ran the experiment again with people at home.
They got much the same results, only people found the experience even more miserable and cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
To see if the effect was found only in students, the scientists recruited more than 100 people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers’ market. They, too, disliked being left to their thoughts.
But, the most staggering result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of administering a mild electric shock.
They had been asked earlier to rate how unpleasant the shocks were, alongside other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.
All the students picked for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks after receiving a demonstration.
To the researchers’ surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks, as did six of 24 women.
“What is striking is that simply being alone with their thoughts was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid,” the scientists write in Science
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably zap themselves to cheer up a tedious lecture. But, she says more needs to be known about the motivation of the shockers in Wilson’s study.
“Imagine the setup – a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will deliver a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there and entertain themselves with their thoughts,” she said.
“As they sit there, strapped to this machine, their mind starts to wander and it naturally goes to that shock – was it really that bad?
“What are the experimenters really interested in? Perhaps this is a case where curiosity killed the cat.” | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
The day began with more police dawn raids on the Baur Au Lac hotel in Zurich and ended with 16 football officials being charged with corruption in the US, including five current or former members of FIFAs executive committee. They included the former Brazilian federation chief Ricardo Teixeira and his successor, Marco Polo Del Nero, who recently stepped down from the FIFA executive committee.
They were among 16 individuals accused of fraud and other offences by the US Department of Justice as it gave details of a series of kickback schemes in a new 240-page indictment. Twentyseven defendants have now been charged by the US, including former FIFA executive committee members. The betrayal of trust here is outrageous, the US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, said. The scale of corruption is completely unacceptable.
Swiss police arrested the president of the South American football confederation, the Paraguayan Juan ngel Napout, and Alfredo Hawit, the head of the North and Central American and Caribbean governing body. Hawit only succeeded Jeffrey Webb in May 2015, after Webb was arrested as part of the US operation that threw FIFA into crisis and led to the downfall of Sepp Blatter. Webbs predecessor, the controversial Jack Warner, was also arrested in May.
The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said of the latest arrests: They are in custody pending their extradition. According to the US arrest requests, they are suspected of accepting bribes of millions of dollars. Webb and the Colombian former executive committee member Luis Bedoya were among those whose guilty pleas were entered in the US.
Eleven current and former members of FIFAs executive committee have now been charged in the investigation, which alleges $200m in bribes, mainly as kickbacks from TV and marketing contracts but also FIFAs development programmes.
The message from this announcement should be clear to every individual who remains in the shadows, hoping to evade our investigation: you will not escape our focus, said Lynch. Teixeira, the former son-in-law of the FIFA ex-president Joo Havelange, was charged alongside Del Nero and his predecessor Jos Maria Marin, who was charged in May.
Fourteen men had been charged in May 2015. Days later, Blatter won a fifth term as president but then agreed to step down as the crisis grew. He was then provisionally suspended together with the UEFA President, Michel Platini, over an alleged 1.3m payment to the Frenchman. Both men face possible life bans when their case is heard by the FIFA ethics committee in December if they are found guilty.
Among those also charged on Thursday were Rafael Salguero, a Guatemalan who left the executive committee in May; the former South American confederation Secretary General, Eduardo Deluca; the former Peruvian football federation president, Manuel Burga; and Bolivias football president, Carlos Chaves, already jailed in his own country.
Lynch said: The Department of Justice is committed to ending the rampant corruption we have described in the leadership of international football not only because of the scale of the schemes alleged earlier and today or the breadth of the operation required to sustain such corruption, but also because of the insult to international principles that this behaviour represents.
The acting FIFA President, Issa Hayatou, refused to comment on the detail of the latest arrests. But he said neither he nor the organization was corrupt. Appearing for the first time before the media since taking the role in September 2015, when Blatter was suspended, Hayatou responded in a similar way to his predecessor when he claimed the current crisis was the fault of a few bad individuals.
FIFA is not corrupt. We have individuals that have shown negative behaviour. Do not generalize the situation, said Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football for more than 25 years. There are lots of people who have been in FIFA for more than 20 or 30 years that have not been accused of anything. | 1 | Intermediate |
The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon is going to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man. He was born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564 and died there 400 years ago.
Stratford was important to Shakespeare all his life, says Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “People often think Shakespeare left Stratford and his family, went to London to earn his fortune and only came back to die,” he said. “But Stratford is where he bought land and houses, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.” The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be celebrated across Britain and the world. There will be performances of Macbeth in Singapore and Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeare’s Globe is completing the first world tour in the history of theatre. During the tour, it has taken Hamlet to every country except North Korea. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to show each of Shakespeare’s plays.
The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and almost every other theatre production company in the country will celebrate the anniversary. There will be traditional and experimental performances of the plays. There will also be hundreds of lectures, international conferences, films, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
Shakespeare was famous in his own lifetime but there is little documentary evidence about Shakespeare’s life and times. His plays survived because his friends and actors collected together every bit of every play they could find and made the First Folio, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
The actor Mark Rylance has called the First Folio his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those that belong to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious documents will be shown in an exhibition in London.
The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, documents from the time when Shakespeare and other actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and details of payments for performances for James I and Queen Anne. The director of the Globe Theatre recently said as a joke that Shakespeare was a true London man. But people in Stratford believe that the town made and educated Shakespeare. They are rebuilding his old school room and will open it as a visitor attraction. Shakespeare bought New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died in 1616 on 23 April, the same day as his birth. “You don’t buy a house like New Place and not live there,” Paul Edmondson said. “The general public and many academics have underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare. ”
Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there. He says the late plays were planned in his library and probably written there.
Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago. Another house was built in the same place. That house was destroyed in 1759 by a bad- tempered priest, Francis Gastrell, in an argument about taxes. He also cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer sat and worked, because he didn’t like all the tourists looking into his garden.
The house has never been rebuilt but they have found Shakespeare’s kitchen in the cellars. The area where the house was will be on display for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored. “Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “there would have been no Shakespeare. ” | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
Some people call it the hotel of mum and dad. A fifth of young adults are staying in the family home until they are at least 26 and the same proportion are not paying a penny towards their keep. A recent survey found that the proportion of adults living at home varied around the country, from just under 9% in the East Midlands to more than double that in London, where house prices and rents are highest. While many around the country contributed financially, it found that 20% were paying nothing at all.
Young adults are squeezed by low wages and high rents, while those who want to buy a property are finding the monthly cost of renting is preventing them from saving enough to get on the housing ladder. Recent research showed half of tenants were unable to save a penny towards a deposit, while a quarter could only save 100 or less each month. Mortgages are cheaper than ever before thanks to record low interest rates but the best deals are still only given to people with large deposits.
As a result of this, young adults are increasingly returning to the family home to save money and parents who cannot afford to offer their children a large sum of money seem happy to help. The survey found that 28% of adults were living at home because they were trying to save for a deposit. However, it also found that 30% were not saving any money.
Michael Day, 30, who lives with his parents in Bristol, says he has been caught between paying high rents and saving for a mortgage deposit. Rents for a one-bedroom home in the city are between 500 and 800 a month, while buying a similar property would cost about 130,000. I dont really want to move out to rent as its more than a mortgage but you need such a big deposit to get a mortgage so its a vicious circle.
He does not want to share with strangers so his options are limited. At home, he pays a nominal rent to cover bills and is able to keep the rest of his earnings from his job. He admits that, instead of saving, he spends his spare money on golf and holidays. You need so much money that I will have to save for the foreseeable future, he said. Because its been so difficult, Ive been going on holiday and enjoying it.
Sue Green, of Saga, a business that sells insurance to people over 50, said the majority of parents may not have planned to have their children living with them in their 20s or 30s. Most will be more than happy to have them in the family home rent-free because it might help their kids get on the property ladder sooner, she said. Children who dont pay rent may contribute in other ways like buying groceries, family takeaways or doing odd jobs around the home.
Angus Hanton, of the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, said older generations were the architects of the housing crisis and children should not be blamed for staying at home. The under-30s have suffered a reduction in average incomes of about 20% since the 2008 downturn. Rents and car insurance have never been so high and mortgage lending rules are now stricter for the young but not for older buy-to-let investors, who squeeze out the young, he said. Many jobs on offer zero-hour and short-term contracts are turning younger workers into second-class citizens. Rather than blaming the young, we should help them so they can afford to build lives of their own.
Jenna Gavin, 29, lives in Southport, Merseyside, in the family home where she grew up. She works as a medical receptionist nearby so she wants to stay in the area. But renting a one-bedroom flat would cost more than 420 a month not including bills, which would use a lot of her earnings. I dont want to rent I dont want to spend all that money and have nothing at the end, she said. Ive looked at buying and seen mortgage advisers but I just cant borrow enough to get on the property ladder.
Gavin is trying to save for a deposit. Its difficult to save enough money even a 5% deposit is such a lot of money and I would like to have a bigger deposit, she said. Her parents are happy not to charge her rent. They want me to try to save up and I contribute in other ways I buy food and I do things around the house.
Gavin gets on with her parents and has her own space in a room that she moved into when she was 14 but she said she had always imagined she would have her own place by the time she was 30. I dont see that happening, as its next year. But, hopefully, in a couple of years, Ill move out. | 1 | Intermediate |
Glastonbury Festival wants to fight a war against plastic water bottles. They plan to become the world’s most environmentally friendly outdoor music event.
Each year, disposable bottles leave the Somerset festival site covered in plastic. About one million plastic bottles are used during the festival.
The festival organizers will give stainless-steel reusable bottles to all band members. Thousands more bottles will go on sale to festival-goers to stop them using plastic bottles. Organizers have asked the 140,000 festival-goers to bring reusable bottles that they can fill at 400 drinking water taps across the site.
Lucy Smith, Glastonbury’s green issues organizer, said: “We have amazing water quality in the UK but everyone drinks bottled water.”
There is currently 150 million tonnes of plastic rubbish around the planet and oceans, poisoning ecosystems and killing wildlife.
