Intermediate
Maria is sitting on a black plastic chair in a community centre on a cold Tuesday afternoon waiting for someone to call her number. She is number 34.
When its her turn, Maria goes to pick up a brown paper bag  lled with essentials including pasta, eggs and corn akes, and can choose between butternut squash or carrots as this weeks vegetables.
Maria is the 34th client so far today at East Hampton Food Pantry, just streets away from some of the most expensive houses in the world.
Each day at this time of year, more than 400 families collect their weekly food parcel from the food pantry. This food helps them survive the cold, dark Long Island winter.
The Hamptons are historic oceanfront towns and villages 100 miles from Manhattan. In the summertime, they are a billionaires playground. But, in early September, when the rich and famous shut up their mansions and go back to Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the glamour ends and the gritty reality of life begins for the mostly immigrant community who live here all year.
The people who come here are rich and famous but we who live here are not, says Maria, who works 14-hour days in the summer cleaning mansions but often has no work at all in the winter.
Maria laughs when asked if she has enough money. There is no work in the winter, only in the summertime, says Maria, who is from Latin America, like many of the workers in the Hamptons. Here, lots of people live in a single room because they cant pay the rent.
She says some families with up to  ve children have to live in basements and still pay more than $1,000 a month in rent. People come here looking for work but, in the winter, there is nothing.
Lots of her friends cant pay for heating or medication and many would go hungry if the East Hampton Food Pantry didnt exist, she says. It is just one of several food pantries in the town.
Vicki Littman is chairperson of the East Hampton Food Pantry, which provided more than 31,000 food parcels in 2015. She says there are more and more people coming to the food pantry.
Littman says that, when she talks to the people who come for the summer about the food pantries, they are always shocked because they know only the glamorous side of the Hamptons where there are big parties and the beaches and mansions.
But, what people dont realize is that there is that service industry. Its the landscapers, the nannies, the waitresses  they all rely on what they earn in the summer to survive the winter.
 Littman says the town has lost too many people who do important jobs  such as teachers, police of cers and even doctors and dentists  because they cant afford to live in the community.
 Housing is the biggest cost in the Hamptons. Larry Cantwell, who has lived in East Hampton all his life, says homes regularly change hands for more than $25m. Finding your  rst home is a challenge in an area like this, Cantwell says. If you can  nd a home to buy anywhere in East Hampton for $500,000, youre very lucky.
Cantwell says more than half the towns homes are empty for most of the year  this causes the population to go from 80,000 in August to 10,000 in the winter months.
 Theres certainly a lot of wealth here but almost all of that wealth is in second homes only used in the summer, says Cantwell, the son of a  sherman father and a house-cleaner mother. But, the rest of us live here year round.
There are famous and very wealthy people but also hard-working and poor people who struggle to get by. Youve got to remember that this community used to be a farming and  shing community of people who lived off the land and the water  a real working-class community.
Eddie Vallone, 22, says, People see the Hamptons as some sort of rich town but there are a lot of problems here, especially drugs. Its hard to grasp  OK, the summer is ending. What am I going to do for the winter? Vallone says. I want to work but theres no work to do.
 Vallone, who works cleaning pools and doing odd jobs on luxury estates, says that, if he saves well, his summer earnings can last until November. But, work doesnt start again until May or the beginning of June.


The roof is plastic and the desks just old chairs, but the students inside the Chemin des Dunes school are studying hard. They want a new life in France.
“The French language is very difficult but we try hard. If we come every day, maybe our dreams will come true,” says Kamal, a refugee from Sudan. He comes to three or four hours of classes every day. “It’s a good thing to keep your brain active.”
The 29-year-old electrical engineer is one of many refugees who live in the “jungle” camp outside Calais who have applied for asylum in France. They want to learn the language of their new home.
“I want people in the UK to know that not everyone wants to go there. There are a lot of people here who want to stay in France,” Kamal said.
France already has more than a quarter of a million refugees. There are also 56,000 asylum seekers who are waiting to see if they can stay in France.
While they wait for an answer, France does not give them any money or allow them to work. The wait can take many months. The jungle camp offers a free meal a day and a plastic roof over their heads. So, many people decide to live there and not work illegally because then they will not be allowed to stay in France.
Some of the asylum seekers suggested the idea for the school at the start of the summer.
They were bored with waiting and nervous about starting a new life in France totally unable to communicate. The school opened on 11 July.
“We did it so people can learn French,” said Zimarco Jones, the school’s Nigerian founder. He arrived in Calais in 2013 and is still waiting to hear if he will be allowed to stay in France. “Now, we need to build another school,” he says with a grin.
The tiny classroom can hold 30 pupils. There are five rows of desks in front of a big green chalkboard and pictures of cartoon animals for each letter of the French alphabet. There are also classes in English, art and t’ai chi. But the French lessons are the most popular. The teachers are volunteers from Calais and other places.
“French is not as easy as English but, two weeks ago, I decided there was no way to get to the UK,” says George, another refugee and student. He wanted to cross the Channel because he speaks fluent English but, with language classes, he says he is happy to stay in France.
“Anywhere there is peace, I can stay, no problem,” he says. He is already waiting at the classroom more than half an hour before his teachers arrive.
He says he doesn’t know much about France but the classes are slowly helping him understand the country and the language.
Many of the volunteers at the jungle school are local teachers who are giving up their summer holidays.
Jenny Flahaut, 33, who works at a children’s home, volunteered when she saw an advertisement on Facebook. “I saw these people in Calais every day and I wanted to do something for them,” she said.
“Most of them are very good people. They are welcoming and friendly. They want to improve their life and make it better, and learning is part of that,” Flahaut said as she prepared for an afternoon lesson.
The teachers and Zimarco now plan a separate classroom for around 200 women and 20 children. There are ten times more men than women in the Calais camp. Most of the women feel uncomfortable going to classes with male students they don’t know, the volunteers say.
Zimarco has more dreams for making the camp a place to live, not just survive. He wants to start a football team for migrants and dreams of changing the camp name. He hates “the jungle” because he says it sounds like the residents aren’t people.
“We have a discotheque, a house, a mosque, a school, shops,” he says. “We are not animals.”


Although much of his work, and arguably nearly all the best of it, was firmly within the discipline of the blues, BB King was always open-minded and interested when he found himself in other settings, bridging musical and cultural differences with affability and skill. Perhaps it is premature to speak of “the last of the bluesmen” but it is hard to imagine any future blues artist matching King’s influence over musicians by the thousand and audiences by the million in a career spanning 65 years.
Riley B King (the B did not seem to stand for a name) was born near Itta Bena, Mississippi and grew up with the limited prospects of an African-American agricultural worker, a barrier he gradually worked to overcome as he learnt the basics of guitar from a family friend and honed his singing with a quartet of gospel singers. In his early 20s, he moved to Memphis.
Within a couple of years, he was playing regularly at a bar in West Memphis, Arkansas. He also became a disc jockey, presenting a show on a Memphis radio station. His billing, “The Beale Street Blues Boy”, was shortened to “Blues Boy King” and thence to “BB”. After a single session in 1949 for a Nashville label, King began recording for the West Coast-based Modern Records in 1950.
He had his first hit in 1952, with a dramatic rearrangement of Three O’Clock Blues, which topped the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it was the first of a list of successes such as Please Love Me, You Upset Me Baby and Sweet Sixteen . On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history. He was always ready to praise the musicians who had influenced him and would usually mention T-Bone Walker first.
“I’ve tried my best to get that sound,” he told the Guitar Player magazine. “I came pretty close but never quite got it.” In an interview in 2001, he said: “If T-Bone Walker had been a woman I would have asked him to marry me.” But he would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
He once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style, like Elmore James and Booker White. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” He was similarly self-deprecating about his singing, a sumptuous blend of honey and lemon, mixed half-and-half from crooners such as Nat King Cole and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll.
Throughout the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist on the circuit of black-patronized theatres and clubs on an interminable series of one-nighters. In 1956, he is supposed to have filled 342 engagements. In 1962, he tried to change that working pattern by signing with a major label, ABC, but the first records under that contract, which tried to reshape him as a mainstream pop singer, were as unsatisfactory to his admirers as they were to ABC’s accountants.
The 1965 album Live at the Regal, however, proved the durability of King’s blues repertoire and has become iconic, a turning point in the early listening of many younger musicians. He had further R&B hits with blues numbers including How Blue Can You Get and Paying the Cost to Be the Boss , and, in 1969, he hit the upper reaches of the pop charts – where no blues artist had been for many years – with The Thrill Is Gone .
It took him a while to establish himself with a rock audience, for whom the blues was largely defined by the Chicago school of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf but he was brought to their attention by musicians who admired him. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “all of a sudden, kids started coming up to me saying, 'You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.' And I’d say, 'Who told you that?' And they’d say, 'Mike Bloomfield' or 'Eric Clapton'. It’s to these youngsters that I owe my new popularity.” He acquired further rock credibility with the 1970 album Indianola Mississippi Seeds, on which he collaborated with Carole King and Joe Walsh.
From then on, King was firmly established as “the chairman of the board of blues singers”. Guided by his manager, Sidney Seidenberg, he embarked on international concert tours that took him to Japan, Australia, China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners at the Cook County jail in Chicago and at San Quentin, experiences that led to his long involvement in rehabilitation programmes.
In 1990, King was diagnosed with diabetes and cut back his touring but not so much that his followers outside the US could not catch up with him every year or two. Though he would now deliver most of his act seated, the strength of his singing and the fluency of his playing were only very gradually diminished. The celebrations for his 80th birthday, in 2005, included an award-winning album of collaborations with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, tributes from musicians as diverse as Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “farewell tour” that proved not to be a farewell at all.
In 2009, King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012, he performed at a concert at the White House, where the US President, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago. King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others predeceased him.


