Intermediate
How long can you hold your breath? Im trying it right now. The  rst 30 seconds are easy. Im ready to give up at 45 seconds but I continue and it seems to get easier for a while. But, as the second hand ticks past a minute, my heart is pounding. I let out a tiny breath and this helps. Eventually, I give up, releasing the air in my lungs and taking a huge breath. I manage one minute and 12 seconds. Im quite impressed with myself.
The ability to hold your breath is extremely important in some sports, particularly freediving. In 2006, I was  lming a programme about the anatomy and physiology of the lungs for a BBC series. I was lucky to meet Sam Amps, who was captain of the UK freedive team. At a pool in Bristol, she taught me some simple exercises to help me hold my breath for longer while swimming underwater. By the end of the session, Id managed 90 seconds of breath-holding, enough to let me swim a width. Sam swam three widths easily. She could hold her breath for  ve minutes, while swimming. Five!
I asked how she did it: very slow breathing for several minutes before each dive, then a big, deep breath before diving in. She also said that training helped her resist the urge to breathe for far longer than most people.
Some have suggested that the ability to voluntarily hold your breath is evidence that, at some point during our evolution, we lived in water. Some even say that humans have an ability to lower their heart rate in order to breath-hold for even longer. Other facts  our hairlessness, the distribution of our subcutaneous fat and even that we walk on two legs  have been linked to an aquatic phase of our evolutionary development. But, unfortunately, the aquatic ape hypothesis is not true.
Looking at voluntary breath-holding, we are, in fact, not the only non-aquatic mammals that are able to hold their breath. (But its a dif cult thing to investigate in other mammals because, unlike humans, its dif cult to get them to hold their breath.) And evidence shows that our heart rate doesnt drop during breath-holding. At least, it doesnt if youre breath-holding on land. When youre in cold water, its different: this leads to a slower heart rate in most people. But, once again, this isnt evidence of an aquatic ape ancestry. This reduction in heart rate is just one of the physiological responses that are sometimes called the mammalian diving re ex. But physiological responses that are useful in diving are also  and, perhaps, even more importantly  useful for not drowning.
While our ability to breath-hold may not be special, when we compare ourselves with other animals, its now becoming very useful in one particular area of medicine. Radiotherapy for breast cancer involves pointing radiation, very precisely, at the tumour. This may require several minutes of radiation and, so, its usually done in short periods, between breaths. But, if the patient can keep her chest perfectly still for several minutes, it means that the entire dose can be given, in the right place, in one go. The problem, of course, is that most people, just like me, cannot hold their breath for much longer than a minute. But doctors at University Hospital Birmingham have shown that, if patients are given oxygen-rich air before holding their breath, they can hold it for  ve-and-a-half minutes.
Surprisingly, the trick seems to be the ability to fool the diaphragm. When you breathe in, youre pulling the muscle of your diaphragm  at so that the volume of your chest increases  and air is pulled into your lungs. When you hold your breath, you keep your diaphragm like that. If you arti cially raise oxygen levels and reduce carbon dioxide levels before a breath-hold, as in the Birmingham radiotherapy experiments, you may be able to delay tiredness in the diaphragm. So, its your diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing, that is in charge when it comes to holding your breath. Eventually, even if youve fooled it for a while, the signals from the diaphragm are just too strong and you have to give up  and take a breath.


The Canadian tennis player Frank Dancevic slammed Australian Open organizers for forcing players to compete in “inhumane” conditions after he collapsed on court as temperatures rose to 41C.
Dancevic, who collapsed during the second set of his first-round match against France’s Benoît Paire on the uncovered court six at Melbourne Park and passed out for a minute, said conditions were plainly dangerous for the players. He also said the heat had caused him to hallucinate: “I was dizzy from the middle of the first set and then I saw Snoopy and I thought, 'Wow, Snoopy – that’s weird.'”
“I think it’s inhumane. I don’t think it’s fair to anybody – to the players, to the fans, to the sport – when you see players pulling out of matches, passing out,” he added. “I’ve played five-set matches all my life and being out there for a set and a half and passing out with heat stroke, it’s not normal.
“Having players with so many problems and complaining to the tournament that it’s too hot to play; until somebody dies, they just keep going on with it and putting matches on in this heat. I, personally, don’t think it’s fair and I know a lot of players don’t think it’s fair.”
Other players were in broad agreement. The British number one, Andy Murray, said: “It’s definitely something that you have to look at a little bit. As much as it’s easy to say the conditions are safe, it only takes one bad thing to happen. And it looks terrible for the whole sport when people are collapsing, ball kids are collapsing, people in the stands are collapsing. That’s not great.
“I know when I went out to hit before the match, the conditions at 2.30–3pm were very, very tough. Whether it’s safe or not, I don’t know. There’s been some issues in other sports with players having heart attacks.”
Caroline Wozniacki said: “I put the water bottle down on the court and it started melting a little bit underneath the plastic. So, you know it was warm.”
John Isner, who retired from his first-round match with a right ankle injury, said: “It was like an oven when I open the oven and the potatoes are done. That’s what it’s like.”
The defending champion Victoria Azarenka took the same line. “It felt pretty hot, like you’re dancing in a frying pan or something like that,” she said.
The tournament’s “extreme heat” contingency plan was put into force for women’s matches on Tuesday, allowing an extra ten-minute break between the second and third sets. Under a change to the rules for 2014, however, the decision on whether to stop matches at the tournament is now at the discretion of the tournament director, Wayne McKewen. Rather than use the raw Celsius readings to assess the heat, organizers prefer to use the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature composite, which also gauges humidity and wind to identify the perceived conditions. Organizers said temperatures peaked at 42.2C in the early evening on Tuesday and conditions had never reached the point where play would be stopped. “We have to reach a minimum threshold and have a forecast that it will be sustained for a reasonable time,” McKewen said in a statement. “That didn’t happen. While conditions were hot and uncomfortable, the relatively low level of humidity ensured play would continue.”
Dancevic, who said he had felt dizzy from the middle of the second set, resumed after medical attention but, unsurprisingly, ended up losing 7–6, 6–3, 6–4. “I was really close to stopping completely,” he said. “I wasn’t really running too much towards the end. I wasn’t tired; I just felt my body temperature was too high.”
A ball boy had earlier required medical attention after collapsing during Milos Raonic’s 7–6, 6–1, 4–6, 6–2 victory over Daniel Gimeno-Traver on the equally exposed court eight and the tournament shortened rotations for the ball boys to 45-minute shifts. China’s Peng Shuai also said the heat had caused her to cramp up and vomit, and she had to be helped from the court after her 7–5, 4–6, 6–3 defeat to Japan’s Kurumi Nara. Officials played down health risks, saying the majority of matches were completed without calls for medical attention.
“Of course, there were a few players who experienced heat-related illness or discomfort, but none required significant medical intervention after they had completed their match,” Tim Wood, the tournament’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.
Most competitors, though, followed Roger Federer’s line that, although conditions were tough, they were the same for both players. “It’s just a mental thing,” the Swiss said, albeit before Dancevic collapsed. “If you’ve trained hard enough your entire life, or the last few weeks, and you believe you can do it and come through it, there’s no reason. If you can’t deal with it, you throw in the towel.”
Dancevic disagreed. “I don’t think it’s much to do with the shape the players are in. Some players are used to the heat – their bodies can genetically handle the heat and others’ can’t,” he said. “It’s hazardous to be out there; it’s dangerous. It’s an hour and a half since my match and I still can’t pee.”


Intermediate
The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon intends to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man: the bard of Avon, born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564, who died there 400 years ago.
Stratford remained hugely important during Shakespeares life, says Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. People often see Shakespeare as someone who turned his back on Stratford and his family, went to London to earn his fortune and only came back to die, he said. But Stratford is where he bought land and property, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.
The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be celebrated across Britain and the globe. Macbeth will open in Singapore, Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeares Globe is completing the  rst world tour in the history of theatre. It has taken Hamlet to every country except North Korea. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to showcase each of Shakespeares plays.
The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and nearly every other theatre production company in the country will celebrate the anniversary. Interpretations of the plays will range from the highly traditional to the experimental. There will also be hundreds of lectures, recitals, international academic conferences,  lms, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
For a man famous in his own lifetime, there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeares life and times. The plays would probably not have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every bit of every play they could  nd  drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors parts and 17 plays not known in any other version  into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeares death.
The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display  including those belonging to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a tattered copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious surviving documents will be collected together in an exhibition at Somerset House in London, including four of his six known signatures, which are all slightly different.
The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, the court papers relating to the audacious move when Shakespeare and his fellow actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and accounts showing payments from the royal treasury for Boxing Day performances for James I and Queen Anne.
The director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, recently jokily claimed Shakespeare was a true Londoner. Stratford, however, will be insisting that the town made and educated Shakespeare. They are restoring his old school room. It will open as a permanent visitor attraction.
Shakespeare bought the splendid New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died, according to literary legend, on St Georges Day, 23 April, the same day as his birth. You dont buy a house like New Place and not live there, Paul Edmondson said. The general public and many academics have consistently underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare.
Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust describes New Place as the jewel in the crown of the 400th anniversary celebrations.
However, Shakespeares house was demolished 300 years ago and the house that replaced it was demolished in 1759 by a bad-tempered priest, Francis Gastrell, in an argument over taxes. He had already cut down Shakespeares mulberry tree, under which the writer is said to have sat and worked, because he was irritated by all the tourists peering into his garden.
The gap where the house was has never been  lled. But the news that Shakespeares kitchen had been found in the partly surviving cellars went round the world. The whole site is being displayed for the anniversary, with the oundations marked and the garden restored. Without Stratford, Edmondson said, there would have been no Shakespeare.


