Intermediate
The right of Bolivias indigenous Indian tribes to 1 chew coca leaves, the main ingredient in cocaine, has caused major international disagreement, which could have a significant effect on global drugs policy. Bolivia has received a special exemption from the 1961 Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which controls international drugs policy. The exemption allows Bolivias indigenous people to chew the leaves.
Bolivia had argued that the convention was in 2 opposition to its new constitution, adopted in 2009, which says it must protect native and ancestral coca as part of its cultural heritage and maintains that coca in its natural state  is not a narcotic.
South American Indians have chewed coca 3 leaves for centuries. The leaves are said to provide energy and have medicinal qualities. Supporters of Bolivias position said that defending the rights of indigenous people was the right thing to do. The Bolivian move is inspirational and groundbreaking, said Danny Kushlick, of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which supports drug liberalization. It shows that any country that is fed up with the war on drugs can change its relations with the UN conventions.
However, the UNs International Narcotics Control 4 Board (INCB), which checks implementation of global drug treaties, says that Bolivia is threatening international drug controls. A number of countries  including the UK, the US, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia  opposed Bolivias demands.
The UK told the UN that it respects the cultural 5 importance of the coca leaf in Bolivia, but it adds: The United Kingdom is  worried that the exemption could lead to increases in coca production and  most importantly  the amount of coca that goes into the cocaine trade. As a result, the exemption would weaken  the global effort to tackle the drugs trade.
The right of indigenous people in South Americas 6 Andean region to chew coca leaf was removed in 1964 when Bolivia was under a dictatorship and it signed up to the convention. But Bolivia was given 25 years to implement the ban. This arrangement came to an end in 1989 and since then the issue has been under dispute.
In 2011, Bolivia  whose President, Evo Morales, 7 is a former coca producer  formally told the UN that it did not want to be in the convention any more. It has now signed up to the convention again, but with an exemption so that its indigenous people can continue chewing coca leaves.
The exemption is the first of its kind in the 8 history of UN drug-control treaties and has led to concerns that other countries may apply for exemptions. The Russian government has argued that the exemption will lead to an increase in illegal circulation of cocaine and warned that it also sets a dangerous precedent that could be used by other states in creating a more liberal drug-control regime.
The British parliament has recommended that 9 Bolivias request should be supported by the UK government. It argues that it is important that countries stay in the convention. Bolivias return could be blocked only if a third or more of the 184 countries that have signed up to the convention opposed its request. There are suspicions that the US and UK are trying to persuade other countries to block Bolivias request.
Nancie Prudhomme, of the International Centre 10 on Human Rights and Drug Policy, criticized the co-ordinated opposition to Bolivias demands. These objections are legally questionable, she said. They support an arbitrary and over-broad provision and apply international drug laws in a vacuum. This is not right. No state has paid any attention to decades of developing international norms on cultural and indigenous rights, which support Bolivias efforts.
The decision to ban coca chewing was based on 11 a 1950 report produced by the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Coca Leaf, which supporters of drug liberalization say was not based on evidence. The growing of coca leaves is legal and licensed in Bolivia. Some believe this has led to a fall in cocaine production in the country. For this reason, some experts see Bolivia as a model for other countries.


Intermediate
Barack Obama has urged young people to reject pessimism and interact with people who have different beliefs if they want to make changes in the world.
On the final day of his last visit to Britain as US president, Obama told 500 youth leaders at a meeting in London: Im here to ask you to reject the idea that there are forces we cant control. As JFK said, our problems are manmade and can be solved by man.
Youve never had better tools to make a difference, he told the students at the question-and-answer session. Reject pessimism, cynicism and know that progress is possible. Progress is not inevitable; it requires struggle, discipline and faith.
But Obama said he knew that young people had many challenges. He said it was a time of breathtaking change, from 9/11, 7/7  and during an age of information and Twitter where theres a steady stream of bad news.
The audience cheered as the president was introduced. He spoke about his policies, including healthcare and education.
He urged the audience to interact with people with different political beliefs: Seek out people who dont agree with you and it will also help you to compromise.
Obama said he was proud of his healthcare reforms, which received huge cheers from the audience, and said of the US response to the 2008 financial crisis: Saving the world from great depression  that was quite good.
He also listed diplomatic deals with Iran and the response to the Ebola crisis as highlights of his presidency. Im proud; I think Ive been true to myself.
Questioned on the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), he said: The answer to globalization is not to pull up the drawbridge, though he said it is crucial to pay attention to workers rights.
Before Obama arrived, Tanya Williams, a community officer, told the Guardian: I love Michelle but I like Barack Obama and its exciting to have the chance to hear someone who has changed so much and encouraged so many people who didnt vote before to vote for the first time.
Oliver Sidorczuk, 26, said: Everyone is extremely excited to listen to what he has to say. Im going to ask him about electoral rights.
Obama ended the session by taking a question from a young Sikh Londoner, who asked about the problem of racial profiling at airports and being mistaken for a Muslim.
Obama said that, although there were people with crazy ideology, living together peacefully was important. I visited a mosque a few months ago and said our greatest allies are American Muslims who are integrated, he said.
Furqan Naeem, a campaigner from Manchester, said: I recently visited the United States and I saw some really important work the president did  the work celebrated Americas diversity and brought communities together.
Kenny Imafidon, the managing director of a youth organization, said afterwards: What I will remember is what he said about meeting with people who have different politics from you and having to make compromises. Also, the thing he said about being a good leader and finding great talent.
Later, Obama met Jeremy Corbyn, who said they had an excellent 90-minute discussion.
When he was asked if they talked about the debate on Britains membership of the EU, Corbyn said they discussed it briefly.
After the meeting, Obama joined David Cameron to play golf. Obama ended the day at a dinner with the British prime minister and the US ambassador, Matthew Barzun, before travelling to Germany.


Intermediate
Chemists have waited a long time for a new element to turn up and, now, four have been discovered by researchers in Japan, Russia and the US. The four new elements are the first to be added to the periodic table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were included. The new elements, all highly radioactive, complete seventh row of the periodic table and mean that science textbooks around the world are now out of date.
The US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the global organization that controls chemical names, terminology and measurement, verified the elements on 30 December, 2015 after examining studies dating back to 2004. The scientists who found them must now come up with formal names to replace the Latin-based temporary names  ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium  which reflect their atomic numbers, 113, 115, 117, and 118. The atomic number is the number of protons found in an elements atomic nucleus.
IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced enough evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118. The organization gave credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the RIKEN Institute in Japan. The decision means Japan becomes the first Asian country to name an element. Under IUPAC rules, new elements can be named after mythological concepts, minerals, a place or country, or a scientist.
When elements 114 and 116 were given formal names in 2012, scientists chose flerovium and livermorium respectively, after the Flerov Lab at Dubnas Joint Institute of Research and the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the US, where the elements were discovered. Kosuke Morita, who led the research at RIKEN, said his team now planned to look to the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond. Jan Reedijk of IUPAC, said: The chemistry community is eager to see the table finally completed down to the seventh row.
The Japanese team is considering three names for ununtrium: japonium, rikenium and nishinarium, after the Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, where the element was found. They have been thinking about it for a while already, said Polly Arnold, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh University. This is painstaking work. The work helps us with our models and with understanding radioactive decay. If we understand it better, hopefully we can improve how we deal with nuclear waste and things that are important in the real world. It also leads to fantastic technological advances in building the kit to make these observations.
Along with new names, the scientists must suggest two-letter symbols for the elements. When IUPAC has received the researchers suggestions, they will go to public review for five months. That allows scientists and others to raise any objections. In 1996, the symbol Cp was suggested for copernicium, or element 112, but it was changed to Cn when scientists complained that Cp referred to another substance.
To discover the elements, researchers at the three labs slammed lighter nuclei into one another and looked for radioactive decays that should come from the new elements. Ununtrium and ununpentium are thought to be metals. Ununseptium could be a metalloid. The fourth element, ununoctium, may be a gas, like other elements, helium, neon and argon. It is hard to know for sure because so few atoms of each element have ever been made.
Paul Karol, chair of the IUPAC panel that verified the elements, said: It will be a long time before we can find practical uses for the new elements.