Intermediate
Nelson Mandela, the towering figure of Africas struggle for freedom and a hero to millions around the world, has died at the age of 95.
South Africas first black president died with his family beside him at home in Johannesburg after years of illness, which had caused him to stop taking part in public life.
The news was announced to the country by the current president, Jacob Zuma. He said Mandela had departed around 8.50pm local time and was at peace.
This is the moment of our deepest sorrow, Zuma said. Our nation has lost its greatest son. What made Nelson Mandela great was exactly what made him human. We saw in him what we look for in ourselves.
Fellow South Africans, Nelson Mandela brought us together and it is together that we will bid him farewell.
Zuma announced that Mandela would receive a state funeral and ordered that flags fly at half-mast.
Barack Obama led tributes from world leaders, referring to Mandela by his clan name  Madiba. The US president said: Through his fierce dignity and strong will to sacrifice his own freedom for the freedom of others, Madiba transformed South Africa  and moved all of us.
UK prime minister David Cameron said: A great light has gone out in the world and described Mandela as a hero of our time.
FW de Klerk  the South African president who freed Mandela and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993  said the news was deeply sad for South Africa and the world.
He lived reconciliation. He was a great unifier, de Klerk said.
People gathered in the streets of South Africa to celebrate Mandelas life.
In Soweto, people gathered to sing and dance near the house where he once lived. They sang songs from the anti-apartheid struggle. Some people were wrapped in South African flags and the green, yellow and black colours of Mandelas party, the African National Congress (ANC)
Mandelas death sends South Africa deep into mourning and self-reflection, nearly 20 years after he led the country from racial apartheid to democracy for all.
But his passing will also be felt by people around the world who considered Mandela to be one of historys last great statesmen, comparable with Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
It was his act of forgiveness, after spending 27 years in prison, 18 of them on Robben Island, that will assure his place in history. With South Africa facing possible civil war, Mandela chose reconciliation with the white minority to build a new democracy.
He led the ANC to victory in the countrys first multiracial election in 1994. He then voluntarily stepped down after one term.
Born Rolihlahla Dalibhunga in a small village in the Eastern Cape on 18 July, 1918, Mandela was given his English name, Nelson, by a teacher at his school.
He joined the ANC in 1943 and became a co-founder of its youth league. In 1952, he started South Africas first black law firm with his partner, Oliver Tambo.
Mandela was a charming, charismatic figure with a passion for boxing and an eye for women. He once said: I cant help it if the ladies notice me. I am not going to protest.
When the ANC was banned in 1960, Mandela went underground. After the Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 black protesters were shot dead by police, he took the difficult decision to begin an armed struggle. He was arrested and eventually charged with sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government.
Conducting his own defence in the Rivonia trial in 1964, he said: I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society, in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if necessary, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
He was not given the death penalty but was sentenced to life in prison.
Finally, in 1990, FW de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and Mandela was released from prison, to scenes of great happiness that were seen around the world.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said:  He restored others faith in Africa and Africans.
Mandelas 91st birthday was marked by the first annual Mandela Day in his honour. Married three times, he had six children, 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.


Unusually for someone who likes to chat, Kenton Cool can barely speak. Exerting himself at high altitude has left his voice a throaty growl. He is now in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, having flown down from Everest base camp that morning. Cool is reflecting on a startling sequence of climbs completed over the course of the previous weekend. Early on Saturday morning, he reached the summit of Nuptse, the first and lowest of the three main summits in the Everest “horseshoe” that surrounds the glaciated valley called the Western Cwm.
That same day, he climbed up to the summit of Everest itself, reaching the top in complete darkness early on Sunday. He and his climbing partner then continued on to the summit of Lhotse, the third of this spectacular three-peaks challenge, on Monday morning.
“It was a snatched opportunity,” he says. “For the first time since the late 1990s, there were fixed ropes on all three mountains. That doesn’t take away the physical achievement of what I did. I’ve set the bar at a certain level. But whoever comes along next will move the bar further and do it without ropes or bottled oxygen.”
Sixty years after Everest was first climbed, much of the coverage is looking back to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and their age of innocence from the modern era of commercialism and environmental degradation. I’ve asked Cool to look forward and imagine what top climbers might be doing 60 years from now.
“I hate to think,” he says, but mentions the Swiss climber, Ueli Steck, who fled the mountain in April following what Cool terms “an altercation” with a crowd of Sherpas at Camp 2. Steck, he says, was planning to climb Everest’s west ridge, first done in 1963, descend to the South Col and then immediately climb Lhotse via a new route, all without fixed ropes. “Ueli had been training like a machine,” Cool says. “He’s a climber in a class all his own. He’s technically brilliant but he had also taken his physical condition to an astronomic level. It would have been amazing to see what he could have done.”
What tourism will look like is another matter. One clue is in the stunning helicopter rescue performed by Simone Moro, Steck’s climbing partner, whose intemperate language provoked the confrontation at Camp 2. Moro flew back to Everest on Tuesday at the controls of a high- powered helicopter to rescue a stricken climber at an altitude of 7,800 metres.
It was the highest rescue yet performed on Everest and highlights the exponential rise in helicopter flights in recent years. By 2073, the infrastructure on the mountain could include a helipad on the South Col, bringing tourists breathing bottled oxygen. In the meantime, they are transforming the potential for rescuing both climbers and the far more numerous trekkers heading as far as base camp.
Whether the Everest region can continue to cope with a booming tourism sector remains to be seen, according to mountain geographer and environmentalist, Alton Byers. The combination of climate change and tourism, he says, is creating new stresses on the Sherpa homeland. The retreat, and in some cases disappearance, of glaciers in the Everest region are having a major impact already. “Everywhere you go, people are talking about how there’s less water. There’s less water for agriculture and less water for all the new lodges that are getting built.”
In the Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar, he says, a new five-mile pipeline is being laid to bring water to service the growing tourist demand for showers and flush toilets. The local stream has become contaminated with human waste and does not provide enough water for a place that, in high season, is bursting at the seams. “Every village is digging a pit just beyond the houses for garbage. Khumbu has the highest landfill sites in the world,” he says. Human waste at base camp is now managed well and removed in plastic barrels. But, according to Byers, these barrels are emptied into a huge pit a few hours down the valley that could leak into the region’s watercourses.
“These problems can be solved, but we need to get serious about it,” he says. “One climber can spend $85,000 climbing Everest. And that’s fine. But at some point we’re going to have to address these other priorities. For half a million dollars a year, you could solve most of them.”
Climate change is another matter. Byers works with local conservation committees to identify and plan for the impacts of climate change, most usually finding new water sources or introducing rainwater harvesting. The rapid build-up of glacial lakes that threaten to burst and flood the Sherpa homeland is a constant threat. “There’s going to come a time when people are going to have to get out of their way.”
Changing weather patterns are also having an impact on tourism. Increased cloud cover in periods of normally clear weather is closing Lukla Airport, the gateway to the Everest region, more often. A new road for 4x4s is being built to Lukla to guarantee the flow of tourists and their money, but Byers is concerned that the rapid spread of the road network in Nepal is being done on the cheap, with disastrous consequences in terms of soil erosion and landslides.
“Everest is the icon everyone knows,” he says. “It’s the canary in the coalmine that everyone understands. It’s the perfect laboratory for figuring out how to address some of these problems, like the impacts of climate change and tourism.”