The festival organizers hope to make Glastonbury the world’s greenest music festival. They want to be like America’s Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, where people have to take away everything that they take to the festival.
Organizers have also asked Glastonbury festival-goers to travel to the site on public transport or to share a car with friends. “We want to be as environmentally friendly as we can,” said Smith.
Plastic water bottles can take hundreds or even thousands of years to completely biodegrade. Millions of barrels of oil are used to make plastic bottles and transporting mineral water across the planet produces even more carbon emissions.
Around 13 billion plastic water bottles are sold in the UK every year, but only one in five is recycled.
Smith said that festival-goers should not buy bottled water; they should use the water on tap, which comes from big underground reservoirs. The charity WaterAid will also set up water kiosks around the site. They will sell reusable bottles and cups and offer free refills.
Organizers say that almost half of all the rubbish left at the site was recycled in 2013. They also say that there will be 15,000 bins for recycling across the festival site in 2014. | 0 | Elementary |
Organic food has more of the antioxidant compounds linked to better health than regular food, and lower levels of toxic metals and pesticides, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date. The international team behind the work suggests that switching to organic fruit and vegetables could give the same benefits as adding one or two portions of the recommended 'five a day'.
The team, led by Professor Carlo Leifert at Newcastle University, concludes that there are “statistically significant, meaningful” differences, with a range of antioxidants being “substantially higher” – between 19% and 69% – in organic food. It is the first study to demonstrate clear and wide-ranging differences between organic and conventional fruits, vegetables and cereals.
The researchers say the increased levels of antioxidants are equivalent to “one to two of the five portions of fruits and vegetables recommended to be consumed daily and would therefore be significant and meaningful in terms of human nutrition, if information linking these compounds to the health benefits associated with increased fruit, vegetable and wholegrain consumption is confirmed”.
The findings will add to the controversy over organic food and whether it is better for people, with one expert saying that the findings were exaggerated. Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition at King’s College London, said the research did show some differences. “But the question is are they within natural variation? And are they nutritionally relevant? I am not convinced.” He said Leifert’s work had caused controversy in the past. “Leifert has had a lot of disagreements with a lot of people.” Sanders added the research showed organic cereals have less protein than conventional crops.
The results of the research are based on an analysis of 343 peer-reviewed studies from around the world – more than ever before – which examine differences between organic and conventional fruit, vegetables and cereals. “The crucially important thing about this research is that it shatters the myth that how we farm does not affect the quality of the food we eat,” said Helen Browning, chief executive of the Soil Association, which campaigns for organic farming.
Plants produce many of their antioxidant compounds to fight back against pest attacks, so the higher levels in organic crops may result from their lack of protection by chemical sprays. But, the scientists say other reasons may be important, such as organic varieties being bred for toughness and not being overfed with artificial fertilizers.
Leifert and his colleagues conclude that many antioxidants “have previously been linked to a reduced risk of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and certain cancers”. But, they also note that no long-term studies showing health benefits from a broad organic diet have yet been conducted. The researchers found much higher levels of cadmium, a toxic metal, in conventional crops. Pesticide residues were found on conventional crops four times more often than on organic food. The research was funded by the EU and an organic farming charity.
The research is certain to be criticized: the inclusion of so many studies in the analysis could mean poor-quality work skews the results, although the team did “sensitivity analyses” and found that excluding weaker work did not significantly change the outcome. Also, the higher levels of cadmium and pesticides in conventional produce were still well below regulatory limits. But, the researchers say cadmium accumulates over time in the body and that some people may wish to avoid this, and that pesticide limits are set individually, not for the cocktail of chemicals used on crops.
A further criticism is that the differences seen may result from different climates, soil types and crop varieties, and not from organic farming, though the researchers argue that combining many studies should average out these other differences. The greatest criticism, however, will be over the suggestions of potential health benefits. The most recent major analysis, which took in 223 studies in 2012, found little evidence. “The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods,” it found.
This was also the conclusion of earlier, smaller studies published in 2009 in a scientific journal and by the UK Food Standards Agency, though the latter considered just 11 studies. The 2012 study did note that eating organic food might help people avoid pesticide residues. Sanders said he was not persuaded by the new work. “You are not going to be better nourished if you eat organic food,” he said. “What is most important is what you eat, not whether it’s organic or conventional. It’s whether you eat fruit and vegetables at all. People are buying into a lifestyle system. They get an assurance it is not being grown with chemicals and is not grown by big business.”
Opinion polls show healthy eating (55%) and avoiding chemical residues (53%) are key reasons cited by shoppers for buying organic produce. But, many also say care for the environment (44%) and animal welfare (31%) are important, as is taste (35%). Browning said: “This research backs up what people think about organic food. In other countries, there have long been much higher levels of support and acceptance of the benefits of organic food and farming. We hope these findings will bring the UK into line with the rest of Europe.” | 2 | Advance |
A recent report says that the wealthiest people in India will become four times richer by 2018 – hundreds of thousands of new entrepreneurs and inheritors will become multimillionaires. In India, at the moment, business people are beginning to be confident again in the world’s biggest democracy.
Economic growth has been weak in recent years in India. The cost of basic foods has risen and the value of the Indian currency has fallen. The economy has not been good but there are now nearly a sixth more Indians with more than $3.75 million than in 2013, the report says. “Cities are mushrooming, the middle class is growing, there are lots more opportunities and Indian politics have improved a lot in recent months,” according to Murali Balaraman, a co-author of the report.
The richest people in India have money and houses that are worth a trillion dollars. This is about a fifth of the total wealth in the country. By 2018, that total will probably reach $4 trillion, the report says, and there will be three times more multimillionaires.
New rich people are buying lots of luxury things. “They really want to show or talk about their wealth and buying luxury things is a nice way to do it,” Balaraman said. Abhay Gupta, who works for the company Luxury Connect, said that more and more people will want to buy luxury things and experiences. “There is a huge class of people who want to copy very wealthy people,” he said.
Cars are very popular things to buy, the report says. In 2009, wealthy Indians bought Indian SUVs to impress their friends but now they buy foreign cars. Mercedes sold 47% more cars in India in 2013. BMW has launched a new $200,000 model in Delhi.
But companies sell fewer luxury cars because of India’s terrible transport system. Lamborghini’s Chief Executive, Stephan Winkelmann, said, in 2013, that the traffic and roads in India “are not so suitable” for the $450,000 sports cars. In India, Lamborghini sells two models: the Gallardo and the Aventador, which has a maximum speed of 217 miles per hour. Winkelmann said Lamborghini’s Indian customers were much younger than European customers. In India, a normal buyer is in his 30s. But the most popular investments are still houses – mainly in India – and jewellery.
India’s super-rich have often surprised people around the world with their very high spending. Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest man, has built the world’s most expensive home in Mumbai, the business capital. The 27-storey tower has helicopter pads, indoor cinemas and more than 600 people who work there. It is worth $1 billion.
The three-day wedding of the niece of Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon who lives in the UK and has $16 billion, cost $80 million. Hundreds of guests flew to Barcelona for the wedding and party, which was in a museum in the city.
But people who buy luxury things are becoming more and more difficult to satisfy, the report says. One super-rich person bought nine boxes of Japanese whisky that cost more than over $750 a bottle for a wedding party. The attraction of the imported whisky was that no one who came to the wedding would be able to find the same drink in India. Another super-rich person bought identical pairs of Louis Vuitton bags, then cut up half of them to make clothes that would match her bags.
Even the traditional Indian wedding is changing. Traditionally, people send presents such as silver plates, dried fruit or sweets with wedding invitations. But, now, rich people prefer to send gifts by top western designers. “These days, it’s Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton bags,” says Gupta.
Almost half the new multimillionaires live in small cities and many of them give a lot of money to charity. Co-author Balaraman says that more rich people will not create more social problems because a wide gap in wealth is an “accepted norm” in India. “People know that someone is rich and someone is poor and they carry on with their lives,” he explains. | 0 | Elementary |
Serial dater Emmanuel Limal was tired of meeting women who weren’t ready to start a family, or at least wouldn’t admit that they were. The 43-year-old actor, originally from France, had spent 20 years living in Copenhagen and looking for love in the hope of raising children. He recently took his quest online but was dismayed by the results.
“I got frustrated with everyone trying to sell themselves as really active, always travelling or with a long list of hobbies, but no mention of children,” Limal said. “On some sites, there was an option to click, saying: 'I’d like kids someday,' but you would read the person’s profile and think: 'You will never have time!' If someone’s going to the gym eight times a week and travelling every month, they are not putting a family first.”
Limal has a six-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, but coming from a big family – his father is one of 11 – he has always wanted more children. “I couldn’t seem to meet anyone willing to prioritize starting a family and struggled with when to mention wanting kids any time I met someone new. It’s the ultimate dating taboo,” he said. “Then one day I read a profile from a 38-year-old who said she knew it was 'really bad to admit' but she wanted children. And I just thought: 'You shouldn’t be ashamed of this.'”
Limal remortgaged his apartment to fund the setting up of Babyklar.nu – or 'baby-ready now' in English. It functions like a normal dating site but every potential dater is asked to be honest about their wish to start a family soon. “We ask people if they are OK with someone who already has children as well as wanting another baby,” Limal said. “But we don’t make them specify how many children they’d like. That would be a bit too much like grocery shopping online.”
The response to the site has been overwhelming, he said. “We had 50 sign-ups an hour when we launched in June and we are already hearing from couples who have met through the site and are now together. I’m fully expecting the first Babyklar.nu baby by next summer.” More men have signed up than women (53% to 47%), with testimonials such as “It’s so lovely to be able to say this out loud” and “I finally dare to be honest about what I want.”
The site has come at an opportune time for the country of five million people. Danes are not having enough babies, according to a report from the Copenhagen hospital Rigshospitalet, and the current rate of 1.7 children per family is not enough to maintain Denmark’s population. The usual suspects are being blamed for the new low – women leaving it “too late” and couples cohabiting and waiting to start families.