Intermediate
Benjamin Carle is 96.9% made in France, including even 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, decided, in 2013, to see if it was possible to live using only French-made products for ten months as part of a television documentary.
He got the idea after the Minister for Economic Renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, asked the French people to buy French products to save the countrys industrial production sector.
For the experiment, Carle had to give up his smartphone, television, refrigerator (all made in China); his glasses (Italian); his underpants (Moroccan); morning coffee (Guatemalan) and his favourite David Bowie music (British).
Fortunately, his girlfriend, Anas, and cat, Loon, are both French.
Politicians say all sorts of things. I wanted to see if it was possible to do what the minister was asking us to do, Carle said.
He had just three rules: eat only food produced in France, remove any 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 in France  and that the rest would have to go, including the lightbulbs (China) and green beans (Kenya).
Left without a refrigerator (none are made in France), he was forced to chill his food on the window ledge.
His foreign-made clothes, including his underwear, were replaced with more expensive alternatives: French-produced underpants (26), socks (9), polo shirt (75), espadrille sandals (26), but no jeans because none are produced in France.
During the experiment, Carle hunted in supermarkets for 100% French-made products, learned to cook seasonal fruit and vegetables grown in France, proudly brushed his teeth with a toothbrush made in France and hand-washed his underwear until he found a French-made washing machine (which opened at the top and so would not fit under the kitchen counter).
Going out with friends was a problem  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 French singer Michel Sardou and reading French novels. French wine was, of course, allowed and French-Canadian singer Cline Dion, but not French bands such as Daft Punk, who sing in English.
Unable to use his British-made bicycle or even a French car, because he discovered that the only affordable Peugeot, Renault and Citron models are mostly made overseas, he bought an 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, which he swapped for an old Sagem mobile.
Carle said his aim was to save the French economy. He admits the experiment was part serious and part jest. At one point, he asked a French language expert to check if he should use cool and other English words  he was advised to swap it for the nearest French equivalent: chouette.
When he discovered that France makes no refrigerators (apart from wine coolers) or televisions, but makes aeroplane seats and windmills, he sighed and said: Great. Nothing that will fit into my apartment.
At the end of the experiment, Carle took out a bank loan to buy new furniture and clothes. A special auditor declared him 96.9% made in France and Montebourg visited to present him with a medal.
Carles conclusion: Its not entirely possible or even desirable to live 100% made in France, particularly in terms of new technology. But that wasnt the point.
This wasnt about French nationalism or patriotism. It was trying to show that we should reflect about the way we buy 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. People could do 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.


“I got a Dyson vacuum cleaner but I don’t even know if I want it. I just picked it up,” Louise Haggerty, a 56-year-old hairdresser and waitress, said of her 1am trip to the Black Friday sales. “It was mental in there. It was crazy. It was absolutely disgusting, disgusting.”
Haggerty had ventured out to the 24-hour Sainsbury’s supermarket in Harringay, north-east London with a friend in the hope of snapping up a bargain flat-screen TV. “But so many people pushed in the queue we didn’t have a chance,” she said. “The poor woman who was second in the queue was pushed out by a crowd of youths. She didn’t get anything. People were behaving like animals – it was horrible,” she said. “I only saw two security guards.”
Frustrated with not being able to buy a Blaupunkt 40” TV reduced from £299.99 to £149.99, Haggerty rushed to pick up a Dyson Animal Vac, down from £319.99 to £159.99. “I don’t even know how much it costs; I don’t know even know if I’m going to buy it. I just wanted something,” she said. “There are lads in there with three, four, five tellies. It’s not fair.”
One of those lads was Andy Blackett, 30, an estate agent, who had two trolleys full of bargains. “I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you the prices but I know they’re bargains.” But his mate Henry Fischer, a 19-year-old student, wasn’t as successful. “Someone snatched my telly from me – it’s cos I’m the smaller one.”
Blackett, Fischer and some mates had driven to Sainsbury’s at 12.45am after retreating from the “bedlam” of Tesco’s 24-hour Lea Valley supermarket, where the Black Friday sale started at midnight. “Tesco was scary so we came here instead,” Blackett said.
More than a dozen police officers attended the Tesco store on Glover Drive, Upper Edmonton, as scuffles broke out between eager and frustrated shoppers. Customers were seen tearing down cardboard hoardings put in place to hold back sale items until the stroke of midnight. Tesco delayed the sale of its most popular sale items – TVs – for almost an hour until police brought the situation under control. One officer was overheard criticizing the manager for failing to ensure adequate security and suggested the sale should be suspended altogether. The Tesco store is across the road from an IKEA furniture store that was the scene of riots when it opened with a midnight sale in 2005.
Police intervened at other stores, including Tesco in Willesden and Surrey Quays, just before the doors opened at midnight. Greater Manchester Police said at least two people had been arrested at Black Friday sales events already that morning. The force said on its Twitter feed: “Keep calm, people!” South Wales Police also reported receiving a number of calls from staff at Tesco stores after they became “concerned due to the volume of people who had turned up to sale events”.
One of the first purchasers of a flat-screen TV, when TV sales began just before 1am, was James Alled, 30, a businessman, who bought two and was already negotiating to sell one of them to someone further down the queue. “I bought them for £250. I’ll sell it to you for £350, £300 cash,” he said. Further back in the queue, Christine Ball, 62, wasn’t impressed. “I got here at 10.15pm and I’m further back now than when I got here,” she said. “None of that lot know what a queue is.”
Ball, who, like most of the shoppers, had not heard of the US-inspired Black Friday sales until now, said she had come out especially to buy her grandson a TV for Christmas. “Not one of those massive ones; just a normal one at £100 or so,” she said. In her basket was a pint of semi-skimmed and a loaf of bread. “Telly, milk and bread – the necessities,” she said.
Mel Mehmet, 23, had been to Black Friday sales in 2013 and had expected queues but said the atmosphere in Tesco scared her this time. “It’s crazy, really, having it at midnight – the police must have more important things to do at night than be called to sales. We’re going to PC World first thing – their sale starts at 8am.”


Barack Obama has urged young people to reject pessimism and interact with those who have different beliefs if they want to make changes in the world.
On the final day of his last visit to Britain as US president, Obama told 500 youth leaders at a town hall meeting in London: “I’m here to ask you to reject the notion there are forces we can’t control. As JFK said, our problems are manmade and can be solved by man.”
“You’ve never had better tools to make a difference,” he told the A-level and UK –US exchange students at the Q&A session. “Reject pessimism, cynicism and know that progress is possible. Progress is not inevitable; it requires struggle, discipline and faith.”
But Obama acknowledged the challenges faced by young people: “Not to say your generation has had it easy, in a time of breathtaking change, from 9/11, 7/7 … and during an age of information and Twitter where there’s a steady stream of bad news.”
The audience cheered as the president was introduced and went on to speak about his policies, including healthcare and education.
He urged the audience to interact with people with different political beliefs: “Seek out people who don’t agree with you and it will also help you to compromise.”
Obama also said: “You should feel encouraged social attitudes are changing. That doesn’t mean it’s fast enough but you should keep pushing and it’s in part due to the courageous acts of young people like yourself.”
When asked about his presidential legacy, Obama said he was proud of the healthcare reforms, which received huge cheers from the audience, and said of the US response to the 2008 financial crisis: “Saving the world from great depression – that was quite good.”
He also listed diplomatic deals with Iran and the response to the Ebola crisis as highlights of his presidency. “I’m proud; I think I’ve been true to myself during this process.”
But he added: “Don’t give up and succumb to cynics if, after five years, poverty hasn’t been eradicated … It’s OK. Dr Martin Luther King says the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice.”
Questioned on the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), he said: “The answer to globalization is not to pull up the drawbridge and shut off,” though it was crucial to pay attention to workers’ rights.
Before Obama arrived, Tanya Williams, a community engagement officer, told the Guardian: “I love Michelle but I like Obama and it’s exciting to have the chance to hear someone who has changed so much and galvanized so many people who didn’t vote before.”
Oliver Sidorczuk, 26, said: “Everyone is extremely excited to listen to what he has to say. I’m going to ask him about electoral rights and try to ask him if he would join our campaign to ask David Cameron for automatic registration.”
Obama ended the session by taking a question from a young Sikh Londoner, who asked about the issue of racial profiling at airports and being mistaken for a Muslim.
Obama said that, although there were people with “crazy ideology”, pluralism was important. “I visited a mosque a few months ago and said our greatest allies are American Muslims who are most integrated and economically well off,” he said.
Furqan Naeem, a campaigner from Manchester, said: “I recently visited the States through the US embassy on the community leaders programme and saw first hand some really important work the president did in celebrating America’s diversity and bringing communities together.”
Kenny Imafidon, the managing director of the youth organization ClearView Research, said afterwards: “It was a great opportunity and what will stick with me is what he said about meeting with people who have different politics from you and having to make compromises. Also, the thing he said about being a good leader and finding great talent.”
Later, Obama met Jeremy Corbyn, who said they had an “excellent” 90-minute discussion.
The Labour leader said they talked about “the challenges facing postindustrial societies and the power of global corporations, and the increasing use of technology around the world and the effect that it has.”
Asked if they talked about the president’s intervention in the debate on Britain’s membership of the EU, Corbyn said it was discussed briefly.
After the meeting, Obama joined Cameron to play golf at the Grove in Chandlers Cross, Hertfordshire. Obama ended the day at a dinner with the prime minister and the US ambassador, Matthew Barzun, at the ambassador’s residence, before travelling on to Germany.