Our new international survey across 33 countries shows just how wrong the world is about a range of key social realities.
British people think the top 1% wealthiest households own 59% of their country’s wealth, when they actually “only” own 23%. Americans think that 33% of their population are immigrants, when in fact it is only 14%.
Brazilians think the average age in their country is 56, when it is only 31. Russians think that 31% of their politicians are women, when it is only 14%.
In Britain, people think that an extraordinary 43% of young adults aged 25-34 still live at home with their parents, rather than the actual 14%. In India, the online population think 60% of the whole country also has internet access, when in fact only 19% do.
Why are people across the world so often so clueless about these realities?
It is partly that we just struggle with basic maths and some of us clearly misunderstand the questions or interpret them differently. For example, most countries hugely overestimate how many people do not affiliate themselves with a religion: across the 33 countries, 37% do not, according to respondents, but the average is actually just 18%. This will be partly because we will be thinking of how many people practise their religion, rather than what they put on census forms.
People also take mental shortcuts, where they grab for easily available information even if it doesn’t quite fit the question. Our huge overestimates of the rural populations in most countries will be affected by how much of the physical landmass rural areas make up, rather than a careful calculation of how unoccupied it generally is. In Daniel Kahneman’s terms, answers to these sorts of questions are classic examples of “fast” thinking, rather than “slow”.
We are tied to our own perspective and struggle to imagine the variety in our countries, as highlighted by our Indian sample’s massively overestimating their population’s access to the internet. Our study was mostly carried out through an online survey – and, in developing countries, this will be representative of a more affluent, connected group rather than the population as a whole. In some ways, we may have expected this more educated sample to get closer to reality – those with higher education levels tend to be more accurate on these types of questions. But what we find, throughout the study, is that people grossly generalize from their own situations, forgetting how unrepresentative they are.
We suffer from what social psychologists call “emotional innumeracy” when estimating realities: this means we are sending a message about what is worrying us as much as trying to get the right answers. Cause and effect run both ways, with our concern leading to our misperceptions as much as our misperceptions creating our concern.
For Britain, this is likely to be part of the explanation for people’s huge overestimates of how much the wealthiest own, how many young people are still living at home and what proportion of the population are immigrants (the guess is 25%, when it is really only 13%, according to official estimates). People are worried about the concentration of wealth, the housing pressures facing young people and immigration levels, and this is reflected in them overstating the scale of the issues.
But, the survey suggests there are also some issues where people are not as worried as they should be. For example, most countries hugely underestimate how much of their population is overweight or obese. The worst case is Saudi Arabia, where people think only 28% are, when 71% are. Britons think it is 44%, when it is actually nearly half as much again – 62% are either overweight or obese.
And, in many ways, it is not our misperceptions but these realities across different countries that are the most interesting and important aspects of the study. The top 1% in Russia own 70% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% in New Zealand only own 18%. Half of Italians aged 25-34 still live with their parents, when it is only 4% in Norway.
The average age in India is 27; it is 47 in Japan. Only 10% of politicians are women in Brazil, Hungary and Japan, when 44% are in Sweden.
When the reality is so strange and varied, it is no wonder we’re so wrong.


The threatened extinction of the tiger in India, the perilous existence of the orangutan in Indonesia, the plight of the panda: these are wildlife emergencies with which we have become familiar. They are well-loved animals that no one wants to see disappear. But, now, scientists fear the real impact of declining wildlife could be closer to home, with the threat to creatures such as ladybirds posing the gravest danger to biodiversity.
Climate change, declining numbers of animals, rising numbers of humans and the rapid rate of species extinction mean a growing number of scientists now declare us to be in the Anthropocene – the geological age of extinction when humans finally dominate the ecosystems.
WWF’s Living Planet Index (LPI) 2014 seemed to confirm that grim picture, with statistics on the world’s wildlife population that showed a dramatic reduction in numbers across countless species. The LPI showed the number of vertebrates had declined by 52% over four decades. Biodiversity loss has now reached “critical levels ”. Some populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians have suffered even bigger losses, with freshwater species declining by 76% over the same period.
But it’s the creatures that provide the most “natural capital” or “ecosystem services” that are getting many scientists really worried. Three quarters of the world’s food production is thought to depend on bees and other pollinators such as hoverflies. Never mind how cute a panda is or how stunning a tiger – it’s worms that are grinding up our waste and taking it deep into the soil to turn into nutrients, and bats that are catching mosquitoes and keeping malaria rates down. A study in North America has valued the loss of pestcontrol from ongoing bat declines at more than $22bn in lost agricultural productivity.
“It’s the loss of the common species that will impact on people, not so much the rarer creatures because, by the very nature of their rarity, we’re not reliant on them in such an obvious way,” said Dr Nick Isaac, a macroecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire. He says that recent work he and colleagues have been doing suggests that Britain’s insects and other invertebrates are declining just as fast as vertebrates, with “serious consequences for humanity”. “The really interesting thing about this work is that we are learning that it’s not just about the numbers of species going extinct, but the actual numbers in a population; that’s the beginning of a fundamental shift in our understanding,” he says.
He pointed to the fact that between 23 and 36% of all birds, mammals and amphibians used for food or medicine are now threatened with extinction. In many parts of the world, wild- animal food sources are a critical part of the diet, particularly for the poor.
The blame, most agree, sits with unsustainable human consumption damaging ecosystems, creating climate change and destroying habitats at a far faster rate than previously thought. But, this time, it’s not just the “big, cuddly mammals” we have to worry about losing but the smaller, less visible creatures upon which we depend – insects, creepy- crawlies and even worms. They might not be facing immediate extinction but a decline in their numbers will affect us all. “We are going to feel the impact of those losses. With the UK species, the pattern is much the same with invertebrates as it is with vertebrates. It’s not as simplistic as 'fish die and people starve' – it’s more complex,” said Isaac.
Humans, said TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough in 2013, are a “plague on earth”, but WWF claims there is still time to stop the rot. Its UK Chief Executive, David Nussbaum, said: “The scale of the destruction highlighted in this report should act as a wake-up call for us all. We all – politicians, business and people – have an interest, and a responsibility, to act to ensure we protect what we all value: a healthy future for people and nature.
“Humans are cutting down trees more quickly than they can regrow, harvesting more fish than the oceans can restock, pumping water from our rivers and aquifers faster than rainfall can replenish them and emitting more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb,” he said.


Intermediate
We asked five people who do some unusual jobs how much they are paid, what the worst parts are and why they enjoy their work.
1. Dog-food taster The job: Tasting dog food to make sure it meets a top brands quality standards
What it involves: Opening sample tins of each batch of dog (or cat) food, smelling it and eating it. Although dogs sense of taste is different from ours, tasting is an important quality check to ensure each different ingredient is perfectly balanced in just the right way, says Philip Wells, the chief taster for Lilys Kitchen pet food.
Typical salary: 20,000 for an entry-level job in the quality department. However, Wells says an experienced technical director can easily earn 50,000 or more.
Worst part of the job: The deadlines, for Wells, who admits he quite likes the food. The meat used in pet food has to come from animals that are fit for human consumption, under the Animal Feed Regulations 2010. He adds: There are some pretty terrible pet foods out there and, although I dont taste them, the smell is enough to turn the stomach.
Job satisfaction: No two days are ever the same. Wells finds it rewarding that a project he has worked on will help pets to become happier and healthier. However, he acknowledges that some of the credit must go to another key member of the tasting team: Lily, the border terrier.
2. Hygiene technician The job: Disinfecting areas that might have been exposed to bio-hazardous situations
What it involves: Cleaning up crime scenes, road accidents and suicides. Clearing houses full of rubbish, rats and excrement  among other things. The job is about keeping people safe, says Richard Lewis, a hygiene technician for Rentokil. We deal with some extremely dirty sites.
Typical salary: The entry-level salary is usually around 14,500 and a top salary can be up to 22,000.
Worst part of the job: Cleaning up after suicides. You get used to the job being disgusting but the emotional side of it is still hard, he says. You also need to have a sense of humour because some days can be difficult.
Job satisfaction: Lewis finds the variety of tasks exciting. One day, Im cleaning up after a dead body; another day, Im in a prison cell or high in the air being lowered down into a silo to clean it. He also takes pride in the changes he makes: Its satisfying to make a hazardous site safe again. And it benefits society.
3. Biogas engineer The job: Setting up biogas plants in developing countries
What it involves: Linking a system  which can be filled with human excrement, animal dung and other waste products  to toilets to produce a biogas that can be used for cooking and lighting. You have to know what size and shape the mixing pit needs to be, how to create the best temperature for the process and where to build the biogas plant, says Baburam Paudel, chief technical officer in Nepal for the charity Renewable World.
Typical salary: An entry-level salary is around 10,000, while a typical salary for a chief technical officer is 30,000.
Worst part of the job: For Paudel, its seeing people struggling to survive on very little income. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty during the build process and inspections. Unsurprisingly, the anaerobic digestion (the process that takes place when bacteria eat the waste and produce methane) smells like rotten eggs. It can be disgusting and there is no room for mistakes.
Job satisfaction: I find it very satisfying to know that I am helping people to increase their incomes and allowing girls to go to school by replacing the need to collect firewood, says Paudel. My work improves the health and hygiene of whole communities.
4. Eel ecologist The job: Conserving the critically endangered European eel
What it involves: To monitor the size of the endangered eels, ecologists walk into the Thames and other London rivers full of eels, sometimes up to their armpits, and reach into a net filled with up to 20 adult eels to take one out with their bare hands. Adult eels can be a metre long, or even larger, and weigh up to 2kg. Theyre not at all dangerous but they are almost pure muscle and they can be a little bit slimy, says Stephen Mowat, an eel conservationist and ecologist for the Zoological Society of London. We have to weigh and measure them, and they wriggle  a lot. Its difficult to look professional while crawling on the ground chasing an eel across the grass.
Worst part of the job: Eels are really tricky creatures to work with says Mowat. You also have to be ready to jump from one project to the next. I once had to cut up some dead eels to examine parasites living in them, moments before putting on a suit for a meeting. But, for Mowat, the worst part of the job is definitely not handling the eels  he believes baby eels (known as elvers) are as cute as pandas: The worst thing about the job is regularly learning how much damage we are doing to the environment.
Job satisfaction: Working outdoors and seeing British wildlife up close is the best part of the job, says Mowat. Eels are beautiful creatures and working with eels doesnt just benefit the eel  it helps rivers and coastal areas. That is something worth doing.
5. Shopping channel presenter The job: Selling and demonstrating a wide range of products on live TV
What it involves: Presenting hours and hours of monotonous TV, while, at the same time, demonstrating the products and appearing to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about everything that youre selling. I prepare and research as much technical and practical information as possible on every single product beforehand, says Shaun Ryan, presenter for Ideal World TV.
Typical salary: A trainee presenter would start on a minimum of 30,000, while an experienced presenter can expect over 55,000.
Worst part of the job: The unsociable hours, says Ryan. An experienced presenter like me generally has to work weekends, bank holidays and very late evenings, plus, occasionally, a 5am shift.
Job satisfaction: I love the rush of live presenting and having to think on my feet every second, says Ryan. I also get an adrenaline rush from knowing that, at times, I have thousands of viewers ordering the product that I have just been presenting.