“Now, I hope, men and women who want to start a family but haven’t met the right person yet will have another option,” says Limal. He’s keen to point out that this isn’t just about baby farming: “I want this to be about children and love. My goal is to pair up people who really want a family and a partner – and who’ll stay together. I’m a romantic at heart.”
There are plans to roll out the site in France and the UK later in 2013, but for now it is the Danes who are reaping the benefits. “Danes have no problem having children before marriage so things can move fast and, because the country’s so small, a Jutlander can date a Copenhagener without too much travel,” Limal said. What’s more, Limal has finally found love. “I’ve met a nice woman and she wants a baby too – so we shall see.” | 2 | Advance |
Like veins carrying the lifeblood of a city, a subway system teems with billions of inhabitants: the bacteria of Swiss cheese and kimchi, of bubonic plague and drug-proof bugs and of human skin. Now, for the first time, scientists have started to catalogue and map the bacteria coursing through a city’s subway – and they have found a wealth of curious results.
Dr Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College, led a team that, for 18 months, swabbed the New York City subway system for the microscopic life forms that cover its turnstiles, seats, ticket booths and stations. In what Mason called “the first city-scale genetic profile ever”, his team found meningitis at Times Square, a trace of anthrax on the handhold of a train carriage and bacteria that cause bubonic plague on a rubbish bin and ticket machine at stations in uptown Manhattan.
In research published in the journal Cell Systems, the team strongly downplayed the findings of plague and anthrax, noting the extremely small trace of the latter, that rats likely carried the former and that no one has fallen ill with plague in or around New York for years.
“The results do not suggest that plague or anthrax is prevalent,” the study says. “Nor do they suggest that New York residents are at risk.”
In fact, most of the bacteria identified by the team are either harmless to humans or beneficial in the city’s thriving world of microorganisms, many of which process toxic hazards and waste in the same way that bacteria inside every human help with digestion and bodily functions.
Some of the results were expected, Mason said, including some bacteria associated with fecal matter, which he said “should be a gentle reminder for people to wash their hands”. He also said that many bacteria of the same genus as those “that are beneficial and helpful, like the one used for making cheese,” also turned up around New York.
Bacteria appeared to reflect the eating habits of various neighbourhoods. All around the subway, bacteria associated with cheeses – brie, cheddar, parmesan and the mozzarella of ubiquitous New York pizza – turned up. The distinctive bacteria of Swiss cheese were more localized to midtown Manhattan and the financial district, and the bacteria used to ferment cabbage for kimchi and sauerkraut showed up in the financial district and Bay Ridge. The computer also identified cucumber DNA all over the city, Mason said.
Bacteria associated with illness and infections were extremely common. Species that cause diarrhoea and nausea, both benign and bad E.coli (mostly benign), and the bacteria that can cause skin infections and urinary-tract infections were common all over the city. The species that produces tetanus appeared in Soho and bacteria that cause dysentery appeared at a station in the Bronx and another in Harlem.
With more than 1,000 samples collected at all of New York’s 466 open subway stations, Mason and his team ran the organic materials through a DNA sequencer and, then, through a supercomputer armed with genetic databases. They identified 15,152 distinct species, nearly half of which were bacteria.
The good news, the researchers wrote, is that these “potentially infectious agents” are not spreading sickness or disease throughout New York but rather seem to be “normal co-habitants” and “may even be essential”. They “represent a normal, 'healthy' metagenome profile of a city”.
In short, the researchers conclude, the subway and city are about as safe as everyone thought.
Mason said people should not be concerned about getting urinary-tract infections from subway seats. “You should wash your hands,” he said, “and probably get some sleep and eat salads and go to the gym, and that’s about the same today as it was yesterday.”
“If anything,” he added, “I’ve become much more confident riding the subway.”
Many findings made sense: heavily trafficked stations like Grand Central and Times Square had more bacteria and more diversity among them; the subway was most enriched for bacteria associated with skin. The Bronx, with its diverse neighbourhoods and stations, had the greatest diversity of bacteria; Staten Island, with just three stops, had the lowest.
The researchers found marine bacteria at South Ferry, a station that flooded during Hurricane Sandy – but they were surprised to note the species included some normally associated with Antarctica and fish.
The next steps, Mason said, are studies of other cities, which have begun in Paris, São Paolo and Shanghai, and continued studies of New York, for instance to see how the microbiome changes with the seasons. He said he hoped the research would provide “a baseline” of research for health officials and geneticists, and could help health officials to be better prepared to prevent and track diseases and pathogens. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
The Canadian tennis player Frank Dancevic slammed Australian Open organizers for forcing players to compete in inhumane conditions. He collapsed on court as temperatures rose to 41C.
Dancevic collapsed during the second set of his fi rst-round match against Frances Benot Paire on the uncovered court six at Melbourne Park and passed out for a minute. He said conditions were dangerous for the players. He also said the heat had caused him to hallucinate: I was dizzy from the middle of the fi rst set and then I saw Snoopy and I thought, Wow, Snoopy thats weird.
I think its inhumane. I dont think its fair to anybody to the players, to the fans, to the sport when you see players pulling out of matches, passing out, he added. Ive played fi ve set matches all my life and being out there for a set and a half and passing out with heat stroke, its not normal.
Having players with so many problems and complaining to the tournament that its too hot to play; I, personally, dont think its fair and I know a lot of players dont think its fair.
Other players agreed. The British number one, Andy Murray, said: Its defi nitely something that you have to look at. As much as its easy to say the conditions are safe, it only takes one bad thing to happen. And it looks terrible for the whole sport when people are collapsing, ball kids are collapsing, people in the stands are collapsing. Thats not great.
I know when I went out before the match, the conditions at 2.303pm were very, very tough. Whether its safe or not, I dont know. There have been some problems in other sports with players having heart attacks.
Caroline Wozniacki said: I put the water bottle down on the court and it started melting a little bit underneath the plastic. So, you know it was warm.
John Isner said: It was like an oven when I open the oven and the potatoes are done. Thats what its like.
The defending champion Victoria Azarenka said, It felt pretty hot, like youre dancing in a frying pan or something like that.
Under a change to the rules for 2014, the decision on whether to stop matches at the tournament is now at the discretion of the tournament director, Wayne McKewen.
Organizers said temperatures peaked at 42.2C in the early evening on Tuesday and conditions had never reached the point where the matches would be stopped.
While conditions were hot and uncomfortable, the relatively low level of humidity ensured play would continue, McKewen said in a statement.
Dancevic, who said he had felt dizzy from the middle of the second set, started playing again after medical attention but, unsurprisingly, lost 76, 63, 64. I was really close to stopping completely, he said. I wasnt really running too much towards the end. I wasnt tired; I just felt my body temperature was too high.
A ball boy had earlier required medical attention after collapsing during Milos Raonics 76, 61, 46, 62 victory over Daniel Gimeno-Traver on the equally exposed court eight and the tournament started only allowing the ball boys to work for 45 minute periods. Chinas Peng Shuai also said the heat had made her cramp up and vomit, and she had to be helped from the court after her 75, 46, 63 defeat to Japans Kurumi Nara.
Offi cials played down health risks they said the majority of matches were completed without anyone needing medical attention.
Of course, there were a few players who experienced heat-related illness or discomfort, but none required signifi cant medical treatment after they had completed their match, Tim Wood, the tournaments chief medical offi cer, said.
Roger Federer said that, although conditions were tough, they were the same for both players. Its just a mental thing, the Swiss said. If youve trained hard enough your entire life, or the last few weeks, and you believe you can do it and come through it, theres no reason. If you cant deal with it, you throw in the towel.
Dancevic disagreed. Some players are used to the heat their bodies can genetically handle the heat and others cant, he said. Its dangerous. Its an hour and a half since my match and I still cant pee. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
A mirror that sends heat into cold space has been designed by scientists to replace air-conditioning units that keep buildings cool on Earth.
Researchers believe the mirror could slash the amount of energy used to control air temperatures in business premises and shopping centres because they wont need to use cooling systems.
Around 15% of the energy used by buildings in the USgoesonairconditioningbuttheresearchers say that, in some cases, the mirror could completely offset the need for extra cooling.
In a rooftop comparison in Stanford, California, scientists found that a roof that had been painted black reached 60C more than the air temperature in sunlight and aluminium reached 40C more. However, the mirror was up to 5C cooler than the surrounding air temperature.
If you cover signi cant parts of the roof with this mirror, you can see how much power it can save. You can signi cantly offset the electricity used for air conditioning, said Shanhui Fan, an expert in the study of light at Stanford University, who led the development of the mirror. In some situations, you will be able to completely offset the air conditioning.
Buildings warm up in a number of different ways. Hot-water boilers and cooking areas release heat into their immediate surroundings. In hot countries, warm air comes in through doors and windows. Then, there is visible light and infrared radiation from the sun, which also heat up buildings.
The Stanford mirror was designed to re ect 97% of the visible light that falls on it. But, more importantly, it works as a thermal radiator. When the mirror is warmed up, it releases heat at a speci c wavelength of infrared light that passes easily through the atmosphere and out into space.
To make anything cool, you need what engineers call a heat sink: somewhere to put unwanted heat. The heat sink has to be cooler than the object that needs cooling or it will not do its job. For example, a bucket of ice will cool a bottle of wine because it becomes a sink for heat in the liquid. The Stanford mirror relies on the best heat sink: the universe itself.
The mirror is built from several layers of very thin materials. The rst layer is re ective silver. On top of this are layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide. These layers turn the mirror into a thermal radiator. When silicon dioxide heats up, it radiates the heat as infrared light at a wavelength of around ten micrometres and the heat passes straight out to space. The total thickness of the mirror is around two micrometres or two thousandths of a millimetre.
The cold darkness of the universe can be used as a renewable thermodynamic resource, even during the hottest hours of the day, the scientists write in Nature. In tests, the mirror had a cooling power of 40 watts per square metre at outside temperatures.
Writinginthejournal,Fansaysthatthecostofthe mirrors is between $20 and $70 per square metre. He calculates an annual electricity saving of 100MWh on a three-storey building.