Intermediate
The US Senate Intelligence Committee has approved a bill that would make the National Security Agencys bulk collection of US phone records more transparent but allow it to continue. Introduced by Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, the bill lets the NSA continue to collect phone metadata of millions of Americans and allows the government to keep the data. The bill passed the committee by an 11-4 vote and will now be voted on by the full Senate.
The bill allows analysts to search through the data if they think there is a reasonable suspicion that someone is associated with international terrorism. The bill also allows the NSA to continue surveillance that is begun on foreigners outside the US if they enter the country, for a period of up to 72 hours.
The bill is a direct challenge to another bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy that would end domestic phone-records collection. It was also opposed by leading Intelligence Committee member Mark Udall, who said it did not go far enough. The NSAs surveillance of Americans private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform, Udall said.
Feinstein defended the NSA bulk collection programme, but said there was a need to rebuild public trust. The NSA call-records programme is legal, and I believe it contributes to our national security, she said in a statement. But more can, and should, be done to increase transparency and build public support for privacy protections in place.
Feinstein said the bill would also make a number of improvements to transparency and checks on the NSA  for example, someone who accesses data acquired under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the United States without permission could spend up to ten years in prison. There would also be a limit on the number of contacts an analyst can receive in response to a request for bulk communication records.
After the committees hearing had ended, Feinstein strongly supported the NSAs main domestic programme. I think theres huge misunderstanding about this NSA database programme, and how vital it is to protecting this country, she said.
Concern over the Intelligence Committees bill was expressed by independent legal experts. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice said: The Intelligence Committee bill and the USA Freedom Act present two opposing visions of the relationship between law-abiding Americans and the national security state. The fundamental question is: should the government have some reason to suspect wrongdoing before collecting Americans most personal information to feed into its databases? Leahy says yes; Feinstein says no.
Democratic committee member Ron Wyden suggested that recent concern about NSA spying on foreign leaders had taken attention away from the real focus on mass surveillance in the US. The statements that American intelligence officials have made about collecting data from foreign leaders is consistent with the understanding Ive had for years, as a member of the Intelligence Committee, he said. That has implications for foreign policy. My top priority is ending the mass surveillance, digital surveillance, on millions and millions of lawabiding Americans.
To everyones surprise, Feinstein announced that she was totally opposed to the foreign leader spying of the sort the NSA conducts on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Feinstein has been a strong supporter of the NSAs bulk collection of Americans phone records.
Americans are making it clear, that they never  repeat, never  agreed to give up their constitutional liberties for the appearance of security, Wyden said. Were just going to keep fighting this battle. Its going to be a long one.
Feinsteins strong support for domestic phone records collection shows that she is not yet ready to expand the criticism of the NSA that she gave when she totally opposed its surveillance of foreign allied leaders  a more traditional intelligence activity than bulk phone metadata surveillance.
Decades ago, countries had their own kinds of communication systems. Now that youve had the merger of global communications, I think youre going to have a lot more challenges spying on foreigners with implications for US citizens, Wyden said.


People are talking a lot about loneliness at the moment. The Office for National Statistics says that Britain is the loneliest place in Europe. British people have fewer strong friendships than other Europeans and they know their neighbours less well. Research at the University of Chicago has found that loneliness is twice as bad for older people’s health as obesity. They also found that loneliness causes almost as many deaths as poverty.
This is shocking but these studies do not talk about loneliness in younger adults. In 2010, a Mental Health Foundation survey found that loneliness was a bigger worry for young people than for the elderly. The 18- to 34-year-olds in the survey felt lonely more often, worried more about feeling alone and felt more depressed because of loneliness than people over 55.
“We know that loneliness is a problem for the elderly and there are day centres and charities to help them,” says Sam Challis, of the mental health charity Mind, “but, young people over 21 are too old for youth services.” This is not good because loneliness can cause mental health problems – loneliness causes stress, depression, paranoia, anxiety, addiction and it can cause suicide.
But what can young people do to prevent loneliness? One researcher says that social media and the internet can be both a good thing and a problem. They are a good thing when they allow us to communicate with friends and family far away but not when they replace face-to-face contact. “People present ‘perfect’ versions of themselves online and we expect to have social lives like the lives we see in the media,” says Challis. If we compare the ‘perfect’ lives of our friends with our own lives, this can make us want to stay at home alone.
A study of social media at the University of Michigan in 2013 found that using technology to help you meet new people can be a good thing. And, if you can’t go out, the internet can help you.
For example, Mumsnet, an online network for parents, can help you feel less alone when you are at home with young children.
Helplines can also reduce loneliness, at least in the short term. One in four of men who call the emotional support charity Samaritans say they are lonely. Get Connected is a free helpline for young people, where they can get help with emotional and mental health problems caused by loneliness.
At work, it can be a good idea to tell your employer how you’re feeling. Talking to your colleagues may seem like a waste of time but it can help to protect us from the emotional and psychological problems caused by working too hard.
According to recent research, loneliness is killing the elderly and, with an ageing population, we should try to reduce our isolation before it is too late. “Getting older doesn’t have to mean getting lonelier,” says Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of the relationship counselling service Relate. “But it is very important to create good- quality relationships earlier in life.”


That millennials rely heavily on technology is no secret. More than eight in ten say they sleep with a mobile phone by their bed, almost two thirds admit to texting while driving, one in five has posted a video of themselves online and three quarters have created a profile on a social networking site.
Compared to other generations, millennials are the most active on social media, according to a 2010 report, with 75% of them having created at least one social media account. In contrast, only 50% of Generation X, 30% of baby boomers and 6% of those aged 65 and older use social media. But there is a small percentage of millennials who don’t use social media at all. Meet the millennials bucking the trend.
Celan Beausoleil, 31, Oakland, California Beausoleil is a social worker and has had an “on and off, more off than on” relationship with Facebook.
She last deactivated her account in December 2015 after finding the amount of personal information shared by others “too heavy” to deal with on top of her work demands.
“A lot of my job is listening to people’s lives all day, every day and it started to feel so overwhelming to go on social media and see every single detail of everybody’s life, including people that I don’t really have a relationship with,” she said. “It feels almost like intimacy overload.” She added: “I’m holding a lot in my work life for people and sometimes it felt like it was too heavy to do in my personal life also.”
But Beausoleil does love the way social media connects the world in a truly unique way, citing it as one of her only reasons for staying on Facebook for as long as she did. “One thing I really liked about Facebook was that I could sit for hours and click on a friend and then click on one of their friends and one of their friends and one of their friends and literally end up on someone’s Facebook page from the other side of the world,” she said. “I used to do that all the time.”
“One day, I realized I’m spending so much time doing this. These little seconds add up. I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t spend these seconds here and spent them doing something else. What if I was doing other things with these seconds? What would they become? Would I enjoy it?”
Mathias, who works for the Baltimore City government, had Facebook and Twitter accounts for years before deleting them both in November 2012. But he “quickly forgot that Facebook existed” after his impromptu decision to end his social media presence. He can still appreciate the benefits that come with having social media accounts, like when he met his girlfriend’s friends for the first time and realized “humanizing 20 people you’re meeting at a party” is much easier if you can connect their faces, hometowns and jobs to a photo later on. Or how easy it is to organize large events online. Mathias relies on friends for party invites and is sure there are times he “slips through the cracks”.
But, now, he relishes the time that’s freed up. He spends his lift rides and spare moments at work reading news articles and books rather than scrolling through a newsfeed. And with no friends’ accounts to follow online, he has to “pick up the phone and call them”, something he’s come to “definitely enjoy”.
Lauren Raskauskas, 22, Naples, Florida Raskauskas describes herself as a “pretty private” person. So social media, which can open you up to the scrutiny and analysis of others, is not that appealing to her. “I’m more privacy-minded and have concerns about giving out my data,” said Raskauskas, who is currently looking for a job.
She recently deleted her Twitter account and deactivated her Facebook account two years ago after realizing she “didn’t like everyone knowing what I was doing”. But Raskauskas, who was late to the Facebook game because her “parents were really strict with technology”, can see the positive sides of social media. When a friend of hers that she’d lost track of moved to Naples for a month, Raskauskas didn’t even realize she was there until after she’d left, which the 22-year-old said “was a bummer”.
But in the end, her privacy concerns outweighed any benefits social media could provide and she saw a definite upside when she went through a recent break-up. The last time a relationship of hers ended and she was online, it was not pleasant.
“One time, I did break up with somebody while I was on Facebook and I was like ’Oh my gosh, should I change my profile photo? Should I change my status?’ And, this time, I don’t have to worry about any of that because that kind of stuff is pretty hard,” she said.
Rajagopalan, a student at Boston College, doesn’t see any drawbacks to abstaining from social media.
He claims that he “hasn’t seen any effect at this point”. Even though classmates post about parties and events on Facebook, they make sure to send him a text message, too, he said. “Since I was young, I was always a step behind on that kind of thing so it never really mattered to me,” he said.
In fact, the only time Rajagopalan made use of social media was when it was unavoidable: it was the only way to reach his new roommate at college. Before starting his first year at college, he signed up for his first, and only, social media account. He joined Facebook in order to contact his future roommate and talk about their plans for that year.
Months later, he still has the account but he admits: “I don’t use it. I don’t check it or anything like that.” The most activity it sees is when his two sisters tag him in family photos. He has avoided social media accounts in all other situations, though he has felt the draw of Twitter. As a sports fan, he acknowledged that “it’s where most of the news breaks out”. But he refused to get an account, stating: “I don’t really need one to read tweets”.