In 2010, it was too dangerous for the police to enter the old part of the city of Srinagar in India. Violent separatists were fighting for an independent Kashmir and they had killed more than 100 people there.
But things change very quickly. The same streets are now full of tourists. The mosque where young people threw stones at the security forces will soon be part of an official walking tour. Visitors can take photos in the beautiful gardens by the lake. During the winter, the nearby ski resorts were full of rich Russians.
In 2002, only 27,000 tourists came to visit the Kashmir Valley. Others were scared because of the anti-Indian fighting – almost 70,000 people have died during the fighting. So far in 2012, almost one million people have visited the area – this includes more than 23,000 from outside India. But fewer than 150 Britons visited – mainly because the UK government’s advice is that the area is too dangerous to visit.
Omar Abdullah, the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has asked the British government to change its advice, but they haven’t changed it. “It’s frustrating,” says Abdullah. “Today, because of that travel advice, people’s insurance isn’t valid when they visit here.” 1995 was the last time foreign tourists were murdered in Kashmir, when an Islamist group kidnapped six westerners and killed five of them.
“British citizens have been killed more recently in other countries. I mean, how many British citizens were killed on 9/11? Did you stop people from visiting New York? You’ve lost them in Spain, in Bali,” said Abdullah. “We’ve lost Indians in London. There is still a possibility that al-Qaida could do something stupid, but we haven’t stopped Indians from travelling to London. There is no reason to say Kashmir, or even Srinagar, is a dangerous destination.”
Germany changed its guidelines for travellers to the region in 2011. “Foreigners are usually not direct targets,” the new guidelines said, less than a year after the fighting in 2010. A national holiday on 15 August celebrated 65 years of Indian independence – in the past, this was a dangerous day because many people in the state do not feel part of India. But there was no trouble at the independence celebrations on Wednesday.
Abdullah says tourists are safe in Kashmir, if they are careful. In other words, do not go trekking near the border that separates the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir.
Some visitors may feel it is not right to have fun in a place where local people have very high levels of anxiety and lots of mental health problems. But the local people in Srinagar like tourism. Amjid Gulzar, 26, said Abdullah should encourage foreign visitors. “Without tourism, our economy will be in chaos,” he said.
“We need better roads, reliable electricity. We need more things for tourists to do in the evening – we don’t even have one cinema in this city,” he said. But will tourists feel welcome? In June, a local Islamic group wrote a “dress code” for foreign tourists. Abdullah says: “Nobody wants tourists to come here and cover their faces. But they should be sensitive to our cultural identity and dress appropriately. I think that’s common sense.”
Abdullah said tourism would help the economy. Kashmir’s economy is weak after more than twenty years of fighting. The state receives just £72 million each year in taxes but it pays £155 million in salaries to 500,000 public employees. It is clear why he needs to find more money. He is pleased to see tourists back. “I’m not saying that one million tourists here shows that everything is normal again,” he said. “But it gives me some satisfaction that people can come, have a nice time, and go back.”


Intermediate
Loneliness has finally become a hot topic. The Office for National Statistics has found Britain to be the loneliest place in Europe. British people are less likely to have strong friendships or know their neighbours than people anywhere else in the European Union. And research at the University of Chicago has found that loneliness is twice as bad for older peoples health as obesity and almost as great a cause of death as poverty.
This is shocking but such studies do not examine the loneliness epidemic among younger adults. In 2010, the Mental Health Foundation found that loneliness was a greater concern among young people than among the elderly. The 18- to 34-year-olds surveyed were more likely to feel lonely often, to worry about feeling alone and to feel depressed because of loneliness than the over-55s.
Loneliness is a recognized problem among the elderly and there are day centres and charities to help them, says Sam Challis, of the mental health charity Mind, but, when young people reach 21, theyre too old for youth services. This is problematic because of the close relationship between loneliness and mental health  it is linked to increased stress, depression, paranoia, anxiety, addiction and it is a known cause of suicide.
But what can young people do to prevent loneliness? One researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute points out that social media and the internet can be both a good thing and a problem. They are beneficial when they enable us to communicate with distant loved ones but not when they replace face-to-face contact. People present an idealized version of themselves online and we expect to have social lives like those we see in the media, says Challis. Comparing the perfect lives of our friends with our own lives can lead us to withdraw socially.
Meditation techniques and apps such as Headspace are trendy solutions frequently recommended for a range of mental health problems, but theyre not necessarily helpful for loneliness, as they actively encourage us to be alone with our thoughts. It is better to address the causes of your loneliness first  whats stopping you going out and seeing people? says Challis.
Indeed, a study of social media at the University of Michigan in 2013 found that using technology to help you meet new people can be beneficial. And, if you are unable to go out for some reason, the internet can help you. For example, Mumsnet, an online network for parents, can help you feel less alone when bringing up young children.
Helplines can also reduce loneliness, at least in the short term. One in four men who call the emotional support charity Samaritans mention loneliness or isolation and Get Connected is a free confidential helpline for young people, where they can get help with emotional and mental health problems often linked to loneliness. There are also support services on websites such as Minds that can remind you youre not alone.
At work, it can be beneficial to tell your employer how youre feeling. John Binns advises businesses on mental health and well-being. He was admitted to hospital for stress-related depression in 2007 and took two months off work. He felt as if there was no one to talk to and wasnt close enough to colleagues for them to notice the changes in his behaviour. More openness with his employer and colleagues made his return to work easier. Office chit-chat may seem like a waste of time but it helps to protect us from the emotional and psychological effects of work strain.
We treat the networks we have as incidental but theyre fundamental to our well-being, says Nicky Forsythe, a psychotherapist and the founder of Talk for Health, an organization that trains people to give and receive support in groups. The most important thing is to have a regular time and place to reflect on your life and to have an empathetic listener.
If we believe recent research, loneliness is killing the elderly and, with an ageing population, we should aim to reduce our isolation before it is too late. Getting older doesnt have to mean getting lonelier, says Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of the relationship counselling service Relate. But it is very important to lay the foundations to good-quality relationships earlier in life.


Sir Alex Ferguson will retire as Manchester United manager at the end of the season in the 27th year of a tenure that has made him the most successful manager in British football. While he will become a United director and ambassador, the club will now have to find someone 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.
Regarding his decision, Ferguson said: “The decision to retire is one that I have thought a great deal about and one that I have not taken lightly. It is the right time. It was important to me to leave an organization in the strongest possible shape and I believe I have done so. The quality of this league-winning squad, and the balance of ages within it, bodes well for continued success at the highest level whilst 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 finest in global sport and our home, Old Trafford, is rightfully regarded as one of the leading venues in the world. Going forward, 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. My wife, Cathy, has been the key figure throughout my career, providing a bedrock of both stability and encouragement. Words are not enough to express what this has meant to me.
“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 backing of the board, and Sir Bobby Charlton in particular, gave me the confidence and time to build a football club, rather than just a football team.
“Over the past decade, the Glazer family have provided me with the platform 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 in David Gill. I am truly grateful to all of them. To the fans, thank you. The support you have provided over the years has been truly humbling. 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 sudden nature of Ferguson’s departure is in keeping with how the Scot stated he would leave the post after he mentioned a first retirement during the 2001/2 season before performing a U-turn. It is understood he gathered the players in the first-team changing room shortly after they arrived for training on Wednesday morning. In an emotional speech, he announced he was to step down. He then took his backroom staff aside before finally addressing the rest of the staff in the canteen.
Joel Glazer, joint owner of Manchester United, said: “Alex has proven time and time again what a fantastic manager he is but he’s also a wonderful person. His determination to succeed and dedication to the club have been truly remarkable. I will always cherish 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, the outgoing chief executive, said: “I’ve had the tremendous pleasure of working very closely with Alex for 16 unforgettable years – through the treble, the double, countless trophy 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 squad and club structures are in first-class condition. Alex’s vision, energy and ability have built teams – both on and off the pitch – that his successor can count on as 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. It is a side to him that is often hidden from public view but it is something that I have been privileged to witness in the last 16 years.
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 alongside Alex and a great honour to be able to call him a friend.”
First-team coach René Meulensteen revealed how Ferguson broke the news to his backroom staff on Wednesday morning. “I found out this morning when I came to the club,” he said. “He called us into his office and told us what decision he had taken. It’s always been on the cards – there’s speculation every season. I think the manager kept his cards close to his chest. I think he felt the time was right now and he made a decision.
“He’s obviously a man who thinks very, very hard so I’m sure he’s put a lot of thought into making this decision. I wish him well. He’s been fantastic for this club and I hope all the fans give whoever’s going to come in the same support that he gets.”