Fan said that the mirror could cool buildings but he said that the mirrors would not slow down global warming. Roof space is only a small portion of the Earths surface so the mirror is not a solution to the problem of global warming. But our mirror will help limit greenhouse gas emissions by reducing electricity consumption, he said.
Im really excited by the potential it has, said Marin Solja__i__, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You could use this on buildings and spend much less money on air conditioning or maybe you wouldnt need it at all. You could put it on top of shopping malls. Im really excited by the potential it has, said Marin Solja__i__, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You could use this on buildings and spend much less money on air conditioning or maybe you wouldnt need it at all. You could put it on top of shopping malls. Im really excited by the potential it has, said Marin Solja__i__, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You could use this on buildings and spend much less money on air conditioning or maybe you wouldnt need it at all. You could put it on top of shopping malls. | 1 | Intermediate |
Wales will become the first country in the UK that will assume that people agree to donate their organs, if they haven’t opted out.
The Welsh Assembly voted to accept the opt-out scheme, which will allow hospitals to assume that people who die want to donate, if they have not registered an objection.
“This is a very big day for Wales and, most importantly, for the 226 people in Wales who are waiting for an organ transplant,” said the Welsh Health Minister, Mark Drakeford.
“I am proud that Wales will be the first nation in the UK to take this step. We have shown we are ready to take action to increase organ donation and to give hope to those people who wait every week for a transplant.
“When family members know that organ donation is what the dead person wanted, they usually agree to the donation. The new law will make clearer people’s wishes about organ donation and so it will increase the number of donations.”
The issue is controversial, but the government says they will protect the dead person’s and the family’s wishes. Relatives will have a “clear right of objection”, which will give them the chance to show that their relative did not want to be an organ donor.
Wales has acted because it does “not have enough organs for people who need them,” said Drakeford. “About one person every week dies in Wales while on a waiting list.
“About a third of the people who live in Wales are on the organ donor register, but more than two-thirds of people say they are happy to be organ donors. That other third is people who don’t find the time to put their names on the register.”
The new law would apply to anybody over 18 who has lived in Wales for at least the year before his or her death. Donated organs would not only go to people in need of a transplant in Wales but to anybody in the UK.
Doctors are delighted at the scheme. Big efforts have been made in recent years to increase the number of those who carry an organ donation card, with a lot of success. Hospitals have also become better at organizing transplants – for example, they have important discussions with relatives when no one knows what the wishes of the dead person were. But the increase in numbers of organs is still not enough.
Some religious groups strongly oppose the scheme. Members of the Muslim Council of Wales and the South Wales Jewish Representative Council are not happy, while the Archbishop of Wales, Barry Morgan, said that “donation ought to be a gift of love, of generosity. If organs can be taken unless someone has explicitly registered an objection, that’s not an expression of love. It’s more a medical use of a body.” | 0 | Elementary |
Nelson Mandela, the towering figure of Africa’s struggle for freedom and a hero to millions around the world, has died at the age of 95.
South Africa’s first black president died in the company of his family at home in Johannesburg after years of declining health, which had caused him to withdraw from public life.
The news was announced to the country by the current president, Jacob Zuma, who, in a sombre televised address, said Mandela had “departed” around 8.50pm local time and was at peace.
“This is the moment of our deepest sorrow,” Zuma said. “Our nation has lost its greatest son. What made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.
“Fellow South Africans, Nelson Mandela brought us together and it is together that we will bid him farewell.”
Zuma announced that Mandela would receive a state funeral and ordered that flags fly at half-mast.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu led a memorial service in Cape Town, where he called for South Africa to become as a nation what Mandela had been as a man.
Barack Obama led tributes from world leaders, referring to Mandela by his clan name – Madiba. The US president said: “Through his fierce dignity and unbending will to sacrifice his own freedom for the freedom of others, Madiba transformed South Africa – and moved all of us.
“His journey from a prisoner to a president embodied the promise that human beings – and countries – can change for the better. His commitment to transfer power and reconcile with those who jailed him set an example that all humanity should aspire to, whether in the lives of nations or our own personal lives.”
UK prime minister David Cameron said, “A great light has gone out in the world,” and described Mandela as “a hero of our time”.
FW de Klerk – the South African president who freed Mandela, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993 and paved the way for him to become South Africa’s first post-apartheid head of state – said the news was deeply saddening for South Africa and the world.
“He lived reconciliation. He was a great unifier,” de Klerk said.
People gathered in the streets of South Africa to celebrate Mandela’s life.
In Soweto, people gathered to sing and dance near the house where he once lived. They formed a circle in the middle of Vilakazi Street and sang songs from the anti-apartheid struggle. Some people were draped in South African flags and the green, yellow and black colours of Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC). Mandela’s death sends South Africa deep into mourning and self-reflection, nearly 20 years after he led the country from racial apartheid to inclusive democracy.
But his passing will also be keenly felt by people around the world, who revered Mandela as one of history’s last great statesmen, and a moral paragon comparable with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It was his act of forgiveness, after spending 27 years in prison, 18 of them on Robben Island, that will assure his place in history. With South Africa facing possible civil war, Mandela sought reconciliation with the white minority to build a new democracy.
He led the ANC to victory in the country’s first multiracial election in 1994. He then voluntarily stepped down after one term.
Born Rolihlahla Dalibhunga in a small village in the Eastern Cape on 18 July, 1918, Mandela was given his English name, Nelson, by a teacher at his school.
He joined the ANC in 1943 and became a co-founder of its youth league. In 1952, he started South Africa’s first black law firm with his partner, Oliver Tambo.
Mandela was a charming, charismatic figure with a passion for boxing and an eye for women. He once said: “I can’t help it if the ladies take note of me. I am not going to protest.”
When the ANC was banned in 1960, Mandela went underground. After the Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 black protesters were shot dead by police, he took the difficult decision to launch an armed struggle. He was arrested and eventually charged with sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government.
Conducting his own defence in the Rivonia trial in 1964, he said: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
“It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
He escaped the death penalty but was sentenced to life in prison, a huge blow to the ANC, which had to regroup to continue the struggle. But unrest grew in townships and international pressure on the apartheid regime slowly tightened.
Finally, in 1990, FW de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and Mandela was released from prison amid scenes of jubilation witnessed around the world.
His presidency rode a wave of tremendous global goodwill but was not without its difficulties. After leaving frontline politics in 1999, he admitted he should have moved sooner against the spread of HIV and Aids in South Africa.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who headed the truth and reconciliation committee after the fall of apartheid, said: “He transcended race and class in his personal actions, through his warmth and through his willingness to listen and to empathize with others. And he restored others’ faith in Africa and Africans.”
Mandela continued to make occasional appearances at ANC events and attended the inauguration of the current president, Jacob Zuma. His 91st birthday was marked by the first annual “Mandela Day” in his honour.
Married three times, he had six children, 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Felix Baumgartner stood at the edge of space above New Mexico and paused slightly. It was a small step away from the capsule, but a 24-mile drop back down to Earth. Our guardian angel will take care of you, said mission control, and the man known as Fearless Felix jumped.
Ten terrifying minutes later, the Austrian landed back on Earth. He had reached speeds of up to 725 miles per hour, and broken three world records, including becoming the worlds first supersonic skydiver by breaking the sound barrier at Mach 1.24. We love you Felix, cheered the control room. Baumgartner raised his arms in a victory salute.
He was wearing a specially designed survival suit to protect him against the enormous pressure changes during the jump. Without it, his blood would have boiled and his lungs might have exploded. Baumgartner later told a press conference that all he could think about was getting back alive, but he added: Sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are.
His other two records were for the highest altitude manned balloon flight and the highest altitude skydive. The jump happened on a sunny morning in good weather. Baumgartner was carried up into clear skies by a gigantic balloon it measured 30 million square cubic feet and its skin was one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag. At the bottom of the balloon was a capsule, where Baumgartner sat in his suit.
As he reached the correct height, Baumgartner went through a checklist of 40 things with his mentor Joe Kittinger. Kittinger was the previous holder of the highest altitude manned balloon flight.
Baumgartner had a problem with his visor. This is very serious, Joe, he told Kitttinger. Sometimes its getting foggy when I breathe out. But they decided to go ahead, watched by a record 8 million people live on YouTube.
After a two-and-a-half-hour journey up, during which the curvature of the Earth became visible and the skies gradually turned black, the descent was much quicker. Three cameras, which were attached to Baumgartners suit, recorded his free-fall of just over four minutes and then the parachute opening.
The success of the mission, and of the suit, means that astronauts might be able to survive a high-altitude disaster, like on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, by jumping out of their craft. Baumgartners top medical man in the stunt was Dr Jonathan Clark, whose wife Laurel Clark died in the Columbia accident. Clark is now working to help astronauts survive high-altitude disasters.
Baumgartner has a reputation for daring stunts. The former paratrooper has parachuted off buildings and mountains and once into a 600 foot deep cave. He had already done two practice free-falls in preparation for this jump one from 71,000 feet and a second from 97,000 feet. But nothing can compare with his jump above the town of Roswell, a place famous for its UFO sightings.
He was trying to break five different records: the first human to ever break the sound barrier in free-fall; the highest free-fall altitude jump; the highest manned balloon flight; the longest free-fall; and his jump platform is believed to be the largest manned balloon in history. The stunt was planned for seven years, was sponsored by Red Bull drinks, and beat two of Kittingers records: before, the retired US air force colonel held the high altitude and speed records for parachuting. Kittinger jumped from a balloon 19 miles above the planet in 1960 and gave advice to Baumgartner during the ascent.
Asked after the jump what he wanted to do next, Baumgartner said: I want to inspire a generation. Id like to be sitting in the same spot in the next four years as Joe Kittinger. There is a young guy asking me for advice because he wants to break my record. He said the most exciting moment for him was when he was standing outside the capsule on top of the world. He added: The most beautiful moment was when I was standing on the landing area and Mike Todd [the life support engineer who dressed Baumgartner in his suit] appeared and he had a smile on his face like a little kid.