The continual relegation of women to the sidelines of football was given a good kicking when France appointed its first female professional team manager. It did not matter that it was a second-division club. It did not matter if it was, as some bad sports – male, of course – suggested, just a cynical stunt to drum up publicity for a minor team, Clermont Foot 63, currently ranking a lowly 14th out of 20 in its league.
What mattered was that Helena Costa had been given the top job, a move that saw her make football history by becoming the first female manager to be appointed in the highest two divisions of any professional European league. “As a woman, it’s made me happy,” Véronique Soulier, president of the club’s supporters’ association, told journalists. “When I first heard the news, I was rather surprised, but, once that passed, we were pretty unanimous that it’s good news. We all agree that a woman at the head of a group of men is no bad thing.”
The new manager of Clermont Foot 63, whose average home crowd at the stadium at Clermont- Ferrand in the Auvergne region of south-central France is around 3,800, is a former talent spotter for the Scottish Premiership side Celtic. Costa, 36, was born in Alhandra on the River Tagus in southeast Portugal and graduated with a master’s degree in sports science. She is also a UEFA-licensed coach. She previously coached Benfica’s male youth teams, the Qatar women’s team, which she led to its first international victory in 2012, and, more recently, the Iranian women’s national side, which she left in September 2013.
Costa was appointed on a two-year contract by the president of Clermont Foot 63, Claude Michy, who is a champion at grabbing the headlines for his club. In 2013, he announced the team had signed Messi. They had. Not the Argentinian and FC Barcelona record-breaking striker Lionel Messi, but Junior Messi Enguene, a 20-year-old midfielder from Cameroon.
France’s women’s minister, Najat Vallaud- Belkacem, tweeted: “Bravo to Clermont Foot for understanding that giving women a place is the future of professional football.”
Carolina Morace, an Italian who was the only previous woman coach of a men’s professional team, said: “I don’t know Helena, but, if she has been hired by a team, then it means that she knows how to do her job. I hope that, one day, this can become normal.” Morace was an outstanding player in the women’s game. She was the top scorer for 12 seasons in Italy’s Serie A and played for Italy in 153 internationals. In 1999, she was named as the coach of Viterbese in the men’s Serie C1. But, after only two games, she resigned from the job following a clash with the club’s mercurial proprietor, Luciano Gaucci, who at the time was also the owner of a Serie A side, Perugia.
Morace was quoted as saying that she had refused Gaucci’s demand that she fire her deputy and the side’s trainer. “He let me know that I could carry on working with whomever I wanted. But, by then, mutual trust was lacking and I didn’t fancy carrying on in that climate of uncertainty,” she said. Morace works today as a lawyer in Rome and as expert soccer commentator on television and in the pages of the daily Gazzetta dello Sport.
She said: “For the time being, I see too many men, even in the women’s game, who are working, despite not having the same expertise as women, who, by contrast, are not working.” Raymond Domenech, former manager of the French national team, said: “Women know how to play football and how to manage and are good at doing it. Why shouldn’t they manage men’s teams? The opposite happens and doesn’t cause any problems. It’s a natural choice and reflects our society in which women are equal to men. I say well done to President Michy. I told myself that, if I took charge of a club again, I’d hire a woman as my number two. He beat me to it.”
A statement on Clermont Foot 63’s website said Costa’s appointment would allow the club to enter “a new era”. On the club supporters’ website, reaction to Costa’s appointment was a mix of surprise and a certain cynicism. “In my opinion, it’s just a publicity stunt to get people talking about the club and she won’t last the season. I find it hard to believe she’ll be able to get the players’ respect, above all when she’s the same age as the oldest,” wrote one fan. “Her CV isn’t bad, but now the question is: will she be good enough?” added another. A third wrote: “I wish her welcome and success but I think it’ll be hard for her to make her mark as a woman in such a macho business. Has our president pulled off a media coup?”
But Soulier was hopeful: “Hopefully, with the new manager, the club can find the motivation they’re lacking at the moment,” she said. “The boys in the team can be difficult to manage. With a woman in charge, maybe they’ll be less demanding.”
If Costa’s reputation is anything to go by, she will be the one making the demands. After doing work experience at Chelsea during her compatriot José Mourinho’s first stint as manager of the club between 2004 and 2007, she was reportedly described as “Mourinho in a skirt”. Costa quickly kicked the sexist remark into touch. “Like Mourinho, I always want to win. As far as that’s concerned, yes, I’m happy to be compared with him,” she said.


We do not yet live in an age of flying cars, as predicted in the 1985 film Back to the Future II, but smartphones and other new technologies are creating exciting possibilities. Experts agree that economic and population changes, new technology, and environmental concerns are having a big effect on transportation.
With an ageing transport infrastructure, cities in the US have to change and improve their transportation. Experts and scientists now realize that old ways of reducing traffic congestion aren’t enough to solve the problems of population growth and carbon emissions, and transportation is now an environmental problem.
Big US cities like Los Angeles and Chicago are adding more bus lanes and pedestrian walkways, and expanding rail networks. At the same time, they are creating advanced technologies that will allow a vehicle to drive itself and communicate with other vehicles and its environment.
Here are three of the key ideas that experts predict will change transportation in the future.
Taxi-sharing services like Uber and apps like Waze, which finds the quickest routes for drivers, are completely changing how people move around and affecting the way traffic moves through a city. Communication between riders and drivers, between different vehicles and between cars and infrastructure is bringing transportation into a new era.
According to a recent study, people born in the 1990s are using cars less than older generations. According to the study, people born in the 1990s are making 4% fewer car trips and travelling 18% fewer miles per year, on average, than older generations did at the same time in their lives. And, people who still drive cars are experiencing less traffic thanks to Waze.
Traffic congestion is improving in other ways, too. At the moment, a traffic light knows when a car is getting close but that’s all. Companies are developing technology that allows a vehicle to tell traffic control systems not only that it is present but also where it is going and how fast it is travelling.
We have known about driverless cars ever since Google began testing the vehicles in 2012 but no-one really knows when driverless cars will become commonplace. But, there is already some automation of cars. Automation will probably happen in stages: first, there might be automated buses with their own lanes, then perhaps lorries in ports or mining towns: vehicles that are connected electronically and travel one behind another.
The idea of a fully automated transportation system is interesting because it could improve safety – people’s mistakes won’t cause accidents any more. It could also help reduce carbon emissions and traffic congestion. But, it will take a long time to get fully automated because the average age of cars on the road is 11.5 years old.
To see what driverless cars might look like on the road, go to the video at: vimeo.com/37751380 .
The world is trying to slow down climate change and countries and cities are trying to reduce emissions. These things could have a big effect on the future of transportation and lead to zero- and low-emission vehicles and apps that encourage more walking, cycling and carpooling.
When thinking about the future of transportation, it’s also important to think about why people travel: they may be going to work, to meet friends or family, or to do the shopping. Technologies that reduce the need for those trips – for example, online meetings or online work – could also have a big effect on transportation.


Loneliness has finally become a hot topic – the Office for National Statistics has found Britain to be the loneliest country in Europe. British people are less likely to have strong friendships or know their neighbours than residents anywhere else in the EU and a relatively high proportion of them have no one to rely on in a crisis. Meanwhile, research by Professor John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago has found loneliness to be twice as bad for older people’s health as obesity and almost as great a cause of death as poverty.
But, shocking as this is, such studies overlook the loneliness epidemic among younger adults. In 2010, the Mental Health Foundation found loneliness to be a greater concern among young people than 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 – there are day centres and charities to help them,” says Sam Challis, an information manager at the mental health charity Mind, “but, when young people reach 21, they’re 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, cognitive decline and is a known factor in suicide. In a new essay, Paul Farmer, the chief executive of Mind, and Jenny Edwards, the chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, say it can be both a cause and effect of mental health problems.
But what can young people do to combat loneliness? Dr Grant Blank, a survey research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, points out that social media and the internet can be a boon 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 portrayed in the media,” says Challis. Comparing friends’ seemingly perfect lives with ours can lead us to withdraw socially.
While meditation techniques and apps such as Headspace are trendy solutions frequently recommended for a range of mental health problems, they’re not necessarily helpful for loneliness, as they actively encourage us to dwell alone on our thoughts. “You’d be better off addressing the underlying causes of being lonely first – what’s stopping you going out and seeing people?” asks Challis.
Indeed, a study of social media at the University of Michigan in 2013 found that, while Facebook reduces life satisfaction, using technology to help you meet new people can be beneficial. And, if for whatever reason, you are unable to venture outside, the internet can bring solace. Mumsnet has been “an absolute godsend” for Maddy Matthews, 19, a student with a two-month-old daughter. Since the birth, she rarely sees her university friends and her partner works most evenings. “In the first few days, I was up late at night feeding her and I was worried I was doing something wrong. Being able to post on Mumsnet has helped me feel less alone.”
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 seek help with emotional and mental health issues often linked to loneliness. There are also support services on websites such as Mind’s that can remind you you’re not alone.
At work, it can be beneficial to tell your employer how you’re feeling. John Binns, who advises businesses on mental health and well-being, 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 he wasn’t close enough to colleagues for them to notice the changes in his behaviour. Greater openness with his employer and colleagues made his return to work easier. “Often people find that colleagues are more supportive than they’d expected. Mine started to reach out, asking me to lunch and reassuring me that the world hadn’t moved on that much since I’d left.”
Office chit-chat may seem like a waste of time, but it helps to cushion us from the emotional and psychological effects of work strain. “If you form connections with your team, you might be stressed but not isolated,” says Rick Hughes,
the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s (BACP) lead adviser for the workplace.
“We treat the networks we have as incidental but they’re fundamental to our well-being,” says Nicky Forsythe, a psychotherapist and the founder of Talk for Health, a social enterprise that trains people to give and receive peer 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.”
For developing personal skills such as empathy, counselling can help. The BACP website allows you to search for counsellors in your area. “A problem aired is a problem shared and sometimes you need to talk to someone impartial and independent of your friends and family,” says Hughes. Most universities offer students such counselling and many run group sessions that specifically address loneliness.
If recent research is to be believed, loneliness is killing the elderly and, with an ageing population, we should aim to reduce our isolation before it is too late. “Getting older doesn’t have to mean getting lonelier,” says Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of the relationship counselling service Relate, in a new report. “But much of this rests on laying the foundations to good-quality relationships earlier in life.”