Barack Obama flew back to Washington and his desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday, hours after he gave an election victory speech in Chicago. In the speech, he asked the country to join together.
Both the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, and the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, think that everyone needs to work together to solve the economic crisis. But it could become one of the biggest fights ever between the White House and Congress during Obama’s presidency.
Obama easily beat his Republican opponent Mitt Romney (Obama kept lots of swing states), but the election showed again how divided America is.
Obama disappointed many of his supporters in his first four years, so now he wants to become a great President.
He wants to work on many issues; for example, continued economic recovery, immigration, education, climate change, Iran and Israel-Palestine.
Boehner talked about “the need for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt”.
Reid said: “I look at the challenges that we have ahead of us and I reach out to my Republican colleagues in the Senate and the House. Let’s come together. We know what the issues are; let’s solve them.”
The trouble will come when talks move to detail. The Republicans want to keep military spending the same, but the Democrats want to reduce military spending. Obama wants more taxes for families that earn more than $250,000; Boehner does not want more taxes.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama talked about the long queues to vote and said there was a need for changes.
He spoke in an impressive and emotional way in his speech. He was famous for this way of speaking during the 2008 election, but he stopped in 2012.
But now that he has won, he returned to famous lines from earlier speeches, and he talked again about “hope”.
Obama told the happy crowd of supporters: “Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.”
In a speech that lasted more than 25 minutes, Obama said 'thank you' to his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha – and also to his Vice-President, Joe Biden. Then he returned to the message that first made him popular.
“We are not as divided as our politics suggests,” he said. “We remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.”


Lego’s profits rose strongly in the first half of 2014, helped by the success of its Lego Movie , which has stormed box offices in the US and UK.
The Danish toy firm’s sales rose across Europe, the Americas and Asia as children snapped up products linked to the film. The film, released in February, took more than $250m in the US and £31m in the UK by the first weekend in April.
The movie cost about $60m to make and has been described as a near-flawless piece of content marketing by creating entertaining content aimed at consumers who are likely to go out and buy the company’s products.
Lego’s finance director, John Goodwin, said: “The strong performance of the Lego Movie products had a positive effect during the first half of 2014, and it remains to be seen how the line will continue to develop behind the highly anticipated launch of the movie on DVD in the second half of 2014.”
Operating profit for the first six months of Lego’s financial year increased by 12% to $630m. Sales rose by 11% to more than three times the figure six years before.
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego’s chief executive, said: “It is a very satisfactory result that shows our significant growth in recent years in a tough economic environment. The result for the first half of 2014 is an outcome of our ability to develop, launch and distribute Lego products, which children all over the world put at the top of their wishlists.”
Lego, based in the small town of Billund, started producing its plastic bricks in 1949 and became a staple children’s toy around the world by the 1970s. But the group lost its way and was on the brink of collapse in 2003. Knudstrop took over as chief executive, ending 70 years of family rule, and ditched hundreds of surplus products to refocus the business on its trademark bricks.
The company opened its first factory in China in April and opened an office in Shanghai to spearhead expansion in the world’s second- biggest economy.


Scientists have connected the brains of two rats and allowed them to share information. Researchers say this is an important step towards creating the world’s first “organic computer”.
The US team put electronic brain devices on two rats. The devices let the animals work together on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water. In one important demonstration of the technology, the scientists used the internet to connect the brains of two rats thousands of miles away from each other. One in North Carolina, USA, and the other in Natal, Brazil.
The head of the research team was Miguel Nicolelis, who has made devices that allow paralyzed people to control computers and robotic arms with their thoughts. The researchers say their latest work could make it possible to connect many brains to share information. “These experiments showed that we have created a direct communication connection between brains,” Nicolelis said. “We are creating an organic computer.”
The scientists have shown that rats can share information and respond to that information. The scientists do this by electrically connecting the rats’ brains.
They trained the rats to press a lever when they saw a light above it. When they did the task correctly, they got some water.
To test the animals’ ability to share brain information, they put the rats in two separate compartments. Only one compartment had a light above the lever. When the rat pressed the lever, an electronic version of its brain activity was sent directly to the other rat’s brain. In tests, the second rat responded correctly to the first rat’s brain signals and pressed the lever 70% of the time.
Incredibly, the communication between the rats was two-way. If the rat that received the information failed the task, the first rat did not get the reward of a drink. It then seemed to change its behaviour to make the task easier for its partner. In further experiments, the rats worked together on a task where they had to tell the difference between narrow and wide openings using their whiskers.
In the final test, the scientists connected rats on different continents and used the internet to send their brain activity. “The animals were on different continents, but they could still communicate,” said Miguel Pais-Vieira, the first author of the study. “This tells us that we could create a network of animal brains, with the animals in many different locations.”
Nicolelis said the team is now trying to find ways of linking many animals’ brains at once to solve more difficult tasks. “We do not know what might happen when animals begin interacting as part of a 'brain-net',” he said. “In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could find solutions that individual brains cannot find alone.” Anders Sandberg, of Oxford University, said the work was “very important” in helping to understand how brains process information. But the possible future uses of the technology are much wider, said Sandberg. “The main reason humans control the planet is that we are very good at communicating and coordinating. Without that, although we are very clever animals, we would not control the planet.”
“I don’t think these experiments will create very smart rats,” he added. “There’s a big difference between sharing information through the senses and being able to plan. I’m not worried about clever rats taking control of the world.”
We know very little about how people process thoughts and how they could be sent to another person’s brain, so that will not happen any time soon. And much of what is in our minds is what Sandberg calls a “draft” of what we might do. “And we change a lot of those drafts before we do anything. Most of the time, I think it’s very good that our thoughts are not in someone else’s head.”


Intermediate
The age of the big British summer music festival, including Glastonbury, is drawing to a close, according to the leading rock promoter and manager Harvey Goldsmith.
Goldsmith has produced and worked with most of the western worlds biggest music stars, from the Who, the Rolling Stones and Queen to Madonna, Bob Dylan and Luciano Pavarotti. He says the biggest problem is a serious lack of major new bands to follow on from the old ones.
The age of the festival peaked about two years ago, he said, speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Wales. There are too many festivals and there are not enough big acts to headline them. That is a big, big problem in our industry. And we are not producing a new generation of these kind of acts  like the Rolling Stones, Muse, even the Arctic Monkeys  that can headline.
There were about 900 music festival events in the UK between May and September 2014, he said, and there is no way they can all continue. There is going to be a growth in events where it isnt just music but with poetry or books or magic shows. There will be lots of small combination festivals that give something extra  not people standing around in a big  eld unable to go to the toilet because they might miss the band.
Clearly, the way music is delivered has changed, he said. People dont seem to want to listen to an album any more. And, most rock bands built their reputation on albums  they might take three albums to become really good at their art, to become great, but young people dont want that.
Goldsmith, 69, also revealed that he is working with Robin de Levita, the Dutch producer of the Whos 1970s rock musical Tommy, at a new 1,100-seat theatre in Wembley, London, where the  rst stage adaptation of the teen book and movie series The Hunger Games will be performed in June 2016.
Talking at Hay, Goldsmith also revealed some of the secrets from his long career in the music industry. He said that Keith Moon put dynamite down a Sydney hotel room toilet to unblock it. And, he said that John Lennon had stage fright just before an appearance at Madison Square Garden in 1974  he was pulled, vomiting, out of his dressing room and pushed out on stage. Its bizarre how common that is among artists. Its odd how afraid they get but, as soon as the  rst chord is hit, theyre  ne, he said.
He also gave the answer to a long-running rock n roll mystery: why Elvis Presley never performed outside North America. Presleys long-time manager, Colonel Tom Parker, admitted to him, he said, that the real reason why Goldsmiths attempts to bring the singer to London had failed was Parkers own uncertain immigration status.
He explained that it was because he was an illegal Dutch immigrant. He didnt want to risk leaving the US  it was him, not Elvis, said Goldsmith.
And, his ultimate rock n roll performer? Freddie Mercury had to be our most powerful stage performer, the best live performer weve ever had. At Live Aid, he went out and saw that audience and just grabbed it.
But, nobody has found the next Queen yet, he said. Were not producing a new generation of this kind of act. Coldplay is probably the last one and that was ten years ago.
 So, with no big acts to headline, there are no big shows. Glastonbury has got to the point where it cant  nd any more big acts and thats the pinnacle of the festivals. They are really over.