Anitta, a music star from Brazil, has millions of fans, but she is at the centre of a debate about skin colour.
Some people are saying that Anitta had to give up her black skin to be a success in the mostly white middle-class market.
The debate was started by photographs that show that Anitta’s skin has got much lighter since she signed a music deal with Warner.
In the first photo, before she was famous, she looked darker. In the second photo – a marketing photo after she became famous – she seems lighter. The difference has started a discussion about whether you need to have light skin to be a success in Brazil.
Born Larissa de Macedo Machado, the diva-to-be was a church chorister in her childhood. In her teens, she made a name for herself in Rio de Janeiro’s baile funk scene as a dancer and singer.
She now has an album and a huge hit single, Show das Poderosas, which was number one in the charts and attracted 52 million YouTube views.
Many people love her because she is a pop idol with a strong message and some good pop songs. Her marketing team want people to see her as a cultural bridge between the poor people living in the mostly black and mixed-race shanty towns on Rio’s hills and the richer and whiter parts below.
But now people are asking if she – or her marketing team – have gone too far and changed her too much.
This is a sensitive topic in this mixed-raced country. Brazil has the largest population of African descent outside Africa, but race and where your family come from are less important there than colour. There is a clear link between skin colour and inequality.
In Brazilian cities, white workers earn twice as much as workers of African descent. Up until 2011, black or mixed-race students also spent two years less at school on average.
Most business and government executives are white, but black and mixed-race workers do most of the boring or dirty jobs.
Brazil did a census in 2010. Among the 197 million population, 82 million said they were “pardu” (mixed race), 15 million black, two million Asian and 0.5% indigenous.
Maycon de Mattos Batista, a financial analyst who used to work with Anitta, said there has been a huge change in Anitta’s image, but not of her colour.
“I don’t believe she is whiter; it’s more the makeup, hairstylists and the way she dresses,” he said. “I don’t think that was because of pressure they put on her. She always liked to show off, sing and dance. That was a natural thing for her. I believe that it is because of this naturalness that she has become a success.”


Intermediate
The Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, will retire at the end of the season after 27 years as the most successful manager in British football. He will become a director of the club and someone will have to replace a man who has won 13 English Premier League titles, two Champions Leagues, the Cup Winners Cup, five FA Cups and four League Cups.
Talking about his decision, Ferguson said: The decision to retire is one that I have thought a great deal about. It is the right time. It was important to me to leave an organization in the strongest possible condition and I believe I have done so. The quality of this squad, and the balance of ages within it, bodes well for continued success at the highest level. The structure of the youth set-up will ensure that the long-term future of the club remains a bright one.
Our training facilities are amongst the best in world sport and our home, Old Trafford, is regarded as one of the leading venues in the world. I am delighted to take on the roles of both director and ambassador for the club. With these activities, along with my many other interests, I am looking forward to the future. I must pay tribute to my family; their love and support has been essential.
As for my players and staff, past and present, I would like to thank them all for a staggering level of professional conduct and dedication that has helped to deliver so many memorable triumphs. Without their contribution, the history of this great club would not be as rich. In my early years, the support of the board of directors gave me the confidence and time to build a football club, not just a football team.
Over the past ten years, the Glazer family have made it possible for me to manage Manchester United to the best of my ability and I have been extremely fortunate to have worked with a talented and trustworthy chief executive, David Gill. I am truly grateful to all of them. To the fans, thank you. It has been an honour and an enormous privilege to have had the opportunity to lead your club and I have treasured my time as manager of Manchester United.
The suddenness of Fergusons departure is exactly how he said he would leave the job. He first mentioned the possibility of retiring during the 2001/2 season but then performed a U-turn. It is understood that he gathered the players in the first-team changing room shortly after they arrived for training. In an emotional speech, he announced he was retiring.
Joel Glazer, joint owner of Manchester United, said: Alex has proven time and time again what a fantastic manager he is but hes also a wonderful person. His determination to succeed and dedication to the club have been truly remarkable. I will never forget the wonderful memories he has given us, like that magical night in Moscow.
Avie Glazer, his brother, said: I am delighted to announce that Alex has agreed to stay with the club as a director. His contributions to Manchester United over the last 27 years have been extraordinary and, like all United fans, I want him to be a part of its future.
David Gill added: Ive had the tremendous pleasure of working very closely with Alex for 16 unforgettable years  we have had countless wins and numerous signings. We knew that his retirement would come one day and we both have been planning for it by ensuring the quality of the team and club structures are in first-class condition. Alexs vision, energy and ability have built teams that are among the best and most loyal in world sport.
The way he cares for this club, his staff and for the football family in general is something that I admire. What he has done for this club and for the game in general will never be forgotten. It has been the greatest experience of my working life being with Alex and a great honour to be able to call him a friend.
First-team coach Ren Meulensteen revealed how Ferguson broke the news to his backroom staff. I found out this morning when I came to the club, he said. He called us into his office and told us his decision. Hes obviously a man who thinks very, very hard so Im sure hes put a lot of thought into making this decision. I wish him well. Hes been fantastic for this club and I hope all the fans give the new manager the same support that he gets.


Do you want your child to be good at sport, play for the school team and, maybe one day, even be in international competitions? Well, try to make sure that your child is born in November or October. A study by a top expert on children’s physical activity has found that schoolchildren born in November or October are fitter than everyone else in their class.
Children born in November or October were fitter, stronger and more powerful than children born in the other ten months of the year. They are especially fitter, stronger and more powerful than children with birthdays in April or June. Dr Gavin Sandercock of Essex University and his colleagues found that children born in the autumn had “a clear physical advantage” over their classmates.
The research involved 8,550 boys and girls aged between ten and 16 from 26 state schools in Essex. All were tested between 2007 and 2010 on three different things: stamina, handgrip strength and lower-body power. The results showed that a child’s month of birth could make big differences to their levels of fitness, muscle strength and ability to accelerate, all of which predict how good someone is at sport.
November children were the fittest because they had the most stamina and power and were the second strongest. Children born in October were almost as fit – they scored highest for strength and came third for power, with December children close behind.
The gap in physical ability between children in the same class but born in different months was sometimes very wide. “For example, we found that a boy born in November can run at least 10% faster, jump 12% higher and is 15% more powerful than a child of the same age born in April. This is a huge physical advantage,” said Sandercock. These gaps could decide who became a top-level athlete because “selection into elite sports may often depend on very small differences in a person ’s physical performance ”.
The study found that, when scores for the three kinds of fitness were put together, children born in April were the least fit, followed by children born in June. The findings seem to show that children born in the early months of the school year enjoy a double “autumn advantage” – we already know that they have an academic advantage and, now, they also seem to be better at sport, too.
The authors of the study believe that the most likely explanation is that children born in autumn get more vitamin D over the summer months towards the end of pregnancy. John Steele, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust, said the quality of a young person ’s introduction to sport at school can be “a major factor” in their sporting development. “Children that get a high-quality first experience will have greater agility, balance and coordination, and are more likely to develop an enjoyment of physical activity and be good at sport as they grow up”, he said.
UK Sport could not say if a majority of the 1,300 athletes it gives money to were born in November and October. Natalie Dunman, its head of performance, said that the differences shown in the new study were true for teenagers in junior-level competitions, but that the differences disappear before sportspeople were in adult competitions. She said: “With adult athletes, there are many factors that make a champion and we don’t think that month of birth is one of the key ingredients.”


The forests – and suburbs – of Europe are echoing with the growls, howls and silent padding of large predators, according to a new study that shows that brown bears, wolves and lynx are thriving on a crowded continent. Despite fears that large carnivores are doomed to extinction because of rising human populations and overconsumption, a study published in Science has found that large-predator populations are stable or rising in Europe.
Brown bears, wolves, the Eurasian lynx and wolverines are found in nearly one-third of mainland Europe (excluding Belarus, Ukraine and Russia), with most individuals living outside nature reserves, indicating that changing attitudes and landscape-scale conservation measures are successfully protecting species that have suffered massive persecution throughout human history.
Bears are the most abundant large carnivore in Europe, with around 17,000 individuals, alongside 12,000 wolves, 9,000 Eurasian lynx and 1,250 wolverines, which are restricted to northern parts of Scandinavia and Finland. Only Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in mainland Europe – like Britain – have no breeding populations of at least one large carnivore species. But the paper’s lead author and other conservationists said these animals’ surprising distribution across well-populated regions of Europe showed that even the British countryside could support big predators.
Guillaume Chapron from Sweden’s University of Agricultural Sciences and researchers across Europe found wolves, in some cases, living in suburban areas alongside up to 3,050 people per square kilometre – higher than the population density of Cambridge or Newcastle. On average in Europe, wolves live on land with a population density of 37 people per sq km, lynx in areas with a population density of 21 people per sq km and bears among 19 people per sq km. The population density of the Scottish Highlands is nine people per sq km.
“In order to have wolves, we don’t need to remove people from the landscape,” said Chapron. According to Chapron and his colleagues, the big-carnivore revival shows the success of a “land-sharing” model of conservation – in stark contrast to keeping predators and people apart by fencing off “wilderness” areas, as occurs in North America and Africa.
“I’m not saying it’s a peace-and-love story – coexistence often means conflict – but it’s important to manage that conflict, keep it at a low level and resolve the problems it causes. Wolves can be difficult neighbours,” said Chapron. “We shouldn’t be talking about people-predator conflict; we have conflict between people about predators. These animals are symbolic of difficult questions about how we should use the land.”
According to the researchers, this “land-sharing” approach could be applied elsewhere in the world. The reasons for its success in Europe include political stability, burgeoning populations of prey species such as wild deer and financial support for non-lethal livestock protection such as electric fences, which mean that farmers do not resort to shooting wild predators. Most crucial, said Chapron, has been the EU Habitats Directive, which has compelled member states to protect and revive rare species.
“Without the Habitats Directive, I don’t think we would have had this recovery,” he said. “It shows, if people are willing to protect nature and if political will is translated into strong legislation like the Habitats Directive, it’s possible to achieve results in wildlife protection.” The revival was welcomed by author and commentator George Monbiot, who is launching Rewilding Britain, a new charity to encourage the return of wild landscape and extinct species.
“It is great to see the upward trend continuing but Britain is completely anomalous – we’ve lost more of our large mammals than any country except for Ireland,” he said. “Apart from the accidental reintroduction of boar, we’ve done almost nothing, whereas, in much of the rest of Europe, we’ve got bears, lynx and wolves coming back. It’s a massive turnaround from the centuries of persecution.”
The survey found the Eurasian lynx living permanently in 11 population groups across 23 European countries, of which only five were native populations, indicating the success of reintroduction efforts. According to Monbiot, momentum is building for the reintroduction of the lynx into the Cairngorms in Scotland.
“If it works in the rest of Europe, there’s absolutely no reason why it can’t work in the UK,” he said, pointing out that bears and wolves are found within an hour of Rome. “There’s no demographic reason why we can’t have a similar return of wildlife in the UK.”