The inventor of a state-of-the-art computer-assisted autopsy system that is increasingly being used in European hospitals has claimed the technique could eventually mean there is no such thing as a 'perfect murder'.
The method, called 'Virtopsy', is now being used at selected forensic medical institutes in Europe, having been pioneered by a group of scientists at the University of Zurich. Instead of reaching for the scalpel and making the Y-shaped incision in the chest with which a traditional autopsy begins, pathologists are now able to examine the corpse in 3-D via computer screens.
Michael Thali, the Director of Zurich’s Institute for Forensic Medicine in Europe, and one of the inventors of Virtopsy, said it had the potential to revolutionize criminal investigations. “Basically there will be no such thing as the perfect murder any more as a virtual autopsy allows you to find every piece of evidence,” he said.
Virtopsies combine the images from high-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) and surface scans of dead bodies. Combined, the devices are referred to as a 'Virtobot'. The technique allows the detection of injuries such as lesions and blows often undetectable during a traditional autopsy, as well as air pockets, heart attacks and even cancer.
“The Virtopsy has the potential to replace the autopsy one day,” Richard Dirndorfer, one of the pioneers of DNA analysis in criminology, and a founder developer of Virtopsy, told the German science magazine PM . “I think we’ll see it happen gradually, just like DNA analysis gradually replaced blood group analysis,” he said.
The computer imaging techniques allow doctors to gain in-depth insights into the deepest interiors of dead bodies. The method has already allowed the discovery of haemorrhages and fractures that were not picked up during conventional autopsies. The initial aim is to use the new method to complement the traditional autopsy.
“It will enable forensic scientists to plan their autopsies far more efficiently,” Dominic Wichmann, an internal medicine specialist at Hamburg’s University Hospital, told Spiegel. Criminologists from around the world have been travelling to Switzerland over the past few years to see the development of the new method for themselves.
The US forensic medical drama CSI has already twice featured Virtopsies. In one, the system was able to prove that a murder victim was killed by a bullet through the cheek; in another, a Virtopsy on a murdered man meant his wish to be cryogenically frozen could still go ahead as his body remained intact.
The method has been under development for decades, with the scientists behind it first housed in an unheated laboratory on a university campus where they were considered a bit of a laughing stock. Later, a donation from a rich ophthalmologist enabled the project to take off. Even then it was initially rejected for its potential to undermine the traditional skills of forensic scientists and pathologists. But a new generation appears to be seeing it as less of a threat and rather as something that will complement and substantiate conventional methods and possibly even one day replace them, though probably not entirely.
“In order to analyze the colour of the blood, the consistencies (of body fluids) or smells, we’ll need to keep on with the conventional cut,” said Lars Oesterhelweg, Deputy Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, which is using a version of the Virtopsy.
He added that the new method was particularly helpful in re-examining cases where the cause of death was unclear. “It means that third opinions can be gathered, investigations can be re-examined and cases can be reopened,” he said.
Scientists using the new method said that relatives of the dead, who are often reluctant for autopsies to be carried out because of the disfigurement they cause, were much keener on the non-invasive method.


Robert Mysłajek stops. Between two paw prints on a mountain path, the scientist finds what he is looking for. “Droppings!” he says happily. It is so rare to see a wolf that seeing droppings makes it a good day.
But it is getting easier to see a wolf. There are now about 1,500 wolves in Poland. The number has doubled in 15 years. The wolf, the brown bear, the lynx and the wolverine are Europe’s last large predator carnivores. Scientists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are coming here to find out how the country has saved wolves who have a bad reputation even in fairy tales.
Bits of bone and hair stick out from the droppings. “It ate a red deer,” says Myslajek. “I can tell you all about this wolf – what it eats, if it’s a male or female, its sexual habits, age, health and family connections.”
DNA tests have shown that Polish wolves are travellers. “One wolf walked to the Netherlands, where it was hit by a car. They travel very far. They need space. The average territory of a Polish pack is 250 square kilometres,” said Mysłajek.
The scientist says wolves can move up to 30 kilometres during a single hunt. “The pack that he is tracking is a strong group of eight or nine animals. “This year, we have recorded five cubs, two young wolves and two adults.
“We follow them using special cameras in the forest and by following their prints in the mud and snow. In each family group, only one pair of adults has cubs each year. All the wolves in the pack look after the young.”
Mysłajek, the son of a shepherd, doesn’t understand wolves’ bad reputation. “Why did we have to have the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, with its big bad wolf?”
He is fascinated by these animals, who remained in the wild 33,000 years ago when other types of dog decided on a much more comfortable life as pets.
Mysłajek says only the need to save forests and control the wild animal population can save Europe’s wild carnivores, especially the unpopular wolf. “Natural predators balance the ecosystem. They reduce the number of herbivores, which allows trees to grow tall for birds to nest in.”
The ban on wolf hunting in the western Carpathian mountains became law in 1995 and in the whole of Poland in 1998. There are now wolf packs in nearly all the country’s major forests where the wolves exist together with humans.
The Polish government pays compensation to farmers when a wolf kills their farm animals. Mysłajek tells farmers to put up electric fences. He also tells them to use two things that wolves find scary: strings of small red flags (to keep wolves away from sheep) and the Tatra Mountain Sheepdog.
Poland didn’t have many big roads until recently and this has helped wolves. In 1989, when the communists left power, Poland had only one motorway. Big road projects began after Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and they now have to consider wild animals.
The way people think about wolves has also changed. “For many years, hunting was a part of life in Poland. In 1975, there were fewer than 100 wolves in Poland.”
Mysłajek says that Polish wolves are much safer now but they are not completely safe. Packs go into neighbouring countries – Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia – where there is still hunting.
He says Poland’s new government doesn’t like wolves. “The Environment Minister, Jan Szyszko, is a hunter. There are 120,000 hunters in Poland and they have a lot of influence.
“It’s not easy to defend wolves. You can’t say to the politicians that wolves are a big tourist attraction. Most tourists want to see the animals but wolves stay away from humans. They have a very strong sense of smell.”


Intermediate
Music subscription services, including Spotify and Deezer, have broken through the $1bn sales barrier worldwide, as fans choose to pay for music online.
Streaming and subscription revenues rose by more than 50% in 2013 to reach $1.1bn, and sales of recorded music in Europe grew for the  rst time in 12 years, according to  gures published in March.
While many people still listen for free, a desire for more choice is persuading more music lovers to part with their cash. In a three-year period, the number of paying subscribers rose from 8 million to 28 million, according to the 2014 digital music report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Easily accessible from smartphones and tablets, subscription services are popular with people who want to try out new music without buying a download or a CD. They like this cheap, user-friendly and legal alternative to pirated downloads. It is now clear that music streaming and subscription is a mainstream model for our business, said IFPI Chief Executive, Frances Moore.
The IFPI also said that One Direction were the biggest selling artists of 2013, with 4m physical and digital sales for their Midnight Memories album. Katy Perrys Prism was the best-selling album by a female artist, in sixth place behind Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars and Daft Punk.
Consumer-technology companies are joining the music-streaming trend. Apple has its iTunes Radio and Google its Play Store. Smaller companies like Beats Music are also joining the trend.
In Britain and America, streaming may soon generate more revenue for the music industry than downloads from online stores such as Apples iTunes. Subscription services now account for a third of all digital sales globally, with downloads making up the rest, but the IFPI data shows that the two formats are growing at different rates.
In the US, the percentage of people using subscription services and streaming rose from 19% in 2012 to 23%, while the percentage of people downloading fell from 28% to 27%. In Britain, downloaders remained static at exactly one third, while subscribers grew from 19% to 22%. In Sweden, France and Italy, streaming is already more popular than downloading.
Digital formats now account for 39% of all music sales, or nearly 5.9bn out of 15bn, and, while sales of physical formats, such as CDs and vinyl, declined steeply in 2013, they still contribute just over half the industrys income.
Vinyl continued to make a comeback in some markets. Sales increased by 32% in America and by 101% in the UK in 2013.