The Canadian tennis player Frank Dancevic criticized the people who organize the Australian Open because they forced players to play tennis in terrible conditions.
Dancevic collapsed during the second set of his match against France’s Benoît Paire on the uncovered court six at Melbourne Park. He said conditions were dangerous for the players. He also said the heat caused him to hallucinate: “I was dizzy from the middle of the ﬁ rst set and then I saw Snoopy and I thought, 'Wow, Snoopy – that’s weird.'”
“I don’t think it’s fair to anybody – to the players, to the fans, to the sport – when you see players passing out,” he added. “Passing out with heat stroke, it’s not normal.
“I, personally, don’t think it’s fair and I know a lot of players don’t think it’s fair.”
Other players agreed. The British number one, Andy Murray, said: “It’s de ﬁ nitely a problem. It only takes one bad thing to happen. And it looks terrible for the whole sport when people are collapsing, ball kids are collapsing, people watching are collapsing. That’s not great.
“I know the conditions at 2.30 –3pm were very, very hard. If it’s safe or not, I don’t know. There have been some problems in other sports with players having heart attacks.”
Caroline Wozniacki said: “I put the water bottle down on the court and it started melting a little bit. So, you know it was warm.”
John Isner said: “It was like an oven when I open the oven and the potatoes are ready. That’s what it’s like.”
Victoria Azarenka said, “It felt pretty hot, like you’re dancing in a frying pan or something like that.”
Organizers said the highest temperature was 42.2C in the early evening on Tuesday but it was never hot enough to stop the matches.
“The weather was hot and uncomfortable, but the humidity was quite low, so play could continue,” tournament director Wayne McKewen said.
Dancevic, who said he felt dizzy from the middle of the second set, unsurprisingly lost 7 –6, 6 –3, 6 –4. “I nearly stopped completely,” he said. “I wasn’t really running too much towards the end. I wasn’t tired; I just felt my body temperature was too high.”
A ball boy needed help from doctors when he collapsed during Milos Raonic’s 7 –6, 6 –1, 4 –6, 6 –2 victory over Daniel Gimeno-Traver on exposed court eight.
China’s Peng Shuai also said the heat had made her cramp up and vomit, and someone had to help her leave the court after her 7 –5, 4 –6, 6 –3 defeat to Japan’s Kurumi Nara.
Organizers said most matches were completed without anyone needing help from doctors.
“Of course, there were a few players who had heat-related illness or discomfort, but none needed much help from doctors after their match,” Tim Wood, the tournament’s chief medical of ﬁ cer, said.
Roger Federer said that the weather was hot, but it was the same for both players.
“It’s just a mental thing,” the Swiss said. “If you’ve trained hard enough all your life, or the last few weeks, and you believe you can do it and come through it, there’s no reason. If you can’t deal with it, you throw in the towel.”
Dancevic disagreed. “Some players are used to the heat – their bodies can deal with the heat and others’ can’t,” Dancevic said. “It’s dangerous. It’s an hour and a half since my match and I still can’t pee.”


One day, drones could deliver packages to your home. When will this happen? If you believe Amazon, it will be soon. Other people are not so sure. They have to invent the right technology but, also, they have to consider public safety.
Amazon say that they will be ready as soon as the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) introduce rules for using drones. The FAA will finally introduce rules for using unmanned aircraft by June 2016. But the technology has a long way to go before then and larger machines aren’t legal yet – only drones up to 25kg will be legal. And the FAA says in the rules they want to introduce that drones will all have to use different radio frequencies that nobody can block or hijack.
Professor Sajiv Singh, who works for delivery company NearEarth, said that flying drones is quite simple – you just give it some basic instructions: go to this height, do this short task, go back home. But even short flights from a mobile landing place could cause serious problems, he said.
“They’re not planning to deliver in areas where nobody lives; they’re planning to deliver from a warehouse to the consumer, which will probably be in a town or city,” he said. “The drone will have to see hazards. Maybe there will be things that the map doesn’t know about. Maybe there will be construction equipment that wasn’t there but is there now. Maybe GPS signals will be blocked so it’s going to have an incorrect idea about where it is.” All this can be solved, he said – but it’s difficult.
One big problem is keeping radio contact with a drone and planning for what happens if that contact breaks. “If a drone loses radio contact, it will keep going and crash into the ground,” said robot expert Daniel Huber.
“We already have most of the technology we need,” said Huber. He is working on a program that will use drones to check telephone lines, bridges and so on. “We can make drones fly around a certain area and look at every surface.”
Huber said about Amazon: “They say that many packages are light – a drone can carry a kilogram for 15 minutes. If you have a vehicle that can go into a neighbourhood, it can deliver from that vehicle. You need a 15-minute distance, and typical drones have about that distance.” It’s one way, he said, to make sure people are safe. “The larger the distance, the more dangerous it becomes.”
Of course, safety is still a big worry – Singh points out that for a passenger aeroplane to be allowed to fly, it can only have one serious failure every one million hours. Drones, he said, are much less safe. “The Reaper drone, for example, has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said.
Part of the reason for this is simply that air travel is dangerous so standards are much higher. “If you fly a passenger aeroplane, often they will say, ‘Oh, a small part isn’t working; we have to go back,’” Singh said. “And people have been flying passanger aeroplanes for 60 years! I hate to think that a drone might come down on a busy road.” Part of the solution, Singh said, is planning for every situation: “If things fail, the drone has to do something sensible.”


The critics usually analyse the novels of well-known British author David Mitchell in detail. But, he is not worried about the critics this time. He completed his latest book at 1am one Tuesday morning before a car arrived to take him to the airport to catch a flight to Norway. No one will see this novel until 2114.
Mitchell is the second author to be part of the Future Library project. For the project, they planted 1,000 trees in 2014 in Oslo’s Nordmarka forest. The first author, Margaret Atwood, gave the manuscript of a text called Scribbler Moon to the project in 2015. Each year for the next hundred years, an author will write a novel that people will only read in 2114, when the trees are cut down to make paper to make the books.
Each author will travel to the place in the forest high above Oslo, where they will give their manuscripts to the project in a short ceremony.
“It’s a little bit of hope at a time when there is lots of very depressing news. It shows that we have a chance of civilization in a hundred years,” said Mitchell. “Everything is telling us that we’re doomed but the Future Library brings hope that we are stronger than we think: that we will be here, that there will be trees, that there will be books and readers, and civilization.”
Mitchell said that writing this book made him feel free “because I won’t be around to know if people think it’s good or bad. But, before me was Margaret Atwood and next year I’m sure there will be another brilliant writer. So my book had better be good. I would look such a fool if they opened my book in 2114 and it wasn’t any good.”
Mitchell says that he usually “polishes and polishes” his writing. “I polish too much. But, this was very different – I wrote till the final minute. So, the first two-thirds are polished and the final third I didn’t have time. And, I felt free.”
The creator of the Future Library asked writers to write on “the theme of imagination and time”. Mitchell revealed only the name of the manuscript, From Me Flows What You Call Time , during a ceremony in the Norwegian woods next to where the 1,000 trees are planted. The title comes from a piece of music by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Mitchell only told us that his book is “longer than I thought it would be.” He said nothing more.
In the forest, Mitchell read a short story and a poem. This small section of forest will be carefully managed for the next 98 years before it becomes Future Library’s manuscripts.
“How vain to think my writing will be of interest to future generations. But, it is the opposite of vain to work hard on a manuscript that nobody will ever congratulate you for and say: 'Good job' or 'I loved the bit where she did that and he did this ...'” Mitchell wrote.
They will seal his manuscript and put it next to Atwood’s manuscript in a room in Oslo’s new public library, which will open in 2019. The manuscript is now, says the author, “gone from me like a coin I’ve dropped in a river”.


Google has made maps of the world’s highest mountains, the ocean floor, the Amazon rainforest and even shown us a bit of North Korea. They want to make maps of the whole world, but they have mostly stayed away from the Arctic.
Now, however, Google is starting a very important update to hundreds of years of polar map making – and it hopes that the map will help give a better understanding of life on the permafrost for millions of web users. A small Google team has flown to Iqaluit, the largest town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. They have taken their warmest winter clothes, many laptop computers and an 18kg telescopic camera that they can fix to their backpacks. The team spent four days collecting the images and information that will give the isolated community on Baffin Island something that people across the world who live in cities now take for granted. An Inuit mapping expert helped the Google team and curious locals followed them around. The town of 7,000 people will go on display via Google’s popular Street View application in July 2013.
When Google made maps of other parts of the world it used a special camera on a car roof. In Iqaluit that was not possible, so Google’s map makers walked the town’s snowy roads and trails. Some roads are made of ice and disappear in the short summer months.
The team also walked along part of a 15km road known as the Road to Nowhere, despite warnings about meeting polar bears. The online map that Google had already created using satellite images was mostly correct, but one road was missing that had been built in the last year.
One difficulty was how to place on the map many businesses and homes that have mail sent to the local post office and not delivered to their address. Putting the PO box addresses on the map would mean the new map would show all the companies, banks and schools in the same place, around the Canada Post building in the centre of town.
About 30 Inuit elders, business people and high-school pupils helped Google to correct this problem. They were given a laptop computer and told how to make sure their homes, shops and meeting places would show up correctly on the map.
The project is more than a novelty. Arif Sayani, the town’s Director of Planning, said that people who are thinking of visiting or moving to the area would be able to use the maps to see the area. It may also help planning decisions in Iqaluit happen more quickly.
The project leader for Google said he hoped to see the work continue in other northern towns. But moving people and equipment around the vast Arctic territory is very expensive. So, in the future, Google might send equipment to the area and ask volunteers to complete the map.