Baumgartner said that he felt like Todds son, adding: He was so happy that I was alive. Earlier, Todd had told the press conference: The world needs a hero right now, and theyve got one in Felix Baumgartner.
This will be the last jump, Baumgartner said. He has promised to settle down and enjoy life with his girlfriend, Nicole Oetl, flying helicopters on rescue missions in the US and Austria. | 1 | Intermediate |
On one day in August, one in seven people on Earth, 1 billion people, used Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. In ten years, the social network has changed people’s relationships, privacy, their businesses, news media, helped to end unfair governments and even changed the meaning of common words.
“A more open and connected world is a better world,” wrote Zuckerberg.
These are just some of the ways his company changed everything – for better or worse.
1. Facebook has changed the definition of “friend”
“To friend” is now a verb. In real life, it is difficult to end a friendship but, on Facebook, it is easy to “unfriend” someone. “To unfriend” is a word invented to describe ending contact with a Facebook friend. The meanings of the words “share” and “like” are the same but Facebook has made the words more important to us.
School and university reunions are unnecessary – you already know whose job is going well and you’ve seen pictures of your schoolfriends’ babies. You won’t be surprised if you see an ex in the street with a new girlfriend or boyfriend: you already know they’re with someone else because you’ve seen the romantic selfies.
In real life, some friends are more important than others but, on Facebook, all friends have the same importance. A classmate from university who you haven’t seen for 15 years, a friend-of-a-friend from a party or a colleague you’ve never spoken to – they are all Facebook friends in the same way as your best friend, or your husband or wife, or your mum. It doesn’t mean we see them the same way. Professor Robin Dunbar is famous for his research that says a person can only have about 150 people in their social group. Facebook hasn’t changed that yet, he believes. But Dunbar says he fears it is so easy to end friendships on Facebook that, one day, people may not need to learn to get on with each other.
2 We care less about privacy
Most young people are happy to give Facebook their personal details. Ninety-one per cent post a photo of themselves, 71% post the city or town where they live, more than half give email addresses and a fifth give their phone number.
More than 80% list their interests, which allows companies to try to sell things to them. But most young users limit who can see their profiles – 60% allow friends only.
3 Facebook has created millions of jobs – but not in its own offices
Michael Tinmouth has worked with companies such as Vodafone and Microsoft. He says, “Thanks to Facebook, companies have a better understanding of their customers than ever before. The data available is extraordinary. You know who your customers are and who they are friends with and what they think about your company.”
And advertisers pay a lot for that. Facebook earned $3.32 billion from advertising.
Facebook can also be dangerous for companies. Suddenly, customers don’t simply complain on the phone or on a small internet forum – angry customers can post their complaints for hundreds of their friends to see or even on the company’s own page.
4 Facebook has been the tool to organize revolutions
Organizing demonstrations has been revolutionized by Facebook. Manchester University’s Olga Onuch found that half of all the Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine had got their information from Facebook.
Many people told Onuch that they needed Facebook to read the truth about what was happening – they don’t trust traditional media.
5 Facebook makes news, breaks news and decides what is news
About 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 63% of all users say they get news from the internet. About a third of Facebook users post about politics and government.
Most people will first read an item of news on Facebook or other social media, mostly on mobiles. | 0 | Elementary |
A car with a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour, two seats and no pedals or steering wheel does not sound very interesting. But Google, in the US, shocked the car and taxi industries when it unveiled the latest version of its driverless car.
Google has begun testing the electric car at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The car does not have all the normal car controls, such as foot pedals. Instead, it has a smartphone app that calls it and tells it the destination, and a STOP button between the two seats in case the passengers need to override the computer.
The company is building about 100 prototypes for a two-year test. The company’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, said that the vehicle was still just a prototype. He says that they want to change the world for people who do not find it easy to travel around.
Talking about the car, he said, “You’re just sitting there; no steering wheel, no pedals. For me, it was very relaxing. About ten seconds after getting into the car, I forgot I was there. I found it really fun.”
Google says that the aim of the project is to improve safety. They say that the car is made with foam at the front and a plastic windscreen, so “it should be far safer than any other car for pedestrians”.
The cars have been built specially by a company in Detroit. Google will now test the cars, which are not yet for sale.
There need to be detailed scans of the roads before the cars can drive on them, because they cannot collect and process enough information in real time.
So far, there are detailed maps of about 2,000 miles of California’s roads, but California has more than 170,000 miles of roads.
Google says it wants to license the technology to traditional car makers when they have improved it.
But the idea that driverless cars will replace taxis with human drivers has alarmed some people.
Dennis Conyon from the UK National Taxi Association said that taxi drivers will become unemployed.
London has about 22,000 black taxis and Conyon thinks that the total number of people who drive taxis in the UK is about 100,000.
Other car makers, including Volvo, Ford and Mercedes, are going to make vehicles that will be different from Google’s version because they will have driver controls.
But Chris Urmson, director of the driverless car project at Google, said that the new prototypes do not have a steering wheel or brakes because a human passenger might not be able to take control in an emergency. He said that it was simpler just to have an emergency stop button.
Urmson said: “The vehicles will be very basic. But they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And, that’s an important step towards improving road safety and helping millions of people travel around more easily.”
So far, the Google versions of the driverless cars have driven 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the computer. The company says that thousands of people die each year on the roads and that about 80% of crashes are caused by human mistakes. | 0 | Elementary |
Clay Cockrell is sitting in his office opposite the Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.
Cockrell is a former Wall Street worker who is now a therapist. He spends large parts of his days walking in Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, talking to some of New York’s wealthiest people.
“Many of the very wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are,” he says.
So, what problems do America’s 1% have? “There is guilt that they are rich,” he said. “There is the feeling that they have to hide that they are rich. And, then, there is the isolation – being in the 1% can be lonely.”
Counsellors say that things have become worse since the financial crisis in 2008. People now talk about the gap between rich and poor more because of groups like Occupy Wall Street.
“Occupy Wall Street had some important things to say about the gap between rich and poor but it was negative about the 1%,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist. The media, she said, makes the rich “feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed”.
“Sometimes, I am shocked by things that people say. You would never talk about another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to talk about wealthy people.”
“It’s really isolating to have a lot of money. People’s reaction to you can be scary,” said Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. “We are all taught not to talk about money. It’s not polite to talk about money. But it’s harder to talk about being rich than it is to talk about being poor. People don’t mind if you say ‘I am broke. Things are hard.’ You can’t say ‘I have a ton of money.’ You have to keep a lot of your life private.”
As a result, Cockrell says, the rich hang out with other rich Americans who understand them and their problems.
In the US, over the last 30 years, the number of very wealthy people has grown. In 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more – excluding the value of their main home – was 10.1 million. There were 1.3 million households worth $5 million and 142,000 worth $25 million or more.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or with your money.
“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with other people, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell.
“Wealth can stop you from connecting with other people,” said the wife of a man who made about $80 million. Some Americans keep their wealth secret.
“There are a lot of people hiding their wealth because they are worried about negative judgment,” said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about their problems, people don’t have a lot of sympathy,” she said.
Cockrell said that there is a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make – they let their money be the most important thing in their lives.
“If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems. There are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing,” he said. “Your problems are real.” | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
A Canadian man who became famous because he offered a free round-the-world trip to a woman with the same name as his ex-girlfriend has returned from the trip with his chosen namesake. Unfortunately, to the disappointment of those following the story, the two of them did not fall in love. Jordan Axani, a 28-year-old Toronto charity founder, arrived back in Canada with Elizabeth Quinn Gallagher and said the pair had a brother-sister-like relationship.
Axani had made headlines in 2014 because he offered an air ticket to any Canadian named Elizabeth Gallagher. He had booked a three-week vacation with his girlfriend but they split up and he was unable to change the name on the flight tickets.
Thats where Axanis new travelling companion, a 23-year-old student from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, enters the story. Elizabeth Gallagher, who calls herself Quinn, replied to an online posting from Axani and she was chosen. Gallagher explained before the trip that she had a pretty serious boyfriend. But that had not stopped journalists from hoping the globetrotters might fall for one another. Unfortunately, it did not happen.
Im going to be very clear, Axani said, soon after the pair returned to Toronto. This was never a romantic endeavour. It was strictly platonic. I do not think of Quinn in a romantic way at all. There is no future for us romantically. She is a good friend. I think of her as a little sister and that is it. And our feelings are entirely mutual.
It took work to create that brother-sister, good-friend relationship, however. It wasnt easy and it certainly wasnt immediate. It took us about a week to really figure each other out, Axani said. There was a certain amount of stumbling around as the pair got to know each other about the dos and donts of travelling together. At the end of it, wed developed a really great rhythm one second, we had really funny inside jokes and, the next second, we knew when the other person needed space.
Although the pair did not fall in love, Axani said the trip, which included Milan, Venice, Vienna, Prague, Khao Lak (in Thailand) and Hong Kong, was fantastic. A favourite place was Prague, Axani said, where they met more people than anywhere else on the trip.
Over the course of two and a half days I think we met about two dozen people. So thats a lot of stories, thats a lot of individuals and thats a lot of love for their home city of Prague.
People were following the pair on Twitter and Instagram, Axani said, and they were even recognized in the street in Hong Kong. It was a real adventure. We had a blast. We learned a lot about ourselves and about each other. I cant imagine it going much better than it did.
Axani arrived back in Toronto at 3am and went straight into a meeting at his charity, A Ticket Forward. Axani started the non-profit organization after his internet post went viral. He wants to offer round-the-world-trips to survivors of abuse, cancer and war.
Apart from that, Axani is also discussing making his story into a television show or film, he said. But he would not comment on what form those productions might take. Ill only say that theres been lots of interest from many production companies. Were well advanced. In terms of his love life, Axani said he was not looking for his next Elizabeth Gallagher yet. Im not looking for anything but life happens and well see, he said. As always, lifes a journey. | 1 | Intermediate |
Brazil experienced one of its biggest nights of protest in decades as more than 100,000 people took to the streets nationwide to express their frustration at heavy-handed policing, poor public services and high costs for the World Cup.