Intermediate
There comes a time in some mens lives when the days seem darker, death more certain, and the only sensible response is to blow the life savings on a sportscar.
Radical and often ill-advised changes in lifestyle are typical for the midlife crisis but, if it is more than a myth, then humans may not be the only animals to experience it.
Now an international team of scientists claims it has found evidence for a slump in well-being among middle-aged chimpanzees and orangutans. The lull in happiness in the middle years, they say, is the ape equivalent of the midlife crisis.
The findings of the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the midlife crisis may have its roots in the biology humans share with our closest evolutionary cousins.
Theres a common understanding that theres a dip in well-being in middle age, Alex Weiss, a psychologist at Edinburgh University, told the Guardian.
He said that they took a step back and asked whether its possible that the midlife crisis is not just something human.
The team from the US, Japan, Germany and the UK asked zookeepers and others who worked with male and female apes of various ages to complete questionnaires on the animals.
The forms included questions about each apes mood, the enjoyment they got from socializing, and their success at achieving certain goals. The final question asked how zookeepers would feel about being the ape for a week. They scored their answers from one to seven.
More than 500 apes were included in the study in three separate groups. The first two groups were chimpanzees, with the third made up of orangutans from Sumatra or Borneo. The animals came from zoos, sanctuaries and research centres in the US, Australia, Japan, Canada and Singapore.
When the researchers analyzed the questionnaires, they found that well-being in the apes fell in middle age and climbed again as the animals moved into old age. In captivity, great apes often live to 50 or more. The animals well-being was at its lowest, on average, at 28.3 and 27.2 years old for the chimpanzees, and 35.4 years old for the orangutans.
In all three groups we find evidence that well-being is lowest in chimpanzees and orangutans at an age that corresponds more or less to midlife in humans, Weiss said. On average, well-being scores are lowest when animals are around 30 years old.
Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, was sceptical about the findings. What can produce a sense of well-being that varies across their lifetimes like this? Its hard to see anything in an apes life that would have that sort of pattern. Theyre not particularly good at seeing far ahead into the future; thats one of the big differences between them and us.
Alexandra Freund, Professor of Psychology at the University of Zurich, was also sceptical. She said, In my opinion, there is no evidence for the midlife crisis.
But Weiss believes the findings could point to a deeper understanding of the emotional crisis some men may experience. If we want to find the answer to the question of whats going on with the midlife crisis, we should look at what is similar in middle-aged humans, chimps and orangutans, he said.


Intermediate
To a traditional navigator like Tua Pittman from Raratonga in the Cook Islands, a canoe is much more than just a means of transport. The canoe is our island, the crew members are the community and the navigator is the leader, Pittman says. He continues, On a canoe, you are not just going from one destination to another using the stars, the moon, the sun and the birds. Navigation is using the philosophies of being a leader to show your crew members the light of life.
It has been a busy week for the crews of four sailing canoes since arriving in Sydney for the start of the World Parks Congress. Tuas journey began at the Cook Islands on 25 September. The islanders sailed to Samoa, then Fiji, Vanuatu and onto the Gold Coast, before sailing south to Sydney. Around 100 crew members were involved in the voyage and they aimed to travel using only traditional navigation techniques. Unfortunately, said Tua, the crews had to rely on modern navigation equipment at times to reach Australia in time for the Congress.
The of cial title of the expedition is the Mua Voyage. It is a partnership between the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Oceania Regional Of ce and  ve Paci c Island countries: Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Fiji. The main goal of the 6,000-nautical-mile (11,000km) trip was to deliver a special message to the World Parks Congress.
The message said: We see the signs of overexploitation. We no longer see the  sh and other marine creatures in the size, diversity or abundance of the past. We witness the change as foreign  shing  eets take our resources. Our coral reefs, the greatest in the world and our spawning grounds are disappearing. Our ocean is vast but not limitless. Growing global populations and unsustainable development are reducing the ability of our ocean to sustain life.
The Paci c Islanders have put a lot of effort into their urgent message to the delegates of the Congress. But, despite this, the Congress has spent much of its time trying to set a revised target for the amount of the ocean that needs to be protected in marine sanctuaries. According to the IUCN, in 2013, the amount of the worlds oceans in marine protected areas was not even three per cent and less than one per cent of that is no take (no  shing). This was despite a target of 20-30% no-take areas set by the last World Parks Congress in 2003.
Marine scientist Professor Callum Roberts was one of the scientists who helped set the 20-30% target in 2003. But he said it was not enough. The IUCN should now lift its target from 30 to 33%. New research shows that we need to raise the 30% target. Any reduction in efforts at this stage and moment in history would be disastrous for our oceans.
After dif cult negotiations, the World Parks Congress delegates passed a motion that will dramatically change the goals for global marine management. Instead of the 20-30% target, the IUCN now says that each marine habitat should include strictly protected areas of at least 30%. These areas should address both biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Tua Pittman was delighted with the news that a strong resolution on the planets oceans had passed the Congress. Its a huge reward for all the effort that we made to be here and to be heard. To hear they made that resolution is fantastic. Its a step in the right direction.
He said he was 55 and, in his lifetime, he was already beginning to see that it was much harder to catch  sh on the open ocean. He also said that pollution was getting worse, particularly as the canoes approached big cities such as Sydney. And climate change is already beginning to have a serious effect on Paci c Islanders. The decisions of the big countries impact on the small countries twice, three times, four times more than they impact on developed, large nations.
The Mua Voyage had been a massive logistical undertaking, said Tua. Years of preparation and navigational planning went into such a trip and it was critical to the voyagers that the world listened to their message and acted. He said that the leaders of wealthy countries need to start to think more like traditional navigators who recognize that their boats are just specks in an enormous sea. Most importantly, and spoken like a true navigator, Tua says politicians must seek a different route. The world needs to  nd a different path.


Astronaut Scott Kelly has just spent 340 days in space. He says that Himalayan lakes, spacewalks and the US presidential campaign helped him to stay sane during his mission. It was the longest mission ever. “It seemed like I lived there forever,” Kelly said. He had been on several missions before but said that his biggest surprise was how long this mission felt. “Maybe, sometimes, you go bananas, ” he said.
Kelly and a Russian astronaut, Mikhail Kornienko, spent nearly a year on the International Space Station (ISS). They studied the effects on humans of weightlessness, radiation and the cramped conditions of spaceflight. This is research that NASA thinks is very important for a future mission to Mars.
Kelly said the length of the mission was the most difficult thing. He felt more pain after he returned to gravity than after shorter trips. Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, have spent the last year taking physical and mental tests. The tests will continue, to help NASA learn about what happens to the human body during spaceflight. Kelly described the sense of wonder he felt after he landed back on Earth. When the Russian capsule opened, he felt the cool air of Kazakhstan and smelled “a smell like a plant was blooming in that area”. It was the fresh air mixed with the burnt, “sweet” smell of a spacecraft that had just re- entered through the Earth’s atmosphere.
When he left the spacecraft, he said, he began to understand the importance of the mission: 340 days on a 15-year-old space station which is “a million pounds, the size of a football field, with the space, some say, of a six-bedroom house”. The ISS, he said, is a place that uses the power of the sun and an international team helped to build it. “The view is great, too,” he said.
Kelly posted amazing photos on social media of the Earth ’s cities, countryside, oceans and atmosphere. “The Earth is a beautiful planet,” he said. He described the beautiful waters around the Bahamas and the rainbow colours of the lakes of the northern Himalayas. But “the main thing you notice is how thin the atmosphere is,” Kelly said. “It is scary to see the thin atmosphere, together with large areas of pollution.”
He said he could see large areas of pollution: smoke clouds from wildfires cover parts of the US, parts of Asia have pollution nearly all year. He said the message “we need to save the planet” was slightly wrong: “The planet will get better; it’s us that won’t be here because we’ll destroy the environment.” “We must take care of the air we breathe and the water we drink. And I believe we do have a big effect on that and we have the ability to change it, if we want to.” Kelly was very active on social media so many people follow him online. But he said he didn’t know about it – instead, he watched the news and especially the 2016 US presidential campaign. The news helped keep him sane, he said, and also work: “I looked forward to the next event – for example, the next spacewalk, the next science experiment. That made a difference to me.” Being back on Earth with everyone still felt strange, he said.
Kelly said that he would probably not fly again with NASA. “But I don’t think I would ever say I’m absolutely, 100% finished,” he said. Maybe he will fly with private spaceflight companies, which are becoming more and more popular. “They might need a guy like me someday,” he said. “Maybe, in the next 20 years, you’ll be able to buy a cheap ticket, just go for a little visit.”