Europe is trying to reduce air pollution. Europe will become the first part of the world to force car makers to use 'real-world' emissions tests. New regulations will introduce tests that will demonstrate clearly what cars’ emissions are like when they are driving on roads and in traffic, not in ideal conditions, similar to a laboratory.
The European Commission has approved the tests. The tests will make sure all cars meet a limit of 80mg of nitrogen oxide per kilometre. At present, only one car in 16 meets this limit. Other countries, such as China and Korea, are also considering real-world emissions tests. They will watch what happens next closely.
In the UK, 29,000 people die every year because of pollution. Pollutants from diesel engines such as nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide are responsible for at least one quarter of those deaths.
The current laboratory test for measuring emissions is 25 years old and it needs to change. Car makers can cheat during the tests on their cars using various techniques. For example, they can tape up doors and windows to reduce air resistance, drive on really smooth roads and test at very high temperatures.
“The Commission will introduce a new emissions test that will properly check the cars in real driving,” said Lucia Caudet, a Commission spokesperson.
“One key reason why air pollution kills 400,000 European citizens each year is that car makers cheat the tests for diesel cars – this causes much more pollution on the road,” said Greg Archer, the clean vehicles manager for Transport and Environment. “The development of a new, real-world driving emission test is an important step towards reducing air pollution in cities. European Union (EU) states should now support the Commission’s idea. They should ignore the complaints from car makers, who say that the rules are too tough.”
According to research by the International Council on Clean Transportation in 2014, actual nitrogen oxide emissions from cars are seven times higher than the 80mg per kilometre standard and some cars are 22 times above the recommended limit. About one third of all nitrogen oxide pollution comes from road transport – mostly diesel – and, in cities, concentrations can be as high as 64%, according to European Environment Agency data.
Campaigners say that car makers have tried to delay reforms to car tests. But car makers do not agree – they say that they need five years to introduce the changes for technical and economic reasons. “Real Driving Emissions is a totally new regulation that will force significant changes,” said Cara McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA). “But ACEA fully accepts that the regulation will apply to new types of cars from September 2017.”
When EU representatives finally agreed a regulation for nitrogen oxide limits – with stricter road trials and monitoring of exhaust fumes – ACEA sent the European Commission their own draft regulation. ACEA’s draft regulation covered fewer pollutants and they wanted to introduce the regulation only in 2020. It included shorter test distances (from 1,300 metres to below 700 metres), raised minimum temperatures from -7C to -3C and wanted to use more country roads for the tests.
The Commission rejected ACEA’s draft regulation. The new regulation will now probably be introduced in September. By 2017, the first real-world car emissions tests should begin. Countries around the world will watch the introduction of the EU’s new emissions tests carefully.


Male bosses are paid bonuses double the size of bonuses given to female colleagues in the same jobs. This means that men get bonuses of £141,500 more than women over their working lives.
The numbers, released by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), show that men in UK management jobs earned average bonuses of £6,442 in 2012 – compared with £3,029 for women.
Female directors received bonuses of £36,270 over the past 12 months, compared with £63,700 received by male directors.
The numbers show that pay in British business is still not equal. Campaigners believe we must do something to improve equality at work.
Ann Francke, the CMI’s chief executive, said that there should be more flexibility and less masculine cultures, and that the good work people do should be more important than how much time they spend in the office.
Also, there should be more transparency around performance and bonuses.
“If we solve this issue, we will improve the performance of organizations and the well- being of people at work,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”
Some of the numbers may be affected by women doing jobs where there is less of a culture of bonus payments. But the differences in the sizes of bonuses do make Britain’s pay gap worse. The government says the pay gap is closing but that full-time male employees still earn 10% more than women.
Maria Miller, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said that the CMI numbers are another example from the world of work that shows that women still earn less than men doing the same job.
“Changes in the workplace are happening and it’s good that the pay gap is closing – but there is still more to do before we see full equality in the workplace.
“The government is trying to help. 120 companies have joined our Think, Act, Report scheme, which encourages companies to improve the way they recruit, promote and pay women.
“We’ve also looked at other causes of the pay gap, such as having to juggle work and family.”
Large companies such as Tesco, BT, Unilever and the international law firm Eversheds are some of the companies that have signed up to Think, Act, Report. The scheme has only attracted 120 companies in nearly two years.
But the CMI’s numbers also showed that the pay gap is closing: the difference between the average salaries earned by male and female bosses appeared to be smaller than in 2012.


Prince Harry has left Afghanistan at the end of a four-month tour. He spoke about the frustrations of being a royal who doesn’t want a lot of public attention.
He also talked about his feelings for some parts of the media and described how his father constantly told him to behave more like a member of the royal family.
As a commander of an Apache helicopter, the prince said he had shot at the Taliban. He said he was only doing his job.
In interviews during his time based at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, the prince, known as Captain Wales in the army, explained his 'three mes'. “One in the army, one socially in my own private time and one with the family.”
He admitted he sometimes disappointed people and also himself with his silly behaviour. He said he was “probably too much army and not enough prince”, but he said he was entitled to privacy, too.
In another interview, he criticized the media, especially the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. He said he was very annoyed by articles that compare his role as an Apache co-pilot gunner to Spitfire crews during the second world war. “No, it’s not like that at all,” he said.
The prince said he didn’t like the media because of the treatment of his family when “I was very small”. He said that he read the stories written about him. “Of course I read them,” the prince said. “If there’s a story and somebody writes something about me, I want to know what they said. But it just upsets me and makes me angry that people can write those things. Not just about me, but about everything and everybody. My father always says, 'Don’t read it'.”
When he was asked if he felt more comfortable being Captain Wales than Prince Harry, his reply was revealing. “Definitely. I’ve always been like that. My father’s always trying to tell me about who I am and things like that. But it’s very easy to forget about who I am when I am in the army. Everyone’s wearing the same uniform and doing the same kind of thing. I get on well with the lads and I enjoy my job. It really is as simple as that.”
Before he went to Afghanistan, the prince was photographed naked in Las Vegas at a private party. Harry said he had disappointed himself and other people, but also blamed the media. “At the end of the day I was in a private area and there should be a certain amount of privacy that one should expect.”
When he was asked why he and his brother liked helicopters, he said, “Probably because you can only fit a few people in a helicopter, so no one can follow us, like you guys.”


Intermediate
In typical bad-boyfriend style, Dan Sullivan was late to breakfast with the Guardian because he got pulled over on his motorcycle.
Sullivan works too much, he says. He misses dinner dates. He forgets to give presents.
And so, like many others in Silicon Valley, the 27-year-old venture capitalist has come up with a start-up: BetterBoyfriend.me, a service that sends girlfriends and wives a present every month for about $70.
Sullivan, who works in finance, has been testing the service and has signed up about 350 boyfriends. Most members, he says, are his friends from Harvard and other friends who are either venture capitalists, founders of start-ups or employees of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. The girlfriends of these friends have been getting presents from Sullivan for the last year.
Each month, Sullivans members choose from a list of seven possible gifts (chocolate, tea sets, manicures). The package is sent to the boyfriend unbranded and unlabelled.
He tests his ideas by buying Facebook ads to see what kind of interest they get. BetterBoyfriend.me took off. People seemed to like BetterBoyfriend, Sullivan said.
Another start-up, called InvisibleBoyfriend, allows users to design and build a believable partner who is everything you want and is always available to talk, whenever you want. The end result is a boyfriend who can text with you all day.
Founder Kyle Tabor launched it to give users a fake boyfriend to deter unwanted advances but has found people have grown attached to their imaginary partners: Many more users are looking for companionship through conversation rather than external proof of a relationship.
For Sullivan and Tabor, the surprise was the real relationships that they have formed with their customers. Sullivan says he has begun to see himself as a sort of relationship consultant for the boyfriends.
Sullivan admits hes made mistakes. Early on, the packages he sent included receipts that had his name on them, Dan Sullivan. One of the boyfriends wrote to me and said, Listen, shes not mad but Cynthia found out.
Of all the women BetterBoyfriend.me deliver packages to, about 50% know about Dan Sullivans involvement in their relationships: Its connected with age. I think, after youve been married for a while, you dont keep many secrets.
And over the year, the young founder says hes got to know the boyfriends really well. Theyve even sent a package to a hospital delivery room. The key, he said, is to remember that his relationship is with the boyfriend.
When he first started his company, he attached tags that said BetterBoyfriend.me to flower bouquets and set off for Dolores Park in Mission District, San Francisco.
I looked for couples and gave the bouquet to the girl but the boyfriends didnt like that. Not at all. I understood why. It was cool, he said. So I changed my idea and started handing out the bouquets to the boyfriends.