The major demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasilia, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and elsewhere started peacefully, but several led to clashes with police and arson attacks on cars and buses.
The large turnout and geographic spread marked a rapid escalation after previous, smaller protests against bus price increases led to complaints that police responded disproportionately with rubber bullets, tear gas and violent beatings.
Coinciding with the start of the Confederations Cup – a World Cup test event – the rallies brought together a wide coalition of people frustrated with the escalating costs and persistently poor quality of public services, lavish investment in international sporting events, low standards of health care and wider unease about inequality and corruption.
While the vast majority of demonstrations in Rio were peaceful, several police were injured in clashes at the city’s legislative assembly, at least one car was overturned and burned, and windows were smashed in the offices of banks and notary offices.
The unrest escalated during the night as a large crowd set several fires outside the legislative assembly, smashed the building’s windows and painted graffiti on the walls proclaiming “Revolution”, “Down with Paes, down with Cabral [the mayor and state governor]” and “Hate police”. Police inside responded with pepper spray and perhaps more – the Guardian saw one protester passed out and bleeding heavily from a wound in the upper arm.
The causes pursued by the protesters varied widely. “We are here because we hate the government. They do nothing for us,” said Oscar José Santos, a 19 year old who was with a group of hooded youths from the Rocinha favela.
“I’m an architect but I have been unemployed for six months. There must be something wrong with this country,” said Nadia al Husin, holding up a banner calling on the government to do more for education.
At a far smaller rally in Brasilia, demonstrators broke through police lines to enter the high-security area of the national congress. Several climbed onto the roof.
In Belo Horizonte, police clashed with protesters who tried to break through a cordon around a football stadium hosting a Confederations Cup match between Nigeria and Tahiti.
In Porto Alegre, demonstrators set fire to a bus and, in Curitiba, protesters attempted to force their way into the office of the state governor. There were also rallies in Belem, Salvador and elsewhere.
In São Paulo, which had seen the fiercest clashes the previous week and the main allegations of police violence, large crowds gathered once again but initial reports suggested the marches passed peacefully.
Reflecting the importance of social networks in spreading the message about the protests, some in São Paulo – where numbers were estimated at between 30,000 and 100,000 – carried banners declaring “We come from Facebook”.
Most protesters were young and, for many, it was their first experience of such a giant rally. “My generation has never experienced this,” said Thiago Firbida, a student. “Since the dictatorship, Brazilians never bothered to take over the streets. They did not believe they had a reason to. But now Brazil is once again in crisis, with a constant rise in prices, so people are finally reacting.”
Comparisons have been drawn with rallies in Turkey and elsewhere. Another global link was evident in the handful of demonstrators who wore Guy Fawkes masks, associated with Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Brazil’s demonstrations are being referred to as the “vinegar revolution” (after police arrested people for carrying vinegar to counter tear gas), as well as the “20-cent revolution” (due to the bus price rise) and the Passe Livre (after the demand for free public transport).
Some said the protests felt un-Brazilian but liberating. “Our politicians need to see the strength we have as one people. Brazilians tend to be too nice sometimes – they enjoy partying rather than protesting – but something is changing,” said Deli Borsari, a 53-year-old yoga instructor.
Following widespread news coverage of the costs of new and refurbished stadiums, the Confederations Cup football tournament has been one of the focuses of the protests. Before the opening match in Brasilia, crowds of demonstrators were dispersed by riot police. Footage showed frightened Japanese supporters rushing from the area holding their children, as the sound of shots – perhaps rubber bullets or tear gas – was heard.
Another protest march, near Rio’s Maracana Stadium, was met with a similarly heavy police response.
Most of the rallies appeared to start peacefully until they confronted the security forces, who are largely organized at a regional level. President Dilma Rousseff condones the protests, according to her aides. “The president believes peaceful protests are legitimate and proper for a democracy, and that it is natural for young people to demonstrate,” said Helena Chagas of the president’s office.
However, the president was booed at the opening ceremony for the Confederations Cup. With the economy in bad shape and social unrest on the rise, she faces a serious political challenge, both now and in 2014, when Brazil will not only host the World Cup but also have a presidential election. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
According to a top-secret document, the National Security Agency (NSA) has got direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other major US internet companies. The NSA access is part of a program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The document claims collection directly from the servers of major US service providers. Although the document claims that the program is run with the help of the companies, all the companies who responded to a request for comment denied knowledge of any such program.
In a statement, Google said: Google cares deeply about the security of our users data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government back door into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.
Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge, one said. An Apple spokesman said he had never heard of PRISM.
The NSA access became possible because of changes to US surveillance law, introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. The program facilitates a large amount of in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating companies who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.
The revelation of the PRISM program follows a leak of a top-secret court order that forced telecoms provider Verizon to give the telephone records of millions of US customers to the US government. The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate about the level of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records from Verizon, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.
It is claimed that some of the worlds largest internet companies are part of the information-sharing program, which was introduced in 2007. Microsoft which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan Your privacy is our priority was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012.
Under US law, companies must comply with requests for users communications, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies servers. The NSA document notes that the operations have the help of communications providers in the US.
During the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in December 2012, several US senators warned about the high level of surveillance the law might allow and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces. When the FAA was first introduced, its supporters argued that one safeguard would be the fact that the NSA could not get electronic communications without the permission of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program makes that permission unnecessary, because it allows the agency to take the communications directly off the companies servers, communications that include email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers and social networking details.
The PRISM program allows the NSA, the worlds largest surveillance organization, to get targeted communications without requesting them from the service providers and without needing individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the companies and get both stored communications and live communications.
A senior administration official said in a statement: The Guardian and Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This law does not allow the targeting of any US citizen or of any person who is within the United States. The program is overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch and Congress. Only non-US persons outside the US are targeted. The program must limit the information it gets, keeps and disseminates about US citizens.
This program was recently reauthorized by Congress after a lot of debate. Information that is collected under this program is some of the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect and it is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
A long time ago, cinema audiences were transported to a galaxy far, far away.
That was 1977 but, in 2015, as the franchise plans to release its seventh lm, interest in Star Wars shows no sign of slowing down. Now, there is news of a new lm about Han Solo and of a reappearance for Darth Vader.
Many fans around the world are constantly waiting for the release of new poster art, new trailers and other information, said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst. Its hard to imagine any other movie franchise that could cause this much enthusiasm and excitement.
The latest Star Wars mania started after Disneys purchase of Lucas lm from the lms creator, George Lucas, in 2012. Disney paid $4bn for Lucas lm and very soon announced that there would be three more Star Wars episodes VII, VIII and IX plus plans for spin-off movies and standalones.
Details of the second spin-off have now been made public. It is a story about Han Solo, the intergalactic smuggler played by Harrison Ford in the rst three lms. This second new lm will be released in May 2018.
It will follow the release in December 2015 of Episode VII, directed by JJ Abrams and titled Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The unnamed Episode VIII is due out in 2017 and a spin-off, Rogue One, will arrive in cinemas in 2016.
That movie will outline a rebel mission to steal the plans of the Death Star, a key part of the story in the rst lm in 1977. There was lots of interest in the rumour that Darth Vader, the black-clad villain of the original series, will reappear in Rogue One. The interest con rms the power of Star Wars nostalgia.
In creating a multi-storyline, multi-character cinema universe around Star Wars, Lucas lm-Disney are copying the phenomenally successful series of lms produced by Marvel Studios, which Disney also bought, in 2009.
Disney has increased the level of marketing savvy to a product that was already popular: Dergarabedian says the decision to make all six existing Star Wars lms available on streaming services is a brilliant way to build the excitement for the new lm and reinvigorate the idea of Star Wars in the minds of the fans.
But, it is not certain that it needs reinvigorating. The level of enthusiasm that has surrounded Star Wars for at least the last twenty years is shown by the huge number of novels, comic books, video games and merchandising that Lucas lm has created over the years.
Michael Rosser, news editor for Screen International, suggests that it is this shared universe of nostalgia that makes Star Wars the top lm franchise. The great thing about the original lms was that they created a huge universe of characters and possibility that sparked the imagination of viewers, he said.
For years, people have been wondering how the different parts of the story t together. This new lm goes back to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker so we hope it will reconnect with the original Star Wars lms. The prequels failed to do that.
Rosser is referring to the three lms Lucas directed between 1999 and 2005 The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith which were about the life of Luke Skywalkers father, Anakin, who becomes Darth Vader. Despite quite bad reviews, the prequels took $2.5bn at the worldwide box of ce.
It shows the power of Star Wars that, although they were disappointing, the prequels still made a lot of money, said Rosser.
In the world of lm, branding and a successful franchise are very important. Is there a risk that movie studios will simply become branding machines and lose their interest in cinema?
Rosser thinks not. They are desperate to keep the franchise going and make sure new lms are of good quality. They also want people to go to the cinema at a time when lots are staying home for entertainment. But you dont want to watch Star Wars on your iPhone.
Meanwhile, Dergarabedian expects massive business when The Force Awakens reaches cinemas in December 2015. We certainly expect a record opening for December and the lm should make at least a billion dollars worldwide. Truly, Star Wars is the ultimate movie brand. | 1 | Intermediate |
Amsterdam still looks liberal to tourists, who were recently assured by the Labour Mayor that the city’s marijuana-selling coffee shops would stay open despite a new national law tackling drug tourism. But the Dutch capital may lose its reputation for tolerance over plans to dispatch nuisance neighbours to “scum villages” made from shipping containers.
The Mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, insists his controversial new £810,000 policy to tackle antisocial behaviour is to protect victims of abuse and homophobia from harassment. The camps where antisocial tenants will be rehoused for three to six months have been called “scum villages” because the policy echoes proposals from Geert Wilders, the far-right populist, who last year demanded that “repeat offenders” be “sent to a village for scum”.