Intermediate
McDonalds is the worlds biggest burger chain and a global emblem of American consumer capitalism. But, these days, the golden arches of McDonalds are looking a little tarnished. After a decade of expansion, customers around the world dont seem to be lovin it any more. McDonalds has revealed that worldwide sales dropped by 3.3% from 2013. The set of results were described as awful.
The company has problems almost everywhere. In China, sales fell by 23% because local media showed workers at a local supplier claiming to use out-of-date beef and chicken in McDonalds and KFC products. In Europe, sales are down by 4%, mostly because of problems in Ukraine and the anti-western mood in Russia. Around 200 of McDonalds 450 restaurants in Russia are being investigated by health inspectors and ten have been closed.
But it is in the US, where McDonalds has around 40% of its restaurants, where the crisis is deepest. Almost 60 years since Ray Kroc opened his  rst restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, consumers are losing their appetite for a Big Mac and fries.
McDonalds has seen 12 straight months of falling sales in its massive home market, with sales down 4.1% in the latest quarter. Younger diners are deserting the restaurant in droves to eat out at rivals such as Chipotle Mexican Grill. The number of 19-to-21-year-olds visiting McDonalds once a month has fallen by 13% since 2011.
To add to the companys problems, McDonalds hamburgers were recently named the worst in America in a poll of more than 32,000 American diners, who said they would rather eat a burger at Five Guys, Smashburger or Fuddruckers. McDonalds is also widely perceived as less healthy than most of its rivals, especially Chipotle, with its antibiotic-free meat and locally sourced, seasonal produce  although local can mean 350 miles away.
The depth of consumer mistrust of McDonalds was exposed by a consumer outreach exercise the company launched in the US in October. Have you ever used pink slime in your burgers? was one question on the Our Food Your Questions website  this refers to the controversial beef  ller used for dog food that is sprayed with ammonia to make it  t for human consumption. McDonalds has not used the meat product since 2012 but Chief Executive Don Thompson acknowledged the company had a job to do in addressing misconceptions about the freshness and quality of its ingredients.
Yet, just as McDonalds has been losing the customers who will pay a bit more for food they think is fresher and healthier, it has also lost its edge in fast-food essentials: speedy service at low prices. Ever since it introduced $2 items on its dollar menu, it has gained a reputation for being more expensive than its rivals, while many consumers complain that service is slower.
The expensive tag was unjusti ed, said Mary Chapman at food analysts Technomic. Prices have indeed gone up but they havent gone up as quickly as the rest of the fast-service chains in the US. Prices at McDonalds have increased by 4.8% since 2009, well below the fast-food average (up 19.4%), and the cost of fast casual eating, a category that includes Chipotle, is up 16.9%. US consumer prices rose 11% over the same period.
But critics are not wrong about the longer queues. McDonalds has a bigger menu than some, with more complicated items  its chicken McWrap takes 60 seconds to make. I think it is worth waiting but the guy behind me who wants his double cheeseburger for a dollar might not, said Chapman.
In the UK, McDonalds has turned around its business, which makes Britain a rare bright spot for the company. A competitive breakfast menu, improved coffee and free wi-  have given McDonalds a broad appeal in the UK, said consultant Peter Martin, adding that 56% of British adults have visited a McDonalds restaurant at least once in the last six months.
Executives are promising to fight misconceptions about its food in its home market. Thompson has promised more organic food and custom-made burgers but, to cut down queues, he also wants to introduce simpler menus. Analysts are not sure how the company can solve the problem of simpler menus and greater choice over  filings.
They want to simplify the menu but enhance its ability to customize and that sounds tricky, said Mark Kalinowski at Janney Capital Markets. Only four out of McDonalds 14,000 US restaurants had so far tested build your own burger, he said. Right now, we are sceptical; we would like to see more detail.
Meanwhile, despite the declining sales, the chain continues to expand globally: by the end of 2014, it expects to have 1,400 new restaurants. Kalinowski expects McDonalds market share will continue to shrink but he, too, warned against writing off the company. We think it will be number one for not just years but decades to come.


The view from the visitors’ centre at the southern edge of Doñana National Park in southern Spain is striking, to say the least. This is an ornithologist’s dream: 200,000 hectares of salt marsh of unrivalled importance to the birdlife of western Europe. Dozens of Britain’s most loved migratory birds, including house martins, swallows, cuckoos and warblers, rest here on their annual migrations from Africa. Doñana, a UN World Heritage Site, is also home to some of Europe’s rarest birds, including the Spanish imperial eagle, while its mammalian inhabitants include the highly endangered Iberian lynx.
It is a glorious, vibrant landscape. Yet it exists on a knife-edge, a point illustrated dramatically in 1998 when almost two billion gallons of contaminated, highly acidic water, mixed with waste metals, poured into the park from a dam that had burst its bank at Los Frailes mine 45km to the north. A toxic tsunami of waste poured down the Guadiamar river and over its banks, leaving a thick metallic crust over a vast stretch of parkland. More than 25,000 kilos of dead fish were collected in the aftermath and nearly 2,000 adult birds, chicks, eggs and nests were killed or destroyed.
It was Spain’s worst environmental disaster and the clean-up cost €90m. Suddenly aware of Doñana’s status as the nation’s most important natural site, Spain decided to spend a further €360m, some of it EU money, on restoring the landscape, which, in the 1950s and 60s, had been drained in places to create rice and cotton fields. Some of this farmland is now being returned to its original wetland state.
It has been a costly but encouraging process. Yet the fate of Doñana still hangs in the balance thanks to the increasing pressures of modern life. Plans have been outlined to build an oil pipeline through Doñana, while other developers have announced proposals to expand local tourist resorts whose new hotels and golf courses would demand water supplies that would further erode the local table. Silt washed from nearby farms is also choking the channels that criss-cross Doñana.
However, the real body blow for conservationists has been the recent decision of the Andalucían government to reopen the Frailes mine that so very nearly destroyed Doñana in 1998. “This is Europe’s most precious bird sanctuary, both in terms of indigenous species and also as a resting place for birds that migrate between Africa and Britain and other parts of north-west Europe,” says Laurence Rose of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). “Doñana already faces a great number of threats, but now they want to bring back the very cause of its near-undoing 16 years ago. It is extremely worrying.”
Having spent so much restoring Doñana to its past glories, it might seem strange that the local government should choose to announce that it wants mining companies to tender bids to rework Los Frailes. However, a brief examination of the state of the local economy provides an explanation. The crash of Spain’s banks in 2008 hit the region catastrophically and unemployment in some parts of Andalucía is now more than 30%. Reopening the mine would provide more than 1,000 precious jobs.
“There are riches here, riches that are badly needed by local inhabitants,” said Vicente Fernández Guerrero, secretary-general of Innovation, Industry and Energy for Andalucía. “We think mining is a good way to make it possible to allow local people to continue to live in the area. This is a mining area. People have been digging metals and ores here since Roman times, after all.”
More to the point, added Fernández, the mine licence would stipulate that only modern mining techniques, which avoid the creation of poisonous wet waste, would be allowed. (It has also stipulated that the Canadian company that ran Los Frailes cannot bid for the contract. Sixteen years after the accident, the two sides remained locked over compensation claims.) “The best technology in the world will be used here,” Fernández insisted. “Liquid will not be used. We are going to insist on that. Our tender makes that clear.”
The proposal has some support in the area, but it also has a lot of opposition. One road sign I passed was liberally daubed with obscenities about the workers’ union UGT, which supports the mine’s reopening. For his part, Carlos Dávila, who works for the Spanish Ornithological Society in Doñana, was also alarmed at the proposal. “This is a very, very bad idea indeed,” he told me. “They say the new mine will be safe, but they said it was safe in 1998 and look what happened. We got the worst ecological disaster in the history of Spain.”
What alarms people such as Dávila is the threat that a new mine poses to the intense investment in eco-tourism that has been made in Doñana in recent years. An example is provided at the restaurant Dehesa de Abajo, where you can have a drink or a meal surrounded by trees in which storks and black kites are nesting.
Virtually every visitor was equipped with a camera and telescopic lens or a pair of binoculars. There is a clear tourist trade to be made from the birdlife of Doñana. Nor should this be surprising, for this is a truly special place. A vast hemisphere of sky hangs over this utterly flat but certainly not featureless landscape. Birds of every shape and size fill the air and sometimes the road. At one point on my visit, a stork calmly stood in front of our car until it felt ready to fly off.
“The trouble is that Spain does not have the public resources it possessed 16 years ago. A repeat of the toxin spill today would have a much, much more damaging impact,” said Rose. This point is backed by Dávila. “After the disaster, Spain woke up to the fact that it possessed a place of real ecological importance and did a lot to clean it up and protect it,” he added. “Now, we seem to be forgetting that lesson. It is very depressing.”