Intermediate
The atmosphere at the beginning of the final series of Downton Abbey is one of melancholy and changing times. The year is 1925. The neighbours are selling up their own stately home, while Lord Grantham wants to cut back on servants.
But, at the real Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle  a stately home owned by George Geordie Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon  they have more money than before. According to Lady Fiona Carnarvon, the huge global success of Downton has paid for building repairs that are needed to save Highclere for the next generation.
Its been an amazing magic carpet ride for all of us, she said. Its given us free marketing and an international profile. Im hugely grateful. My husband and I love Highclere Castle. Now, it is loved by millions of other people.
Currently, only the ground and first floors of Highclere, on the borders of Hampshire, are used. But, a restoration project of tower rooms has begun that will eventually allow visitors to climb up into the tower to an exhibition showing the work of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Sir Charles Barry, who rebuilt the house between 1839 and 1842.
When the Downton Abbey producers first approached Highclere in 2009, the family had 12 million of repairs to do  1.8 million of that work was urgent. But, by 2012, Downton Abbey was having a positive effect. Lord Carnarvon said then: It was just after the banking crisis and we were worried. Then, Downton began and Highclere became a major tourist attraction.
Visitor numbers doubled, to 1,200 a day, as Downton Abbey, written by Julian Fellowes, was shown around the world after becoming a hit in the UK in 2010 and, then, in the US. It is now broadcast in 250 countries.
There is now a computerized advance booking system, which helps foreign visitors to buy tickets. Highcleres current assets have almost trebled to around 1 million since 2012. Gareth Neame, the executive producer for the series, said: I think Downton Abbey secured Highcleres future.
Peter Fincham, ITVs director of television, remembers the moment when Highclere was booked. I thought, So what?, because I had never heard of Highclere Castle. I thought, Every stately home looks the same. But I was wrong. The castle has been an enormous character as well.
The Downton tourists are part of a growing phenomenon. VisitBritain estimates that nearly 30% of foreign visitors, or nearly nine million people, visit castles and historic houses. Almost half of visitors to Britain now say they want to visit places from films or TV.
More than a million take a tour of historic buildings each year, spending more than 1 billion. Fifty-one per cent of Brazilians, 42% of Russians and Chinese, and 35% of Indian visitors are likely to include a visit to a site of interest in their trips.
VisitBritains director, Patricia Yates, said: The links between tourism, films and TV are strong. She added that period dramas have also increased the popularity of places outside of London.
Downton Abbey expresses a certain view of Britain. It is a fantasy world, based in a particular time in history. Its the first TV period drama that has really become part of popular culture.
Lady Carnarvon says that the long-term future of Highclere is not necessarily secure. But, she says, The programme has allowed us to spend faster on the buildings.
Highclere Castle plans a Tutankhamun event in 2022, 100 years after the 5th Earl of Carnarvon discovered Tutankhamuns tomb with Howard Carter. Another opportunity to keep Highclere in the public mind is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot Capability Brown, who designed the grounds.
Every single day, dont take anything for granted, said Lady Carnarvon. You have to invest in all these great houses. And, there has been a deficit since the 1930s. In the past, an estate and house supported the family and their lifestyle but, today, it is quite the reverse: the challenge is how Geordie and I can support Highclere.
Ive tried to persuade people it is fun. We have specific events they can engage with, not just a walk around a dusty house. We have to compete with attractions like the London Dungeon.


He had the tastes of a typical millionaire. He owned a gold and silver Rolex and a fleet of expensive cars. He liked to dabble in modern art. But, although this Chinese businessman had several companies and a palatial villa in the Madrid suburbs, he had almost no money in the bank, a detail that piqued the interest of Spanish authorities.
Gao Ping, who had lived most of his adult life in Spain, had a monopoly on supplies to 4,000 Chinese bazaars across the Mediterranean country. But, authorities suspected he was not paying taxes on the clothes, furniture and other goods he was importing from China.
When police swooped on his warehouses in 2012 they found piles of cash: wads of €100, €200 and €500 notes were wrapped in elastic bands. Around €12m was wheeled away in trolleys, the largest ever cash seizure by Spanish police. The gang, with Gao the alleged ringleader, stands accused of laundering up to €300m a year, as well as selling counterfeit goods and toys with fake safety marks. The government prosecutor said Gao’s illegal business was so big it was damaging the competitiveness of Spain. Gao is on bail; the case has not yet come to trial.
Law enforcement officials have long had concerns about €500 notes. Small and easy to transport relative to their value, they are the payment method of choice for tax dodgers, money launderers and drug barons. The sum of €1m in €500 notes fits easily into a small laptop bag, where the same amount in €50 notes would require a small suitcase. Cash mules have been known to fold the notes into plastic pellets and swallow them. A less dangerous method of concealment is to stuff the banknotes into a car chassis.
The UK stopped distribution of the €500 note in 2010 on the grounds that demand for it was “almost entirely for criminal purposes ”. In 2009, Italy’s central bank warned that the notes were widely used by mafia money launderers and terrorists. Other countries have limited their own high- denomination notes due to links to organized crime – Canada scrapped its $1,000 note in 2000 on the advice of law enforcement officers.
In an age of electronic payment systems and contactless cards, more are questioning whether printing these notes can be justified. Peter Sands, the former head of Standard Chartered Bank, has called for the abolition of high-denomination notes, including the €500, the $100, the 1,000 Swiss Franc note and the £50. In a report for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Sands argued it was time to get rid of high-value notes that make life easier for “bad guys” pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption. Although criminals would switch to smaller- denomination bills, or gold or diamonds, these substitutes are bulkier and more traceable, making it more likely they will get caught, he said.
At a conference on terrorist financing in London, the Head of Europol, Rob Wainwright, called on the European Central Bank (ECB) to look at whether it “should continue to produce and circulate these notes that make it easier for criminals and terrorists to hide their business and to fund illegal activities”. According to Europol, the purple €500 note accounts for 30% of the value of all the euro notes in circulation, although most people have never seen one.
The €500 note was introduced in 2002 when the euro was born: it replaced the 1,000 Deutschmark, the 10,000 Belgian franc and the 500,000 Italian lira. Several European countries favoured high- value banknotes. “It is definitely a preference that has been there for a long time,” says Pia Hüttl, an affiliate fellow at the Bruegel thinktank. “The preference is based on the idea that cash has a lower cost and is accepted everywhere.”
Cash remains king in Germany and Austria, where more than half of all transactions are made with paper money and coins. The former president of Germany’s constitutional court, Hans-Jürgen Papier, told Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that restrictions on cash were at odds with individual freedom, while tabloid newspaper Bild has launched a petition in defence of paper money, including the €500 note – “hands off my cash ”.
Law enforcement authorities are less convinced, amid a steady stream of reports of suspicious bundles of cash. In one case that has caught the attention of police, two men walked into a bank and tried to deposit €200,000 of torn and muddy €500 notes. In the same week, €1.3m in €500 notes was found stuffed in the false bottom of suitcase. But, a suspicion of criminality is not enough to keep people in custody. “Our frustration from a law enforcement perspective is that, in many jurisdictions, it is impossible to provide sufficient evidence to satisfy judicial authorities of a link between suspicious cash detections and criminality,” says Jennifer MacLeod, a specialist in Europol’s financial intelligence group. “The search for these links is complicated further through time constraints and fragmented cooperation and information exchange.”
The agency would like to see central banks take more responsibility for the “striking anomalies” in the use of €500 notes. Luxembourg, for example, issued more than twice its annual GDP in banknotes in 2013 alone, despite being one of the most cash-averse countries in Europe. Europol asked Luxembourg’s central bank to explain. “The reply we had from Luxembourg is that they simply issue the notes requested and have no explanation for the reasons behind the demand,” MacLeod says. “I find it surprising that a central bank does not consider itself to have a responsibility in this area.”
This could be changing. Mario Draghi, the head of the ECB, has said he is determined that the income the bank generates from issuing the notes should not be “a comfort for criminals”. Other members of the ECB’s top team, such as Yves Mersch, contend there is no evidence about the criminal uses of the €500 note. But, amid heightened fears about terrorism, this argument may no longer cut any ice. EU finance ministers have called on policymakers to explore “appropriate restrictions” on high-value notes and report back by 1 May 2016.