Introduction
Did you know that, in the UK, there is no law that says restaurants have to pass on tips to staff?
A new government report asked workers, employers and customers what they thought about tipping. After reading the report, the UK government says it wants to change the rules to make sure that low-paid workers get the tips that customers leave for them.
The report said that some waiters are made to pay a 15% administration fee on tips that customers pay by credit or debit card.
The government said that it wants customers to know that tips are voluntary. They want the tipping process to be made clearer so that everyone can understand it.
We asked waiters around the UK what they think of tipping, including how much money they get from tips and if it’s fair.
2. Elle, 22, Edinburgh: ‘We never know whether it’s fair’
Average tips: £20 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... France
I have three part-time jobs. My day job is in a café where the staff work both in the café and in the kitchen so all our tips go in a pot and we all get the same. My evening job is at a restaurant where we don’t get our tips but we get the minimum wage plus an extra £2.50 per hour. My third job is events catering and nobody ever tips.
In restaurants, because a lot of customers add tips by card, the staff never see how much the tip is – so we don’t know if what we get is fair or not. The system seems better in France, where they don’t tip much but being a waiter is seen as a proper job with job security and good wages.
3. Ashley, 22, London: ‘Tips go towards customer breakages’
Average tips: £10-15 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Australia
I work in a London pub in the evenings and I do day shifts at a local restaurant. In both places, all the tips are collected and shared out at the end of the night. Money is taken from the tips to pay for breakages by staff and customers.
It is very unfair that our tips are shared out, especially when one member of the team doesn’t work hard enough. It’s really unfair that money from our tips is taken for breakages by customers. The managers should have ways to pay for broken glasses and plates without taking our tips. I make around £20 a shift in tips but often I only get £10-15 of that money.
I really need tips because I am only paid £7 an hour. I’d prefer to get a good basic wage (like in Australia) and not have to rely on tips.
4. Tom, Manchester: ‘A big night of tips can help pay the rent’
Average tips: £40 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Italy
Where I used to work, waiters kept 80% of cash tips and 40% of card tips. The rest went to the other staff in the restaurant.
It’s hard to say how much I earn in a shift; maybe about £40. It can make a big difference. Sometimes, waiters need a good night to be able to pay their rent.
They have got tipping right in Italy, where customers don’t add a big tip but usually round up their bill so, if their meal is €19, they leave a €20 note and don’t ask for change.


Intermediate
Scientists have implanted a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment that they hope will help to explain why people remember events or experiences that have never happened.
False memories are a major problem with witness statements in courts of law. Evidence that eyewitnesses give often leads to guilty verdicts, but later the convictions are overturned when DNA or some other evidence is used.
Susumu Tonagawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his team wanted to study how these false memories might form in the human brain, so they encoded memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons. Memories of experiences we have had are made from several elements including records of objects, space and time. These records are encoded in physical and chemical changes in brain cells and the connections between them. According to Tonagawa, both false and genuine memories seem to use the same brain mechanisms.
In the experiment, Tonagawas team put the mice in a box and allowed them to explore it. As they did so, their brain cells were producing a memory protein. The next day, the same mice were put in a second box and given a small electric shock, to encode a fear response. At the same time, the researchers shone light into the mouse brains to activate their memories of the first box. That way, the mice learned to associate fear of the electric shock with the memory of the first box.
In the final part of the experiment, the team put the mice back in the first box. The mice froze, showing a typical fear response, even though they had never been shocked in that box.
A similar process may happen when powerful false memories are created in humans. Humans are very imaginative animals, said Tonagawa.  So, just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with bad or good events. In other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you.
He added: Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the person with false memories to distinguish between them. We hope our future findings along this line will show legal experts how unreliable memory can be.
Chris French, of the University of London, is a leading researcher in false memories in people. He said that the latest results were an important first step in understanding them. Memory researchers have always recognized that memory does not work like a video camera, recording all the details of anything we experience. Instead, it is a reconstructive process, which involves building a specific memory from fragments of real memory traces of the original event, but also possibly including information from other sources.
He warned that the false memories created in the mice in the experiments were far simpler than the complex false memories that have caused controversy within psychology and psychiatry  for example, false memories of childhood sexual abuse, abduction by aliens, or past lives. Such rich false memories will clearly involve many brain systems and we are still a long way from understanding the processes involved in their formation at the neuronal level, he said.
Mark Stokes, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, said the experiments were a great achievement but that it was important to put them into perspective. Although the results seem to show that new memories were formed by the artificial stimulation (rather than the actual environment), this kind of phenomenon is still a long way from most peoples idea of memory, he said.
The mouse models created by the MIT team will help scientists ask more and more complex questions about memories in people. Now that we can change the contents of memories in the brain, we can begin asking questions that were once the realm of philosophy, said Steve Ramirez, a colleague of Tonagawas at MIT. Are there multiple conditions that lead to the formation of false memories? Can false memories be artificially created? What about false memories for more than just contexts  false memories for objects, food or other mice? These are the seemingly sci-fi questions that can now be experimentally tackled in the lab.
As the technology develops, said French, scientists need to think about its uses carefully. In whatever way we implant false memories, we need to be very aware of the ethical issues raised by such procedures  the potential for abuse of such techniques cannot be overstated.


You can be Aagot, Arney or Ásfríður; Baldey, Bebba or Brá. Dögg, Dimmblá, Etna and Eybjört are fine; likewise Frigg, Glódís, Hörn and Ingunn. Jórlaug works OK, as do Obba, Sigurfljóð, Úranía and – should you choose – Vagna. But you cannot, as a girl in Iceland, be called Harriet.
“The whole situation,” said Tristan Cardew, with very British understatement, “is really rather silly.” With his Icelandic wife, Kristin, Cardew is appealing against a decision by the National Registry in the capital Reykjavik not to renew their ten-year-old daughter Harriet’s passport on the grounds that it does not recognize her first name.
Since the registry does not recognize the name of Harriet’s 12-year-old brother, Duncan, either, the two children have, until now, travelled on passports identifying them as Stúlka and Drengur Cardew: Girl and Boy Cardew. “But, this time, the authorities have decided to apply the letter of the law,” Cardew, a British-born cook who moved to Iceland in 2000, said. “And that says no official document will be issued to people who do not bear an approved Icelandic name.”
The impasse meant the family, from Kópavogur, risked missing their holiday in France until they applied to the British embassy for an emergency UK passport, which should now allow them to leave.
Names matter in Iceland, a country of barely 320,000 people, whose phone book lists subscribers by their first name for the very sensible reason that the vast majority of Icelandic surnames simply record the fact that you are your father’s (or mother’s) son or daughter. Jón Einarsson’s offspring, for example, might be Ólafur Jónsson and Sigríður Jónsdóttir.
The law dictates that the names of children born in Iceland must – unless both parents are foreign – be submitted to the National Registry within six months of birth. If they are not on a recognized list of 1,853 female and 1,712 male names, the parents must seek the approval of a body called the Icelandic Naming Committee.
For the 5,000 or so children born in Iceland each year, the committee reportedly receives about 100 applications and rejects about half under a 1996 act aimed mainly at preserving the language of the sagas. Among its requirements are that given names must be “capable of having Icelandic grammatical endings”, may not “conflict with the linguistic structure of Iceland” and should be “written in accordance with the ordinary rules of Icelandic orthography”.
What this means in practice is that names containing letters that do not officially exist in Iceland’s 32-letter alphabet, such as “c ”, are out. Similarly, names unable to accommodate the endings required by the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases used in Icelandic are also routinely turned down. “That was the problem with Harriet,” said Cardew.
The country’s naming laws have come under increasing fire in recent years: in 2013, Blær – “Light Breeze” – Bjarkardóttir Rúnarsdottir won the right to be officially known by her given name, as opposed to “Girl”, when a court ruled that denying her was a violation of the Icelandic constitution. The former mayor of Reykjavik, Jón Gnarr, has also called Iceland’s naming law “unfair, stupid and against creativity”.
The Cardews could get round Harriet’s problem by giving her an Icelandic middle name. “But it’s a bit late for that and way too silly,” said Cardew. “Are they saying they don’t want us here?”