But Bartho Boer, a spokesman for the Mayor, denies that the plans are illiberal. “We want to defend the liberal values of Amsterdam,” he says. “We want everyone to be who he and she is – whether they are gay and lesbian or stand up to violence and are then victims of harassment. We as a society want to defend them.” According to Boer, the villages are not for “the regular nuisance between two neighbours where one has the stereo too loud on Saturday night” but “people who are extremely violent and intimidating, and in a clear situation where a victim is being repeatedly harassed”.
Those deemed guilty of causing “extreme havoc” will be evicted and placed in temporary homes of a “basic” nature, including converted shipping containers in industrial areas of the city. “We call it a living container,” says Boer. Housing antisocial tenants in these units, which have showers and kitchens and have been used as student accommodation, will ensure that they are not “rewarded” by being relocated to better accommodation.
Dutch newspaper the Parool has pointed out that in the 19th century troublemakers were moved to villages in Drenthe and Overijssel, which rapidly became slums. But Boer insists that the administration has learned from past mistakes and is not planning to house the antisocial together.
It would be more accurate to call them “scum houses” than scum villages, says Boer, “because we don’t want to put more than one of these families in the same area”. After up to six months in these houses, scattered around the city, the tenants will be found permanent homes. The city government anticipates moving around ten families a year into this programme, which starts in 2013.
The temporary dwellings will be heavily policed, but antisocial tenants will also have access to doctors, social workers and parole officers. “They are taken care of so the whole situation is not going to repeat at the new house they are in,” says Boer. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Behind the bright lights and mirrored panels, cameras are watching you. If you pick up a boot, a camera will make sure you dont put it into your bag. Enter a department store and you will be watched. But new technology is less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, sex and shopping habits.
A few months ago, IT company Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) wrote a report that said around 30% of stores use facial recognition technology to track customers in-store. Facial recognition is a technology that can identify people by analysing and comparing facial features from a database. It uses devices such as Intel RealSense cameras, which are able to analyse everything from particular expressions to the clothing brands someone is wearing.
Intel spokesman Joe Jensen says that the aim of using RealSense technology in shops is not to create databases of speci c peoples lives but to build generalized models of peoples lifestyles and shopping habits. We dont need to know a particular customer. We need to know that this shopper has these characteristics and that, when those characteristics are present, this is what a person tends to do.
If you combine recognition technology with databases of previous customer patterns, you can start to predict a lot about what a person may or may not do in a shop. If, for example, theres a woman walking quickly towards the sock section, you can use that data to predict she wants to buy socks. That could allow a store to automatically put targeted ads on screens aimed speci cally at that person. If she looks like the type of person who wants to buy socks, they will show her adverts for socks.
If it sounds familiar, its because the online world has been using techniques like these for years. If you search for something on Amazon, youll get targeted ads for similar products on other sites. But its not easy to bring these systems into the physical world. People do not react to cameras in the same way as they do to browser cookies.
Hoxton Analytics, a team of data scientists in London, has developed a technology that uses machine learning and arti cial intelligence to categorize people based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of peoples footwear as they walk past the sensor, the system can identify a customers gender with 75-80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, says that the focus of the system was partly a reaction to facial recognition. My idea was, why dont we simply consider the clothes someones wearing? he said. If I just showed you a photo of someones body, you could probably tell me what gender they are. However, pointing a camera at someones chest or hips feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was what about peoples shoes?
People use the word creepy a lot during discussions of in-store tracking. For stores and data scientists, the aim is to nd a way of getting information without seeming intrusive.
For McCormack, the argument is based on the fact that personal information isnt collected. Right now, shops are doing lots of incredibly invasive things but we just dont know about it. What we say is that, if you know someones a male or a female, then your advertising will be much more ef cient. If you know that everyone in your shop right now is a male, youll be advertising PlayStations not hairdryers.
From the perspective of stores, its understandable that physical shops want some of the information online shops collect. We allow this to happen online so why not of ine? Online, you get a pop-up asking you to accept cookies. But you cant ask for peoples consent in the same way when they move from one physical shop to another.
But its also true that the generation that is growing up with online shopping does not see online advertising as so invasive. In the CSC report, a survey showed that 72% of people aged 55 or more said they were very uncomfortable with these types of technologies in physical shops. But only 51% of 16-24 year olds said they were uncomfortable.
Are younger people more open because they are more familiar with digital technology or do they believe in the honesty of organizations offering free services? Is this kind of technology always creepy or does it depend? In any case, there are a growing number of eyes between the shelves and they care a lot about what youre wearing. | 1 | Intermediate |
The Chief Medical Officer for England compared the problem of antibiotic resistance to the risks of international terrorism. But, each year, the number of deaths around the world from bacterial resistance is far more than the number of deaths from terrorist attacks.
The World Health Organization says that each year more than 150,000 people die from tuberculosis because of antibiotic resistance. This is now a war.
A hundred years ago, life expectancy in the UK was about 47 years for a man and 50 years for a woman. Lots of young children died. About 30% of all deaths were in children under the age of five, mostly because of infectious disease.
But a child born in Britain today has more than a 25% chance of reaching their 100th birthday. We can thank public health systems, vaccination and antibiotics for this.
In intensive care, antibiotic resistant bacteria are most common. Here, powerful antibiotics are used very often. These drugs kill ordinary bacteria. But they cannot kill strong bacteria that have begun to learn how to survive antibiotic drugs.
When I became a doctor in the 1990s, I learnt about Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) is a bacteria that is resistant to methicillin and all other penicillins. There were just a few drugs that could kill it – for example, vancomycin and teicoplanin. But antibiotic resistant bacteria became more and more common.
In our hospitals and our doctor’s surgeries we use antiobiotics too often.
Also, we have put antibiotics into the food chain, when we grow food and when we put anti-bacterial drugs into food for farm animals.
We thought that antibiotics were something we could use forever. We thought that companies would continue to make more and more antibiotics.
But this is no longer true. We have found new, more resistant bacteria. The vancomycin that we used to treat MRSA infection no longer worked. We found Vancomycin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (VRSA) in our hospitals. And other bacteria were becoming resistant too.
Today, infections with organisms that are very resistant are common, but fewer and fewer new antibiotic drugs are made. It is more and more difficult to develop new drugs that can kill resistant bacteria. Antibiotics have become drugs that are expensive to develop, that are only used in short courses and that quickly stop working because of bacterial resistance.
This war against bacteria is different from all other wars. There needs to be change in the way doctors give antibiotics and we need to use fewer antibiotics in farming. And we have to give companies good reasons why they should make new antibiotics, which will not make them lots of money.
Today, antibiotic resistance has become a normal part of life. Less than a hundred years after the discovery of penicillin, we are beginning to lose the fight. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. It is on the edge of the Sahara Desert and at the centre of the North African countrys Ouallywood lm industry, where scenes from movies such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones were lmed.
Now the city, known as the door of the desert, is the centre for a complex of four linked solar mega- plants, which, together with hydro and wind, will help provide nearly half of Moroccos electricity from renewable energy by 2020. The project is a key part of Moroccos ambitions to use its deserts to become a global solar superpower.
When the full complex is complete, it will be the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. The rst phase, called Noor 1, will be ready in November 2015. The mirror technology it uses is less widespread and more expensive than the photovoltaic panels that you can see on roofs all over the world. But it will have the advantage of being able to continue producing power even after the sun goes down.
The potential for solar power from the desert has been known for decades. In the days after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the German particle physicist Gerhard Knies calculated that the worlds deserts receive enough energy in a few hours to provide power for all the people in the world for a whole year. But the challenge is to capture that energy and take it to where it is needed.
As engineers nish Noor 1, its 500,000 moon-shaped solar mirrors glitter in the desert. The 800 rows follow the sun across the sky, whirring quietly every few minutes.
When they are nished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will need a space as big as Moroccos capital city, Rabat, and generate 580 mega-watts of electricity, enough to power a million homes.
Moroccos environment minister, Hakima el-Haite, believes that solar energy could have the same effects on the region this century that oil production had in the last century. But the $9bn project was triggered by more immediate concerns, she said.
We import 94% of our energy as fossil fuels from other countries and that has big consequences for our state budget, el-Haite told the Guardian. So, when we heard about the possibilities of solar energy, we thought, Why not?
Solar energy will make up a third of Moroccos renewable energy supply by 2020. Wind and hydro will make up the other two-thirds.
We are very proud of this project, el-Haite said. I think it is the most important solar plant in the world.
Technicians say that the Noor 2 and 3 plants, due to open in 2017, will store energy for up to eight hours this gives the possibility of 24/7 solar energy in the Sahara and the surrounding region.
The rst part of the project is nearly completed and Morocco has bigger international ambitions. We are already involved in transportation lines to cover the full south of Morocco and Mauritania, says Ahmed Baroudi, manager of Societe dInvestissements Energetiques, the national renewable energy investment rm. But he says the projects effects will go further even as far as the Middle East.
Exporting solar energy could have stabilizing effects within and between countries, according to the Moroccan solar energy agency (Masen). Morocco is making plans with Tunisia and energy exports northwards across the Mediterranean are a key goal.
We believe that its possible to export energy to Europe but, rst, we have to build the interconnectors which dont yet exist, said Maha el-Kadiri, a Masen spokeswoman.
In the meantime, Morocco is focused on using solar to meet its own needs. This could one day include water desalination, which is very useful in a country that is having more and more droughts as the climate warms.
About $9bn has been invested in the Noor Complex, much of it from international institutions such as the European Investment Bank and World Bank and supported by Moroccan government guarantees. Energy subsidies from Moroccos King Mohammed VI have stopped the cost from being transferred to normal people.
Over a thousand, mostly Moroccan, workers are still racing to x electric wires, take down scaffolding and insulate steel pipelines. They hurry past in yellow and orange safety vests, working 12-hour shifts beneath the Atlas mountains. They wear hard hats, safety shoes and ear plugs.