Intermediate
Apart from volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, there are two key things that can make a city disintegrate or even totally disappear  water and sand.
A century ago, Venice  one of the most beautiful and low-lying cities in the world  used to  ood around ten times a year. Nowadays, its lowest point, Piazza San Marco (only three feet above sea level) is inundated with water approximately 100 times a year.
But rising sea levels are not the only cause. In many parts of the world, the land is also sinking. In Venice, subsoil compaction (a result of industrial exploitation of the surrounding area) lowered the city by 20cm between 1950 and 1970. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is also sinking by about 2cm a year  but thats nothing compared to Jakarta, which is dropping 10 to 20cm each year. In the past three decades, the city has sunk roughly four metres.
Unfortunately for the Indonesian capital, it has pumped out so much groundwater to support its population that the land above is drying out and compacting  this has created a bowl. Rivers that used to  ow through the city down to the sea have had to be diverted because they cannot drain uphill.
While there are many plans to save Venice  and Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are taking the problem seriously  the same cannot be said for Miami, where politicians refuse to admit the city has a serious environmental problem.
There are three problems in Miami. It is less than ten feet above sea level; an increasing number of tropical storms are inundating the city; and it is built on porous rock, which is absorbing the rising seawater. This water then  lls the citys foundations and comes up through drains and pipes, forcing sewage upwards and polluting its fresh water. It is possible that Miami may one day become uninhabitable.
In the Maldives, the populations of whole islands are now considering abandoning their homes. The capital, Male_, population 153,379 and only four feet above sea level, has built a ten-foot sea wall at a cost of $63 million  but, long term, only a stabilization of rising sea levels will save it and the rest of the islands.
In Africa, deserti cation is causing the Sahara to spread south at a rate of 30 miles per year, threatening settlements in northern Mauritania. Over the past 20 years, for example, the desert has grown by more than 260 acres around the trading and religious centre of Chinguetti, where the population has declined from 20,000 people in the mid-twentieth century to just a few thousand now. Trading has almost completely stopped as sand piles up in the streets.
Likewise, the Californian resort of Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, may have to be abandoned in the next decade. This city is just one example of a problem caused not so much by global warming as human over-expansion. Californias dream of farming the desert made sense while its total population remained around half a million (in 1870)  but now the state is home to 38 million people, who own 32 million vehicles.
The daily water use in Rancho Mirage is more than 200 gallons per person, which is causing a man-made drought. A 25% cut in water use has been implemented but this is unlikely to stabilize the resort, which is surrounded by sand and dust. The long-term answer in Californias desert is likely to be the abandonment of some cities.
Fire is a growing threat to urban settlements in America  in fact, forest  res cause the most damage after severe storms, with 800 major  re disasters there between 1953 and 2014. A new report by the USDA Forest Service maps the increasing number of urban locations that are particularly vulnerable to wild re.
Similarly in Australia, some of Victorias resorts and several Melbourne suburbs have been placed on a list of the states 52 most vulnerable bush re spots because long-term droughts are making trees highly combustible. Its unlikely that a forest  re will ever destroy an entire city but a succession of  res could make it uninhabitable.
Many cities are  ghting a losing battle against nature but is it possible to identify the worlds most vulnerable city? Natural events are very dif cult to predict  but Males future looks particularly bad because, even if its new sea wall continues to be effective, the islands around the Maldives capital are going to disappear before too long. And, if they disappear, Males raison detre disappears, too.


Two scientists at Stanford University, in the USA, used metadata on people’s telephone calls and texts to find out people’s names, where they lived and the names of their partners. The metadata told them what number people called, when and for how long but it didn’t tell them what people said.
But, that was not all. With the same metadata, they could find out private information about some people. They discovered that one man had a gun and that another man had a heart problem. Other data told them that someone was having a baby and someone had a serious illness.
The results show the extraordinary power of telephone metadata. It is particularly powerful when you use it together with information from Google, Yelp and Facebook.
Then, the scientists used a simple computer program to analyse people’s calls and this helped them to see who was in a relationship. Once they knew the owner of a particular phone number had a partner, it was easy to find out who the partner was, they said.
For the final part of the study, the researchers looked even deeper to see what private information they could get from telephone metadata. They collected details on calls made to and from places such as hospitals, pharmacies, religious groups, legal services and gun shops. From these, they produced interesting pictures of people’s lives.
Mutchler said the study showed how easy it is to find out private information about people. He says that the results should make governments think twice before they record this information. “Metadata programmes, like the NSA’s, will show very private information about ordinary people,” the scientists said.
Stewart Baker, who worked at the US National Security Agency (NSA), said “Metadata tells you everything about somebody’s life.”
Patrick Mutchler, a researcher at Stanford, said that people who collect the information understand the power of metadata but that the public was in the dark.
For the study, 823 people agreed for researchers to collect metadata from their phones using an app. The app also received information from their Facebook pages, which the scientists used to check their results. The scientists collected metadata on more than 250,000 calls and over 1.2 million texts.
With very little money, Mutchler and Jonathan Mayer found out a lot of personal information about the people in the study. Some of the information was private. They found out 82% of people’s names. The same method gave them the names of businesses the people called. When they marked these on a map, they showed groups of local businesses, which the scientists guessed were near the person’s home address. In this way, they named the city people lived in 57% of the time and were nearly 90% correct in guessing, within 50 miles, where people lived.


Introduction
Did you know that, in the UK, there is no legal requirement for restaurants to pass on tips to staff? It’s a fact that’s covered in a government-led review, released in May 2016, in which workers, employers and customers were asked their views on the tipping process. Off the back of it, ministers said they were keen to change rules and make sure low-paid workers get the money left for them by grateful customers. The government have announced a two-month consultation on proposals that they said would stamp out unfairness.
Among the review’s revelations was the fact that some waiters are charged up to a 15% administration fee on tips they are left by credit or debit cards. In some restaurants, the government has seen evidence of waiters being forced to hand over their own cash, if they don’t collect enough tips, to cover these fees. The government said it would consider prohibiting employers from charging workers an admin fee or any other deductions.
The government also said that it wanted customers to know that tips are voluntary, calling for the system to be made more transparent, with restaurants clearly displaying their tips policy.
We asked waiters around the UK what they think of the tipping process (including how much they take home from tips and whether it’s fair) and what would improve it for them.
1. Rodri, 37, London: 'Around 50% of a waiter’s income is tips'
Average tips: £60 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... the US Everything has got fairer since the tipping scandal was exposed in the summer of 2015. This is when it was revealed that dozens of restaurants were exposed for skimming tips from staff for administration fees. However, you still hear horror stories from new employees at some chains. I’ve heard of restaurants not paying their chefs a share of the tronc (a payment arrangement used to distribute tips). Some restaurants will take 4% of all sales to pay the chefs and as an admin fee. So, if you sell £1,000 worth of food, the company will take £40. This is regardless of how much you make in tips. This means that if a table has a £100 bill and doesn’t tip, the waiter has to pay £4 of their own money. This leads to a money-grabbing culture and, ironically, to bad service. If a table doesn’t tip, the waiter feels as if they are being robbed by the company and ends up resenting the customers.
I can average around £60 in tips per shift but, on a good night, this goes up to over £100 and, on a poor night, it’s around £40. Around 50% of a waiter’s income is tips. All restaurants should have to publicly state their exact tipping procedure. America has it pretty good – everyone tips.
2. Elle, 22, Edinburgh: 'We never know whether it’s fair'
Average tips: £20 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... France
I work three jobs, all on part-time zero-hours contracts, in catering and hospitality. My main day job is in a café where the small number of staff work both front of house and in the kitchen so all our tips get put in a pot and shared equally. My main evening job is at a restaurant where we don’t get our tips but our wages are minimum wage plus an extra £2.50 per hour (which apparently has been worked out to account for average tips when shared with the kitchen staff). My third job is events catering and nobody ever tips.
In restaurants, because a lot of customers add tips through card payments, the staff never actually see how much is getting tipped – so we don’t know whether we’re getting our fair share or not. The system seems better in France, where they don’t tip much but waiting tables is seen as a proper job, offering job security and a decent income.
3. Ashley, 22, London: 'Tips go towards customer breakages'
Average tips: £10-15 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Australia
I work in a south-east London pub in the evenings and I do day shifts at a local restaurant. In both places, tips are all collected and shared out at the end of the night. Money is also taken from the tip jar to cover breakages by either staff or customers. If a member of the team gets off early, they will rarely see their tips because they are shared out just before the pub closes.
It is incredibly unfair that our tips are shared out, especially when one member of the team underperforms. Equally, when a member of the team does incredibly well, they don’t get what they’ve earned. It’s really unfair that tips go towards breakages made by customers. The managers should have ways to pay for broken glasses and plates without docking our tips. I make around £20 a shift but would only be given £10-15 of that money. When I am tipped well, the tips hugely impact on my finances. Occasionally, I will earn over £50 in one night, which almost doubles my earnings for that day. However, I never get more than £30 of that money after it has been shared out. I really rely on tips because I am only paid £7 an hour.
I’d rather we earned a good basic wage (like in Australia) and therefore didn’t have to rely on tips to make ends meet.
4. Tom, Manchester: 'A big night of tips can help pay the rent'
Average tips: £40 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Italy
Where I used to work, floor staff kept 80% of cash tips and 40% of card tips. The other 20% of cash went into a pot for the commis waiters and service bar. The 60% went into a tronc system, which helped boost kitchen salaries. I’m not actually sure if this was to help pay the agreed salary or provide bonuses.
It’s hard to say how much I earned a shift; maybe around £40, £20 from card tips. It can make a massive change to your weekly finances. Sometimes, people needed a big night to be able to pay their rent.
They have got tipping right in Italy, where people don’t add a service charge but usually round up their bill so, if they get a meal for €19, they leave a €20 note and don’t ask for change. They respect the staff and you often see people making a career out of waiting and the experience shows.