Intermediate
On an average day its outlets host everything from business meetings to reading groups. All these people are looking for that important morning coffee. But Starbucks should be careful what it wishes for.
The direct action group UK Uncut plans to turn dozens of the coffee empires UK outlets into crches, refuges and homeless shelters to highlight Starbucks tax avoidance tactics.
They announced the action as Starbucks were questioned by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. They asked why the company paid no corporation tax in the UK during the past three years, despite the companys profitable business in Britain.
When he appears before the committee, Starbucks Chief Financial Officer, Troy Alstead, will attempt to repair the companys reputation.
MPs accused the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the UKs tax department, of having cosy relationships with big businesses. Speaking about the arrangements with Starbucks, the Conservative MP Richard Bacon said: It smells. And it doesnt smell of coffee  it smells bad.
The campaign group UK Uncut wants to show a connection between government cuts, in particular those that affect women, and tax avoidance by multinational businesses.
Sarah Greene, a UK Uncut activist, said funding for refuges and rape crisis centres would be reduced unless companies paid the fair amount of tax. HMRC estimates around 32bn was lost due to tax avoidance in 2011.
Greene said the government could easily collect billions that could help pay for necessary services if they were stricter on tax avoidance.
The group, which became known because of its protests at Vodafone stores, Topshop and Fortnum & Mason, turned its attentions to Starbucks beause an investigation discovered the company had paid only 8.6m in corporation tax since launching in the UK in 1998, despite cumulative sales of 3bn.
Uncut campaigner Anna Walker said Weve chosen to really highlight the impact of the cuts on women. So were going to focus on transforming Starbucks into those services that the government are cutting, such as refuges and crches.
Starbucks is a really great target because it is on every high street across the country and thats what UK Uncut finds really important: people can take action in their local areas, she said.
Several international organizations have been criticized over their UK accounts. Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google and Ikea all pay little or no corporation tax.
The coffee store chain, Starbucks, insists it pays the correct level of taxes. The group Chief Executive, Howard Schultz, has said in a statement: Starbucks has always paid taxes in the UK.
Over the last three years alone, our company has paid more than 160m in various taxes, including National Insurance*, VAT and business rates.
Margaret Hodge, who leads the Public Accounts Committee, told parliament last month that Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Starbucks had avoided nearly 900m of tax. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, responded to the claim by saying: Im not happy with the current situation. I think [HMRC] needs to look at it very carefully. We do need to make sure we continue to encourage these businesses to invest in our country, but they should be paying fair taxes as well.
A spokeswoman for Starbucks said: While the subject of tax law can be extremely complex, Starbucks respects and obeys tax laws and accounting rules in each of the 61 countries where we do business, including the UK. Weve posted the facts about our tax practices in the UK on our website.
Starbucks economic impact in the UK goes far beyond our stores and partners [employees]. We spend hundreds of millions of pounds with local suppliers on milk, cakes and sandwiches, and on store design and renovations. When you consider the indirect employment created by Starbucks investments in the UK, the companys extended economic impact to the UK economy is more than 80m a year.


It has charted the world’s highest peaks, the ocean floor, the Amazon rainforest and even provided a glimpse into North Korea. But Google’s mission to map the world has largely steered clear of the inhospitable Arctic.
Now, however, the search-engine firm is embarking on what might be the most significant update to centuries of polar cartography – and one it hopes will help provide a better understanding of life on the permafrost for millions of web users. Google has flown a small team to Iqaluit, the largest town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, armed with their warmest winter gear, a stack of laptop computers and an 18kg backpack- mounted telescopic camera.
Helped by an Inuit mapping expert, and stalked by curious locals, the team spent four days trudging through the terrain and collecting the images and information that will give the isolated community on the tundra of Baffin Island what urbanites across the globe now take for granted.
The town of 7,000 people will go on display via Google’s popular Street View application in July 2013.
Aaron Brindle, project leader, said: “I live in Toronto and I absolutely take for granted that everything is where it should be and that this map is kind of my world, but for so long that hasn’t been the case in the north.”
Unlike more populous and accessible parts of the world, which have been mapped using a special camera mounted on a car roof, the Iqaluit project had mappers hiking the town’s snow-packed roads and traversing little-known trails, some of which are made of ice and disappear in the brief summer months.
The team also cut a path along part of a 15km cul-de-sac known as the Road to Nowhere, despite warnings about the risk from polar bears and other wildlife.
Mayor John Graham said the digital cartographers were, however, hunted by a herd of excited and curious locals, or Google stalkers.
Graham understands the enthusiasm. The Street View project, he said, follows in the footsteps of the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who in 1576 sailed into the bay where Iqaluit now sits while searching for the Northwest Passage, and the 1941 flight of Captain Elliott Roosevelt, a reconnaissance officer and son of the US President, which led to the site being chosen for a military airbase. His exploration led to the founding of the modern town of Iqaluit, which is the seat of government as well as a transport and communications hub for Nunavut.
One of the initial challenges Google faced was gathering the raw data needed to fill in their existing map. What they had created using satellite images was fairly accurate, although the rapid pace of the town’s growth, which has been fuelled by a mining boom, meant they were missing one road that had been created in the past year, said Arif Sayani, the town’s Director of Planning.
Another difficulty was how to situate many businesses and homeowners that have mail sent to the local post office rather than delivered to their address. Plotting the PO box addresses would result in a map with firms, banks and schools clustered around the Canada Post building in the centre of town.
About 30 Inuit elders, entrepreneurs and high-school pupils turned out one night to help correct such problems. They were provided with a laptop computer and instructed how to ensure their homes, shops and meeting places would show up accurately on the map.
The project is more than a novelty or cultural philanthropy. Sayani, 32, said the town would be able to use the maps as a promotional tool for those thinking of visiting or moving to the area. It may also speed up planning decisions that will affect Iqaluit’s growth.
The test run for the Iqaluit mapping exercise occurred last summer in Cambridge Bay, a much smaller Nunavut town of about 1,500 people located 1,700km and a time zone west of Iqaluit.
The gravel roads and muddy puddles that can now be seen online, however, give little sense of life in a land usually covered in snow, which is one reason why Google selected the less- hospitable month of March to travel to Iqaluit.
Brindle said he hoped to see the work continue in other northern towns, though the high costs of shipping and airfares to move people and equipment around the vast Arctic territory appears to be weighing on Google’s ambitions.
The next northern site has not yet been identified but, when it is selected, Brindle said the company might simply send one of its hi-tech backpacks and rely on volunteers to literally put themselves on the map.
“I’m hoping that three, four, five years from now we’ll look back and see a very different map of Canada’s north,” Brindle added.


Intermediate
It was a beautiful summer evening and I decided to go for a swim off Doolin Pier in County Clare, Ireland, where I moved in 2012. There was a woman in the water with Dusty, a dolphin who has a great relationship with a group of people she regularly swims with. Dusty arrived in Doolin in about 2008 and hundreds of people have swum with her since, giving the impression that shes totally tame.
That evening, the woman was tickling Dustys tummy and it just looked so inviting. There were about 20 tourists and locals on the pier, looking at this lovely spectacle. Just after I got into the water, Dusty left the woman she was with and went crazy  I found out afterwards that shes very territorial when she is with somebody. Her tail was flapping wildly and, at first, I thought it was a display but, then, I realized she was angry. I knew I had to get out of the water so I swam towards the pier but, within seconds, Dusty had crashed into me with her snout. It was very powerful and painful, and the speed was amazing. I was pushed forwards violently.
All the people on the pier were staring down at me open-mouthed. Dusty was still in the water beside me, her tail flapping crazily. That was more frightening than anything: I thought, if she hits me with her tail, I could go under and drown.
I was at the pier but couldnt get out because of my injuries. I felt pure terror. I shouted for help and a guy put his arm in and pulled me out on to the steps. Then, another man appeared and said he was an orthopaedic surgeon. He had been driving into Doolin when he saw what was happening on the pier. I was so cold and very worried  I didnt know how bad my injuries were and my biggest fear was internal bleeding. He checked me over and said he couldnt feel any evidence of bleeding but that I probably had broken bones. I found out later that I had six spinal fractures, three broken ribs and a damaged lung.
I was in hospital for five days and off work for five months with limited mobility and pain. Then, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. My near-death experience had left me anxious about everything. I felt that people were looking at me in the wrong way, I began to struggle with loud noises and I suffered from memory loss. Three months before the accident, I had opened a health-food shop but I had to let it go because I could no longer work.
It was the hardest year ever but, now, its all behind me. I had therapy, osteopathy and massage, and am building up my own osteopathy practice now. I have a new empathy with patients because I have been one.
I am grateful that I am healthy and I really want to prevent other people being injured. We have this lovely idea about dolphins and have faith in them  who would think a dolphin would ever attack a person? If you see a fierce animal coming towards you with its teeth bared, its scary, but dolphins have this lovely, wide smile.
I dont have any anger towards Dusty. I respect her. But I was in her territory and shes a wild, unpredictable animal. People need to know that. So many come here to swim with her and they dont understand how dangerous it can be. Several other people were injured that summer.
After the man pulled me out of the water, Dusty swam away but, then, she came back and was looking at me. Our eyes met and I felt there was complete remorse in her. She was a totally different dolphin; the anger had gone. The people on the pier were in awe. When she had that little moment with me, that was the end of the terror. I made my peace with her.