Weve done the construction and, now, we will see how these projects look when they start, says Hajar Lakhael, a 25-year-old environment and security manager from Meknes. It is exactly like the preparation for a grand performance.
A global audience will be watching with interest. | 1 | Intermediate |
The direct action group UK Uncut plans to make many Starbucks cafés into crèches, refuges and homeless shelters to make people notice that Starbucks does not pay enough tax.
The House of Commons questioned Starbucks. They asked why the company paid no corporation tax in the UK during the past three years.
UK Uncut wants to show a connection between government cuts, especially the cuts that affect women, and multinational businesses who do not pay enough tax.
Sarah Greene, a UK Uncut activist, said money for refuges would be cut if companies did not pay the fair amount of tax. The government lost about £32 billion in 2011 because multinational businesses did not pay enough tax.
Greene said the government could easily collect billions of pounds that could help pay for important services, if they were stricter when they collect taxes.
UK Uncut turned its attentions to Starbucks after an investigation found that the company had paid only £8.6 million in corporation tax since opening its cafés in the UK in 1998 despite sales worth £3 billion.
Uncut campaigner Anna Walker said “We’ve chosen to highlight the impact of the cuts on women. So we’re going to focus on changing Starbucks into the services that the government are cutting, for example refuges and crèches.
“Starbucks is a really great target because it is on every high street in the country so people can take action in their local areas,” she said.
Starbucks says it pays the correct level of taxes. The group Chief Executive, Howard Schultz, said: “Starbucks has always paid taxes in the UK.
“Over the last three years alone, our company has paid more than £160 million in various taxes, including national insurance*, VAT and business rates.”
Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Starbucks have avoided nearly £900 million of tax. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, said: “I’m not happy with the current situation. We need to make sure we continue to encourage these businesses to invest in our country, but they should pay fair taxes as well.”
A spokeswoman for Starbucks said: “Tax law can be extremely complex, but Starbucks respects tax laws and accounting rules.
“Starbucks spends hundreds of millions of pounds with local suppliers on milk, cakes and sandwiches, and on store design and improvements. When you consider the indirect employment created by Starbucks, the company’s economic impact to the UK economy is more than £80 million every year.” | 0 | Elementary |
Water scientists have given a very strong warning about the world’s food supplies. They say that everyone may have to change to a vegetarian diet by 2050.
We believe there will be an extra two billion people in the world by 2050. Humans get about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to decrease to just 5% to feed these extra people, say the world’s top water scientists.
“There will not be enough water to produce food for the nine-billion population in 2050 if more people start eating like people in the West,” the report by Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.
“There will be enough water if the percentage of animal-based foods is limited to 5% of total calories.”
There are warnings that water shortages will limit food production. At the same time, Oxfam and the UN prepare for a possible second global food crisis in five years. Prices for food items such as corn and wheat have increased nearly 50% on international markets since June. The price increase has been caused by very bad droughts in the US and Russia, and weak monsoon rains in Asia. More than 18 million people already have serious food shortages across the Sahel.
Oxfam says that the effects of price increases will be very bad in developing countries that need to buy food from other countries, including parts of Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East.
Changing to a vegetarian diet is one way to keep more water to grow food, the scientists said.
Animal protein-rich food uses five to ten times more water than vegetarian food. One third of the world’s farmland is used to grow crops to feed animals.
“Nine hundred million people already don’t have enough food and two million people are malnourished, even though we are producing more food,” they said. “70% of all water is used in farming, and growing more food to feed an extra two billion people by 2050 will put more pressure on water and land.”
The report was released at the start of the annual world water conference in Stockholm, Sweden, where 2,500 politicians, UN groups, non-governmental groups and researchers from 120 countries met to discuss global water supply problems.
Eating too much, malnourishment and waste are all increasing. “We will need a new recipe to feed the world in the future,” said the report’s editor, Anders Jägerskog. | 0 | Elementary |
If we reduced the amount of food we wasted around the world by just 25%, there would be enough food to feed all the hungry people in the world. Each year, we waste 1.3 billion tonnes of food, about one third of all the food we produce. This includes about 45% of all fruit and vegetables, 35% of fish and seafood, 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products and 20% of meat. We waste food like this, when, at the same time, 795 million people suffer from hunger.
The problem is global but is different in different parts of the world. In developing countries, there is a lot of “food loss” – this is when food is lost because of poor equipment, transportation and so on. In rich countries, there are low levels of “food loss” but high levels of “food waste”, which means people throw away food because they have bought too much or shops reject food because it doesn’t look good.
In developed countries, people and shops throw away between 30% and 40% of all food bought but, in poorer countries, people throw away only 5% to 16%.
“In the developing world, there is almost no food waste,” says Robert van Otterdijk, coordinator of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Save Food programme. “Food waste is happening in countries where people have more money, so they can throw away food. But there is a lot of food loss in developing countries because of the poor conditions they have.”
The environmental impact of food loss and waste is high. The carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2. This means that, if food waste were a country, it would produce more greenhouse gases than any country, except the US and China.
“We cause the problem of climate change because we produce and use too much – we are not in balance with what the Earth can provide,” says van Otterdijk. “Production of food is one of the biggest production sectors in the world. If we waste one-third of all this, you can imagine what a huge effect this has on the natural resources – on land, water, energy and greenhouse gases.”
The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand produce the most food waste. People in those countries waste 39% of all the food they buy. The next is Europe, where people throw away about 31% of all the food they buy. In the UK, 15 million tonnes of food is lost or wasted each year. British people throw away 4.2 million tonnes of edible food each year. This means that 11.7% of all food people buy is wasted, which costs each family £700 a year.
The foods most often found in British bins are bread, vegetables, fruit and milk. The most wasted food in the UK by weight is bread – people throw away 414,000 tonnes (22.4%) of all the bread they buy. By percentage, the most wasted food is lettuce and leafy salads – people throw away 38% (64,000 tonnes) of all they buy.
The UK has improved in the past ten years, thanks to a campaign to reduce waste. Van Otterdijk says the UK has been very successful in reducing food waste. Between 2007 and 2012, the amount of food waste produced by UK households decreased by 21%, from 5.3 million tonnes to 4.2 million tonnes.
Van Otterdijk says that more and more people are interested in food waste and this is great. “We have to do much more, and companies and governments also need to help,” he says. “But, if it continues like this, maybe, after ten years, the situation around the world will be better.” | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
The problem with Google Glasses, says Takahito Iguchi, is that theyre not cool. He may be right. Theres already a website dedicated to people wearing them looking either ridiculous or smug or, more often, both. Search Google Images and one of the first hits is a picture of a large, naked man wearing them in the shower. And its this that Iguchi, a Japanese entrepreneur, hopes may be Googles Achilles heel. He is launching a competitor that is a bit more stylish. A bit more Blade Runner. A bit more Japanese.
Iguchis augmented reality glasses arent really glasses they are more a single piece of metal with a camera and a tiny projector. They are called Telepathy One and, since they were presented to the public for the first time in Austin, Texas, they have attracted $5m of venture capital. Like Glass, Telepathy One is due to launch in 2014.
Its a simplified version of Google Glass. Glass has a range of uses you can surf the internet, read emails, take photographs but Telepathy will be more of a communication device. Connected via Bluetooth to your phone, it will focus on real-time visual and audio sharing. Youll be able to post photos and videos from your line of vision on Facebook or send them as an email, or see and speak to a video image of a friend.
It will help bring you close to your friends and family. We are very focused on the communication and sharing possibilities, says Iguchi, who has worked in the Japanese technology industry for 20 years.
Of course, not everyone wants to get closer to the man in the futuristic headset, I tell him. Iguchi shakes his head. Im a visionary. I have a dream that people will understand other people. When I go to London, I am a stranger. Sometimes I feel fear. But I believe that everyone wants to be understood and to understand each other. And, with this device, you can know more information about people before you even speak to them.
Compared to Google, Telepathy is a minnow, but Iguchi doesnt seem to worry. In his shared office space in San Francisco a cool, converted warehouse he quotes Sun Tzus The Art of War and says that even tiny armies can sometimes beat powerful forces. When he was growing up, Japanese technology ruled the world: the Sony Walkman was the iPhone of its day. Now, to compete, hes had to leave Tokyo and go to Silicon Valley.
Tokyo is very rich in fashion and culture but its still an island. Its isolated. There is not any way to expand. Whereas, in Silicon Valley, everyone is from everywhere. Its where you come to connect globally. The hardware will be made in Japan, and he is putting together a team of software engineers in the US to develop its applications.
Building the prototype of Telepathy One was easy, Iguchi says. We have every sort of technology in Tokyo. It is presenting it to the world that is the challenge. The top manufacturers all want to work with him, he says, because they have the technology, they just struggle to sell it. There needs to be a story to the product. Like Apple did with the iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket. And Steve Jobs was inspired by Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, and he inspired me, so maybe it will come in a circle.
Maybe. He certainly has the confidence of Jobs, but, with a thick Japanese accent, he sometimes struggles to make himself understood, a fact that may have contributed to his idea for Telepathy One. When he went to London to present the headset, he stayed in an Airbnb. The house owner was not my friend but I talked with him for three hours, and now he is my friend. That is how long it takes to understand each other, to share our feelings, and background, and career. Maybe Telepathy makes that quicker. If you are getting info from the cloud and social networks, that will happen more easily.
Iguchi hopes that seeing somebody elses I suddenly realized that everything is code. Everything is coded and is shareable between humans. And everything can be encoded and decoded. And, if code is exchangeable between humans, that will end all war. literal point of view will help you to see their metaphorical point of view. As a student, he explains, he studied philosophy by day and taught himself how to code by night. And, one day, I opened the door of my apartment and | 1 | Intermediate |
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OneStopEnglish
OneStopEnglish is a corpus of texts written at three reading levels, and demonstrates its usefulness for through two applications - automatic readability assessment and automatic text simplification.
This dataset is a version of onestop_english, which was randomly split into (64*3=) 192 train examples, and 375 test examples (stratified).
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