In homes and cafes across the country, a cup of tea, baked beans on toast and fish and chips have long played a key role in the British dining experience. But, the extent of a change in tastes over the generations has been captured in a dataset published recently in the National Food Survey, which was set up in 1940 by the government after concerns about health and access to food.
Despite the apparent British love of tea, consumption has more than halved since the 1970s, falling from 68g of tea per person per week to only 25g. With a teabag or portion of loose tea weighing around 3g, that means Britons are drinking on average only eight cups of tea a week today, down from 23 cups in 1974. And, while tea remains the most drunk hot drink in the UK, households now spend more on coffee.
The data, published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as part of its “open data” scheme, is from 150,000 households who took part in the survey between 1974 and 2000, combined with information from 2000 to 2014. It shows some moves towards healthier diets in recent decades, with shifts to low-calorie soft drinks, from whole to skimmed milk and increasing consumption of fresh fruit. But, weekly consumption of chips, pizza, crisps and ready meals has soared.
There has also been a dramatic shift from white to brown, wholemeal and other bread but the figures suggest the amount people are eating has fallen from 25 to 15 slices a week over the past four decades, based on a 40g slice from a medium sliced loaf. The consumption of baked beans in sauce has dropped by a fifth despite a rise in other types of convenience food, particularly Italian dishes. Adults in the UK now eat an average of 75g of pizza every week compared with none in 1974, while the consumption of pasta has almost tripled over the same period.
Fresh potatoes are also becoming less essential with a 67% decrease from 1974, when adults ate the equivalent of 188g every day. Other vegetables such as cucumbers, courgettes, aubergines and mushrooms have gained space on the table. Consumption of takeaway food has almost doubled since 1974, from 80g per person per week to 150g. Around 33g of this amount is chips and 56g is meat, with kebabs (10g), chicken (7g), burgers (5g) and “meat-based meals” (32g) particularly popular.
Some trends suggest that British people are becoming more prudent in what they put on their plates, with the average consumption of fruit, both fresh and processed, increasing by 50% since 1974. In 2014, UK adults ate an average of 157g of fruit per day, equivalent to almost two portions of the five-a-day recommendation from the government. Bananas have been the most popular fruit in the UK since 1996, reaching 221g per adult per week in 2014, well above apples (131g) and oranges (48g). Low-calorie soft drinks represented half of all soft drinks consumed in 2014 for the first time.
Other social changes emerge from the survey, with questions about owning chickens and getting your own eggs being dropped in 1991 and a somewhat belated end in the same year to asking the “housewife” to fill out the questionnaire. Britons are spending a smaller proportion of pay on food today – 11%, compared with 24% in 1974.
The UK Environment Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, said: “Food is the heart and soul of our society and this data not only shows what we were eating 40 years ago but how a change in culture has led to a food revolution. Shoppers are more plugged in to where their food comes from than ever before, the internet has brought quality produce to our doorsteps at the click of a button, pop-up restaurants are showcasing the latest trends and exciting global cuisines are now as common as fish and chips.”
“By opening up this data, we can look beyond what, where or how previous generations were eating and pinpoint the moments that changed our habits for good. We’ve only scraped the surface of what the National Food Survey can tell us and, from local food maps and school projects to predicting new food trends, I look forward to seeing how this data can be used to learn more about our past and grow our world-leading food and farming industry in the future.”


Agios Efstratios is so remote, so forgotten by the banks, the government and most of the modern world that the mobile phone network can’t process data and there isn’t a single ATM or credit-card machine on the island. Before Greece was plunged into financial chaos, residents of this tranquil outpost in the northern Aegean managed quite well. They did their banking at the post office and the few dozen rooms to rent were booked out every summer with people who had heard – by word of mouth – of its spectacular empty beaches, clear seas and fresh seafood.
But, because the island still runs on cash, the closure of banks nationwide has been devastating. Residents have been forced to make nine-hour round trips to the nearest big island to get cash and Greek visitors say they can’t get together enough money to come. “Tourist numbers are down 80% this year,” said Mayor Maria Kakali, in an office in the village where she grew up, home to around 200 people. “Even people born here and living in Athens, who have their own places on the island, aren’t coming.”
Kakali has badgered the government and a major Greek bank into promising an ATM within weeks but she still feels it may come too late for this season on an island where tourism dwarfs the two other sources of income: fishing and agriculture: “We have almost no reservations in August, when usually we have people calling us up asking to find a room and we can’t help them.” A hard winter ahead may be slightly improved by 50 workers billeted in the village to expand the harbour but there is an even bigger crisis looming because the government has said it will end a decades-old tax break for islands.
Created to help island communities survive when they were suffering mass emigration, a lower sales tax contained the costs of living in places where everything had to be imported and made tourism more affordable. Tourist favourites such as Mykonos fear that losing the tax breaks will make it hard for them to compete with Turkey but, for Agios Efstratios, it poses a far greater threat. “If we have to pay a tax of 23%, I’m sorry to say it but we will all die on the island,” says Kakali.
Food and fuel are already more expensive than on the mainland, there are no economies of scale and little economic flexibility on an island which, even in summer, has only three shops, two restaurants and not a single official hotel. “This is an expensive island. Everything, even milk or bread, has changed hands three or four times before it gets to us and each middleman has to take a profit,” said Provatas Costas, a 58-year-old fisherman.
For Agios Efstratios and its closest large neighbour, Lemnos, the timing of the crisis is particularly cruel. They were condemned to relative obscurity for years in part because they are served by slow and unreliable ferries. In 2015, the government had finally given the contract to a new, efficient company, drawing floods of new visitors to explore the islands’ largely overlooked charms, before the bank controls hit.
“It started out as the best season in 30 years and, in one week, became the worst,” said Atzamis Konstantinos, a travel agent in Lemnos who used to earn €15,000 a month as a captain of petroleum tankers and other large ships but came home because he missed it so much. “I always loved this island, even when I was young. I would dock in Piraeus, the port in Athens, take my pay, then get the first boat over. People would say 'You’re crazy. You can go anywhere' but I only ever wanted to come here.”
Lemnos has dozens of wild beaches, where even at the height of summer you can swim and sunbathe virtually alone, a small nightlife scene and numerous cultural sites. It is the eighth largest island in Greece so is in line for the first round of tax increases in autumn 2015 but far less wealthy than many smaller ones. It has just over 3,000 beds for visitors, compared with tens of thousands on an island such as Rhodes. Its councillors say that they will fight the tax rise, although none can say how. “We have been suffering economically in recent years and, now, we will suffer more,” said Lemnos Mayor, Dimitris Marinakis. “When there is not enough money, you reduce your consumption and therefore the whole economy declines.”
The crisis has been particularly hard on people under 40, who often do two or three jobs to make ends meet and still feel they can’t afford a family. Young people fear they are losing their contemporaries in an exodus to match the one that scattered their grandparents’ friends to America, Australia and Canada. “What is the future for our generation?” said Katerina Fikari, who feels she is extremely lucky to work for the local government in Lemnos. “If you work only to pay your bills, how can you have dreams for your future?”
If taxes go up, even more young people will leave, warns Mayor Kakali, who has devoted her year in office to improving education on the island to help keep it an attractive place for families. Because it is one of the smallest islands, Agios Efstratios has until 2017 before the rise is due to come in, so Kakali hopes that the roller coaster of Greek politics means it yet may be spared. If not, though, she plans to travel to Athens to remind the distant government what the tax rise would cost.
“The truth is the government doesn’t pay much attention to the islands of the north Aegean,” she said, “so I would take all the kids from our school to the gates of parliament, to tell them: 'There is still life in these islands'.”