It is not just the world’s biggest burger chain; it is also a global emblem of American consumer capitalism. But, these days, the golden arches of McDonald’s are looking a little tarnished. After a decade of expansion, customers around the world don’t seem to be 'lovin’ it' any more. McDonald’s has revealed that worldwide sales dropped by 3.3% on 2013 in a set of results that were described as atrocious.
Problems are piling up almost everywhere. In China, sales plunged by 23% after a food scare when local media showed workers apparently caught on camera at a local supplier claiming to use out-of-date beef and chicken in products destined for McDonald’s and KFC. In Europe, sales are down by 4%, mostly because of unrest in Ukraine and the sour anti-western mood in Russia. Around 200 of McDonald’s 450 restaurants in Russia are being investigated by health inspectors in apparently politically motivated food-safety checks. Ten have been closed.
But it is in the US, where McDonald’s has around 40% of its restaurants, where the crisis runs deepest. Almost 60 years after Ray Kroc opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, consumers are losing their appetite for a Big Mac and fries.
McDonald’s has seen 12 straight months of declining 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 McDonald’s once a month has fallen by 13% since 2011, according to food analysts Technomic, while the number of 22-to-37-year- olds visiting has not grown.
To add to the company’s problems, McDonald’s 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. Fast-growing US-only chain Chick-fil-A was considered to be best for chicken. McDonald’s is also widely perceived as less healthy than most of its rivals, especially Chipotle, which trumpets its antibiotic-free meat and “locally sourced, seasonal produce” – although 'local' for Chipotle can mean 350 miles away.
The depth of consumer mistrust of McDonald’s 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 – referring to the controversial beef filler (gristle and fat) used for dog food that is sprayed with ammonia to make it “fit” for human consumption. The meat product, banned in Europe since the BSE crisis, was dropped by McDonald’s in 2012.
But pink slime has left doubts in US consumers’ minds. “Does McDonald’s beef contain worms?” asked another person (“No. Gross. End of story,” replied the company). Others wanted to know whether it uses real eggs or whether the McRib is made with the same plastic contained in yoga mats. McDonald’s Chief Executive Don Thompson acknowledged the company had a job to do in addressing misconceptions about the freshness, quality and integrity of its ingredients.
Yet, just as McDonald’s has been losing the customers who will pay a bit more for food perceived as 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 unjustified, said Mary Chapman at Technomic. “Prices have indeed gone up but they haven’t gone up as quickly as the rest of the fast-service chains in the US.” Prices at McDonald’s have increased by 4.8% since 2009, well below the “quick service” sector average (up 19.4%), while the cost of “fast casual” eating, a category that includes the much-hyped Chipotle, is up 16.9%, according to Technomic’s menu monitor. US consumer prices rose 11% over the same period.
But critics have a point when it comes to longer queues. McDonald’s 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, McDonald’s has turned around its business, making Britain a rare bright spot for the company. A competitive breakfast menu, improved coffee and free wi-fi had given McDonald’s a broad appeal in the UK, said Peter Martin of consultancy CGA Peach whose figures show that 56% of British adults have visited a McDonald’s restaurant at least once in the last six months.
Executives are promising to tackle 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 scratching their heads about how the company can square the circle of simpler menus and greater choice over fillings.
“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 McDonald’s 14,000 US restaurants had so far tested “build your own burger”, he said, raising questions about how it could be scaled up. “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 opened 1,400 new restaurants. Kalinowski expects McDonald’s market share will continue to shrink but he, too, warned against writing off the company. “You can never really count McDonald’s out. We think it will be number one in terms of total sales for not just years but decades to come.”


How far away are we from a world where drones deliver packages? If Amazon is to be believed, not far at all. Others are not so sure: technical progress past this point isn’t merely a matter of invention; it’s a matter of public safety.
Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice-president of global public policy, told a congressional hearing recently that his company would be ready as soon as all the rules were in place – but Misener gave no hints as to what that would look like beyond joking with a congressman that there was a basket of fresh fruit on the way to his doorstep to demonstrate the technology’s viability.
The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) will finally have regulations governing the commercial use of unmanned aircraft by June 2016. But the technology has a long way to go before then and larger machines aren’t airway-legal at all yet – only drones up to 25kg will be covered and the FAA points out in the proposed rules that, if you’re going to crowd the skies with radio-controlled flying robots, they had better all be using different radio frequencies that nobody can jam or hijack. Professor Sajiv Singh of Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, who runs a “critical cargo delivery” company called NearEarth, said that piloting a state-of-the-art drone was a little more like leaving it a trail of breadcrumbs: go to this altitude, perform this short task, go back home. But even short flights from a mobile landing pad pose serious logistical problems, he said.
“They’re not proposing to deliver from one uninhabited place to another uninhabited place; they’re proposing to deliver from a warehouse to where the consumer is, which is likely an urban area or a suburban area,” he said. “In those particular cases, there are going to be hazards along the way that the vehicle is going to have to detect. Maybe there will be terrain that the map doesn’t know about, unless you’ve mapped that exact route before. Even then, maybe there’s construction equipment that wasn’t there but is there now. Maybe GPS signals are blocked or partially blocked, in which case it’s going to have an incorrect idea about where it is.” All this is surmountable, he said – but it’s difficult. One major problem is maintaining radio contact with a drone and planning for what happens if that contact breaks. “If you have an off-the-shelf UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle], it’ll just keep going and crash into the ground,” said roboticist Daniel Huber.
That’s not a hard problem for an engineer to fix; it’s just that the fix isn’t yet an industry standard.
Furthermore, “you can’t do everything with a 25kg aircraft”, said Jay McConville, director of business development for unmanned systems at defence and business contractor Lockheed Martin MST. Much of the focus at Lockheed Martin has been on making drone piloting interfaces less like elaborate flight simulators. “Those of us in the aircraft business have to remind ourselves that the operator doesn’t really care about every little thing about the aircraft and wants instead to focus on the end result,” he said. “Operators want to see vehicle status information; they want to see video on their handheld device or their laptop.” “Technologically, most of the things that are needed for this are in place,” said Huber.
He is working on a program that proposes using drones to inspect infrastructure – pipelines, telephone lines, bridges and so on. “We’ve developed an exploration algorithm where you draw a box around an area and it’ll autonomously fly around that area and look at every surface and then report back.”
Huber, a senior scientist at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, where he works on 3D systems imagery, said with respect to a program like Amazon’s: “I have heard them say that many packages are lightweight – a drone can carry a kilogram for 15 minutes. If you have a vehicle that can go into a neighbourhood, it can deliver from that base. You need a 15-minute distance and typical off-the-shelf drones have about that distance.” It’s one way, he said, of making sure the surrounding population is relatively safe. “The larger you get, the more dangerous you get.” Logistical problems are in the middle of being solved in some very dramatic ways, Huber said. At a recent conference, he said, a disaster relief drone firm, SkyCatch, demonstrated a robot that could autonomously take off and, when it got tired, land on its own charging station. “It would land and take off and, when it ran low on batteries, it would land, exchange the batteries and take off again,” he said.
Of course, safety remains a major concern – Singh points out that, for a commercial aircraft to be considered skyworthy, it has to prove a rate of one serious failure every 1m hours. Drones, he said, are “one or two orders of magnitude away” from that benchmark. “The Reaper drone has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said. An oil leak, by the way, doesn’t count as catastrophic failure – something has to fall out of the sky. “We’re closing the gap,” Singh said. “There’s a lot of interest.”
Part of this is simply that air travel is inherently dangerous and, thus, standards are much higher. “If you fly commercial airlines, often they’ll say, ’Oh, a component has failed – we have to go back to the gate,’” Singh said. “And that’s an established industry with 60 years of legacy! I shudder to think that one of these things might come down on a crowded highway.” Part of the solution, Singh said, is simple contingency planning: “If things fail, the vehicle has to do something reasonable.”


Indignant waiters are calling for public support in a battle to hold on to their tips. PizzaExpress branches are to be targeted by protesters as part of an attempt to get the restaurant chain to stop creaming off a proportion of tips for staff that have been paid on credit and debit cards. Campaigners have also started an online petition in the hope that restaurant-goers will back their demands.
In a policy that has outraged some employees, PizzaExpress keeps, as an admin fee, 8p out of every £1 paid when tips are given by card. The chain, which has 430 branches around the UK and is particularly popular with families, makes an estimated £1m a year from the practice, according to the union Unite.
“We believe this 8% fee is unfair and that, if the chain values its staff, it should be paying them the total tips they are given by customers,” said Chantal Chegrinec, campaigns officer at Unite. “We are starting with PizzaExpress but they are by no means the only offender and we will be turning our attention to other companies after this.”
The protests are being organized by local branches of Unite, with the first taking place at the British Museum branch of PizzaExpress in London. The union has also written to the restaurant chain’s CEO, Richard Hodgson. Unite began the campaign following a survey of its PizzaExpress members after the chain was sold to a Chinese private equity firm, Hony Capital, in 2014. One of the top issues was the 8% deduction from their tips.
One disgruntled PizzaExpress employee, who wants to remain anonymous, said that the admin fee was costing her £3 a night. “I have worked at PizzaExpress for 15 years,” she said in a letter to Unite. “After all this time, I’m still only paid the national minimum wage of £6.50 an hour. So you see my colleagues and I are heavily reliant on customer tips to top up our low wages. I work hard and am good at my job but, when PizzaExpress thinks it can get away with taking a percentage of our hard-earned tips left on a card, I get upset.”
PizzaExpress joins restaurant chains Ask and Zizzi in siphoning off 8% of the tips paid by card but other chains deduct even more. Café Rouge, Bella Italia and Belgo deduct 10%, as do Strada and Giraffe, which is owned by Tesco.
A spokesperson for PizzaExpress said that its admin charge was to cover the cost of running a “tronc” – a standard pay arrangement used to distribute tips among staff. “We went to great lengths to set up this tronc system, which is chaired by a troncmaster and run by a committee of waiters and pizzaiolos who independently decide how tips made by electronic card payment are subsequently distributed between front- and back-of-house restaurant teams; a system run by employees for the employees,” she said.
The chain, which sells 29m pizzas a year through its UK restaurants, denied that it profits from the admin fee. But other restaurant groups do not deduct an admin fee from tips. Wagamama, Pizza Hut and TGI Friday all take nothing. The Restaurant Group, which owns Frankie & Benny’s, Chiquitos and Garfunkels, used to charge 10% but dropped this policy several years ago.
Unite recently targeted ten PizzaExpress restaurants in south London, distributing leaflets to customers who were “shocked and disgusted” by the practice. PizzaExpress says the charge is mentioned in small print at the bottom of its menus but the employee who wrote to Unite said that, when she mentioned the charge to customers, it always came as a surprise. Most would then pay the tip in cash. Almost 6,000 people have so far signed Unite’s online petition.
One waiter, who doesn’t work for PizzaExpress but has worked for 11 years for another restaurant chain, said that at least a third of his income is from tips. He doesn’t want to be identified for fear of reprisals. “I work in a busy London branch and, on an average night, I’ll serve 150 people and take home £40 to £50 in tips,” he says. “That might sound like a lot but that money is crucial to me as my basic pay is only £6.50 an hour.”
Conservative MP Andrew Percy, who has called for a change in the law that would give restaurant staff more control over tips, said he plans to raise the issue in parliament after the summer recess.”