Intermediate
A company from the Netherlands is trying to turn dreams of reaching Mars into reality. The company, Mars One, plans to send four astronauts on a trip to the Red Planet to set up a human colony in 2023. But there are a couple of serious problems.
Firstly, when on Mars the astronauts bodies will have to adapt to surface gravity that is 38% of that on Earth. It is thought that this would cause such a total change in their bone density, muscle strength and circulation that the astronauts would no longer be able to survive in Earths conditions. Secondly, and directly related to the first, they will have to say goodbye to all their family and friends, as there is no return ticket.
The Mars One website states that a return cannot be anticipated nor expected. To return, they would need a fully built rocket with enough fuel for the return journey, which is able to escape the gravitational field of Mars, and has on-board life support systems for a seven-month trip. And they must be able to link up with a space station orbiting Earth or perform a safe re-entry and landing.
Nevertheless, the project has already had 10,000 applicants, according to the companys Medical Director, Norbert Kraft. He told The Guardian that the applicants so far ranged in age from 18 to at least 62 and, though they include women, they were mostly men.
The reasons they gave for wanting to go were varied, he said. An American woman called Cynthia, who gave her age as 32, said that it was a childhood dream of hers to go to Mars.
She told the project: When I first heard about the Mars One project I thought, this is my chance  that childhood dream could become a reality. I could be one of the pioneers, building the first colony on Mars and teaching people back home that there are still uncharted territories that humans can reach for.
The main attributes Mars One is looking for in astronaut-settlers are resilience, adaptability, curiosity, ability to trust and resourcefulness, according to Kraft. They must also be over 18.
Mars One says that the basic things required for life are already present on the planet. For instance, water can be taken from ice in the soil and Mars has sources of nitrogen, the primary element in the air we breathe. The colony will be powered by specially adapted solar panels, it says.
The project will cost a reported $6bn, and Bas Lansdorp, the founder of Mars One, has said he hopes this money will be collected partly by selling broadcasting rights. The broadcasting revenue from the London Olympics was almost enough to finance a mission to Mars, Lansdorp said.
Another ambassador to the project is Paul Rmer, the co-creator of Big Brother, one of the first, and most successful, reality TV shows. This mission to Mars could be the biggest media event in the world, said Rmer. Reality meets talent show with no ending and the whole world watching.
The aim is to establish a permanent human colony, according to Mars Ones website. The first team would land on Mars in 2023 to begin building the colony, with a team of four astronauts every two years after that.
The project has its sceptics, however, and people are worried about how astronauts might get to the planet and build a colony with all the life support and other requirements needed.
The mission hopes to inspire generations to believe that all things are possible, that anything can be achieved, like the Apollo moon landings.
Mars One believes it is not only possible but necessary that we establish a permanent colony on Mars in order to speed up our understanding of the formation of the solar system, the origins of life and, of equal importance, our place in the universe, it says.


On average, a girl born today in the UK will live to the age of nearly 82 and her brother will live to 78. They would have a longer life in Andorra (the girl 85 and the boy 79) but will live a little longer than in the US (81 and 76). If they lived in the Central African Republic, they would die in middle age (49 and 44). Almost everywhere in the world, except countries such as Lesotho, which have problems with HIV and violence, life expectancy is increasing. The best news is that small children die much less often than forty years ago. There has been a reduction in deaths of under-fives of nearly 60%, from 16.4 million in 1970 to 6.8 million in 2010.
Over the past five years, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle has led a very big project to look at the global effects of disease. If we know how many children die and why, the world can try to keep them alive. The big IHME database will help global organizations and governments to better care for us all.
The project has been controversial. IHME has been very radical in some of its methods. When they didn’t have death registries or medical records they decided the cause of death by an interview with the family – called a 'verbal autopsy'. The most surprising result has been with malaria. IHME said 1.2 million die of the disease every year – this is twice as many as people believed. The big increase is in adult deaths. It is commonly believed that malaria kills mostly children under five.
“We are taught, as doctors, that in areas with malaria, you become semi-immune as an adult,” said Dr Christopher Murray, IHME Director. But he says the evidence tells them that may not be right. “African doctors write on hospital records that adults are dying of malaria a lot.” But their fever could be something different, he adds. The results have led to more studies.
Although the Director General of the World Health Organization was happy about the IHME study, other people are not so sure. “We need to be very careful,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist. He thinks scientists need to find out if the numbers are correct. One of the most important things in the study, said Murray, was “the very fast change in the main causes of death and the speed of that change is a lot faster than we thought”.
Reduced fertility and longer life have led to an increase in the average age of the world’s population in ten years from 26 years old to almost 30. The change has been dramatic in Latin America, for example, where countries like Brazil and Paraguay had life expectancy of below 30 in 1970 and almost 64 in 2010. That is a 35-year increase in the average age of death in forty years.
Also important is the change outside Africa from communicable diseases to “lifestyle” diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. That change is very obvious in Latin America, the Middle East and south-east and even south Asia, Murray said.
The third big result was, he said, “a surprise to us”. The study showed that there are lots of people with disabilities and it has a big effect on people who are living longer but not healthier lives. “The main causes of disability are different from the ones that kill you,” he said. They were mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, disorders, such as arthritis and lower back pain, anaemia, sight and hearing loss and skin disease. Also, there was drug abuse. “The number of people with these problems is not reducing over time,” he said. “We are making no progress in reducing these problems.”


A company from the Netherlands wants to turn dreams of reaching Mars into reality. The company, Mars One, plans to send four astronauts to the Red Planet to build a human colony in 2023. But there are two serious problems.
Firstly, on Mars the astronauts’ bodies will have to adapt to gravity that is 38% of gravity on Earth. This would probably cause such a total change in their bones, muscles and circulation that the astronauts would no longer be able to survive on Earth. Secondly, they will have to say goodbye to all their family and friends, because there is no return ticket.
The Mars One website says that the astronauts cannot expect to return. To return, they would need a rocket that can leave Mars. The rocket would need life support systems for a seven-month journey and would need to either join up with a space station or land safely on Earth.
But the project has already had 10,000 applicants, according to the company’s Medical Director, Norbert Kraft. He told The Guardian that the applicants so far were aged 18 to at least 62 and, although they include women, they were mostly men.
Mars One says that the astronauts must be resilient, adaptable, curious, trusting and resourceful. They must also be over 18. Mars One says that the basic things people need to live are already present on the planet. For example, they can take water from ice in the soil and Mars has sources of nitrogen, the primary element in the air we breathe. The colony will use solar panels to get power, it says.
The project will cost around $6 billion. Some of this money could come from TV broadcasting rights. “The money made broadcasting the London Olympics was almost enough to pay for a mission to Mars,” Bas Lansdorp, the company’s founder, said.
Another person who supports the project is Paul Römer, one of the creators of Big Brother, one of the first and most successful reality TV shows. “This mission to Mars could be the biggest media event in the world,” said Römer. “A reality show and a talent show, with no ending and the whole world watching.”
Mars One wants to build a permanent human colony, according to its website. The first team would land on Mars in 2023 to begin building the colony, and a team of four astronauts would arrive every two years after that.
But some people are sceptical of the project, and some people are worried about how astronauts might get to the planet and build a colony with all the life support and other things they need.
The mission hopes to inspire people to “believe that all things are possible, that you can achieve anything,” like the Apollo moon landings.
“Mars One believes it is not only possible but necessary that we build a permanent colony on Mars so that we can improve our understanding of the solar system, the origins of life, and our place in the universe,” it says.


Intermediate
The Virunga National Park is home to rare mountain gorillas but is targeted for oil exploration by a British company. The park could earn DR Congo $400m a year from tourism, hydropower and carbon credits, said a WWF report.
But if the UNESCO World Heritage Site that crosses the equator is exploited for oil, as the Congolese government and exploration firm SOCO International are hoping, it could lead to devastating pollution and permanent conflict in the region, says the WWF.
SOCO International is the only company that wants to explore inside the boundaries of the Virunga park. SOCO insist that their operations in Congo would be kept to an area in the park known as Block V, and would not affect the gorillas.
SOCO Chairman Rui de Sousa said: Despite the views of WWF, SOCO is extremely sensitive to the environmental significance of the Virunga National Park. Oil companies still have a central role in todays global energy supply and a successful oil project has the potential to transform the economic and social well-being of a whole country.
However, Raymond Lumbuenamo, country director for WWF Democratic Republic of the Congo, based in Kinshassa, said that security in and around the park would get worse if SOCO went ahead with its exploration plans.
The security situation is already bad. The UN is involved with fighting units and the M23 rebel force is inside the park. Oil would be a curse. It always increases conflict. The park might become like the Niger Delta. Developing Virunga for oil will not make anything better.
The population there is already very dense, with over 350 people per square kilometre. When you take part of the land (for oil), you put more pressure on the rest. Oil would not provide many jobs; people would flood in looking for work, he said.
One fear is that the area is seismically active and another eruption of one of the volcanoes in the park could damage oil company infrastructure and lead to oil spills in the lakes. Virungas rich natural resources are for the benefit of the Congolese people, not for foreign oil prospectors. Our countrys future depends on sustainable economic development, said Lumbuenamo.
For me, choosing the conservation option is the best option. Once you have started drilling for oil, theres no turning back, he said.
But Lumbuenamo accepted that, while the gorillas were safe now, the chances of the park making $400m a year were small. It would be difficult to make the kind of money that the report talks of. Virunga used to be a very peaceful place and can be again. The security situation right now is bad. The UN is involved with fighting units. Its not as quiet as it used to be.
According to the WWF report, ecosystems in the park could support hydropower generation, fishing and ecotourism, and play an important role in providing secure water supplies, regulating climate and preventing soil erosion.
The park, Africas oldest and most diverse, is home to over 3,000 different kinds of animals, but is now heavily populated with desperately poor people, many of whom went there after the Rwanda massacre in 1994.
In all, the park could support around 45,000 permanent jobs. In addition, people around the world could know that the park is well managed and is safe for future generations, says the report.
Virunga represents a valuable asset to DR Congo and contributes to Africas heritage as the oldest and most biodiverse park on the continent, the report continues. Plans to explore for oil and exploit oil reserves put Virungas potential value at risk, it says.