The huge fortunes made by the world’s richest 100 billionaires are making inequality worse and stopping the world from being able to reduce poverty, says Oxfam.
Oxfam said the world could end poverty several times over if the richest 100 billionaires would give away the money they made in 2012.
The charity said that the $240bn made in 2012 by the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to end extreme poverty four times over.
It is unusual for charities to attack the wealthy, because they are usually seen as a source of money. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are among a group of 40 US billionaires who have said they will give much of their money to aid projects, but there is little information about how much money they give each year.
Russian, Middle Eastern and Chinese billionaires do not give away money to charity in the same way that US billionaires do.
In the report, the charity asks world leaders to end income extremes and reduce inequality.
The report said that the richest 1% of people have increased their incomes by 60% in the past 20 years.
Barbara Stocking, Oxfam’s Chief Executive, said: “We can no longer pretend that wealth for a few people will benefit many people – too often the opposite is true.”
The report said the problem affected all parts of the world. “In the UK, inequality is returning to levels not seen since the nineteenth century. In China, the top 10% now earn nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth.”
In the US, the share of national income that goes to the top 1% of people has doubled since 1980 from 10% to 20%, the report says.
The richest 1% are estimated to cause 10,000 times more pollution than the average US citizen.
Oxfam said world leaders should learn from countries such as Brazil, which has grown quickly and reduced inequality at the same time.
Stocking said that world leaders should agree to reduce inequality to the levels seen in 1990.
She said closing tax havens, which hold as much as $31 trillion, or as much as a third of all global wealth, could collect $189bn in additional taxes.


When you see the word Amazon, what’s the first thing you think of – the world’s biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet shop – and which do you think is most important?
These are the questions in a debate about the internet. Brazil and Peru have made objections to a bid made by the US online shop for the domain name, “.amazon”.
Amazon has asked for its company name to be a top-level domain name (currently “.com”), but the South American governments say this would stop the use of this internet address for environmental protection, indigenous rights and other public interest uses.
There are many other disputed claims to names, including “.patagonia”.
Until now, the differences between commercial, governmental and other types of identity were easy to see in every internet address by the use of “.com”, “.gov” and 20 other categories.
But soon there are going to be more of these categories – or generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as they are technically known.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has had bids (each worth almost $200,000) for hundreds of new gTLDs to add to the 22 that we use already.
Amazon has applied for many new domains, including “.shop”, “.song ”, “.book” and “.kindle ”. But the one that has caused most discussion is its application for “.amazon”.
Brazil and Peru want the “.amazon” application to be stopped. They say that a private company should not have a name that is also the name of an important geographical area.
“Allowing private companies to register geographical names as gTLDs to profit from the meaning of these names is not, in our view, in the public interest,” the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology said.
Brazil said other members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty support its views (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela).
There have also been other objections over new top-level domains that use geographical or cultural names.
Argentina is unhappy that the US outdoor clothing retailer, Patagonia, wants a domain name that has been known far longer as a region of spectacular beauty. “Argentina rejects the '.patagonia' request for a new generic top-level domain. Patagonia is an important region for the country’s economy because it has oil, fishing, mining and agriculture resources. It is also a major tourist destination.”
They will discuss the disputed bids again at a meeting of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee in Durban in July. The first new domain names will probably be in use before the end of 2013.


Intermediate
Brazils latest funk sensation, Anitta, has won millions of fans by making the favela sound popular, but she is at the centre of a debate about skin colour.
Anti-discrimination campaigners and social commentators say the music industrys fastest rising star has had to give up her blackness to be a success in the predominantly white middle-class market.
The controversy began with the publication of then-and-now photographs that show a dramatic lightening of Anittas skin tone since she signed a deal with Warner.
In the first photo, when she was quite unknown, she looked darker. In the second  a marketing photo after she became famous  she seems lighter. The contrast has restarted discussion about whether you need to have light skin to get ahead in Brazil.
Jarid Arraes, a psychology student and blogger, wrote a post criticizing the discrimination in media and marketing that she felt Anittas image change represented. People refuse to accept that they are racist and they think they live in a multiracial democracy, but the statistics show that is far from the case. White is the image of the rich, the nice, the successful, the good, while people see black as the opposite of all that.
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 Janeiros baile funk scene as a dancer and singer.
She now has an album and a huge hit single, Show das Poderosas, which topped the charts and attracted 52 million YouTube views.
Many people love her because she is a pop idol with a strong message and some catchy tunes. Her marketing team want people to see her as a cultural bridge between the predominantly black and mixed-race shanty towns on Rios hillsides and the wealthier and whiter communities below.
gangsta references and explicit lyrics of baile funk. Now, however, questions are being asked about whether she  or her marketing team  have gone too far in changing her. Arraes says that if pop stars have curly hair, they will want to straighten it. If they have a big nose, they will want to make it smaller. It creates a vicious cycle for how you feel about yourself.
This is a sensitive topic in this largely mixed-raced nation. Brazil  one of the last big countries in the world to ban slavery  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 tone and inequality.
In Brazilian cities, white workers earn roughly twice as much as those 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, while most menial jobs are done by black and mixed-race workers. If you walk through Ipanema, Gvea or other rich districts, you are far more likely to see black nannies pushing strollers with white children than a white nanny pushing a black child.
Defining colour is complex. People who define themselves as white were in the minority for the first time in the most recent 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.
Sylvio Ferreira, a psychology lecturer at the Federal University of Pernambuco, believes Anitta has won the hearts of the middle class by taking a rebellious sound and making it more acceptable to everyone.
Maycon de Mattos Batista, a financial analyst who worked with Anitta while she was an intern, said there had been a huge change in Anittas image, but not of her colour.
I dont believe its whitening; its more the way they are producing her with makeup, hairstylists and the way she dresses, he said. I dont 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 is where she is today.


The average six-year-old child understands more about digital technology than a 45-year-old adult, a new report says.
The arrival of broadband in the year 2000 has created a generation of digital natives, Ofcom (which checks standards in the UK communications industries) says in its report. These children, who were born in the new millennium, are learning how to use smartphones and tablets before they can talk.
Jane Rumble from Ofcom said that, because they are growing up in the digital age, children’s communication habits are different from older generations, even from the 16-to-24 age group.
800 children and 2,000 adults took Ofcom’s “digital quotient”, or DQ, test. The test finds out how much people know about tablets, smart watches, superfast internet, 4G mobile-phone networks and mobile apps. It also tries to find out how happy they feel about using them.
In 6- to 7-year-olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and online television, the average DQ score was 98. Adults aged between 45 and 49 scored an average of 96. Digital understanding is highest between 14 and 15 years old – this age group have an average DQ of 113.
People can now test their digital knowledge with a short version of the questionnaire. It will give anyone a DQ score. The website also gives people advice on how to improve their understanding and protect themselves and their families online.
The ways in which children contact each other are very different from older generations.
The biggest change is in time spent talking on the phone. Twenty years ago, teenagers spent their evenings on the home telephone line, talking about love and friendships in conversations that lasted for hours.
But, now, for children aged 12 to 15, phone calls make up just 3% of time spent communicating  through any device. For all adults, this rises to 20% and, for young adults, it is 9%. Today’s children communicate most by sending written messages or through sharing photographs and videos.
Over 90% of the time they spend using devices is spent sending messages: chatting on social networks like Facebook, sending instant messages through services like WhatsApp or even sending traditional mobile-phone text messages. Just 2% of children’s time using devices is spent emailing. Adults spent 33% of their time using devices emailing.
When they are not using their phones, 12- to 15-year-olds have a very different relationship with other media, too. A digital seven-day diary shows that only half of their viewing time is spent watching live television, compared to nearly 70% for all adults. They spend 20% of their time watching short video clips, for example on YouTube, or news clips on Facebook and other social sites. The rest of their viewing time is spent watching DVDs, streamed content through Netflix or iTunes and recorded television programmes.