Margaret Thatcher, the most famous British prime minister since Winston Churchill, has died at the age of 87. She was in poor health for many years, suffering from dementia. The British government says that her funeral will be at St Paul’s Cathedral.
The British prime minister, David Cameron, said: “I was very sad when l heard of Lady Thatcher’s death. We’ve lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.” He added: “She was our first woman prime minister – and she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country.” He added that he believed she would be remembered as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.
President Barack Obama said, “Here in America, many of us will never forget her close friendship with President Reagan.”
Margaret Thatcher was the first woman leader of an important western state. She was prime minister for 11 years until members of her own party removed her in 1990.
When they heard of her death, politicians from all parties sent tributes.
British Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, said: “She will be remembered as a unique person. She changed the politics of a whole generation. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister. She was a huge figure in the world. The Labour Party disagreed with a lot of what she did, but we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength.”
The former Conservative prime minister, Sir John Major, said that people who worked closely with her would always remember her courage and determination in politics and her humanity and generous spirit in private.
The “Iron Lady” was a close ally of the US president Ronald Reagan in the final years of the Soviet Union. The Union broke up because of reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev. He was the Russian leader who Thatcher liked and worked closely with. As a result, many ordinary people in ex-Communist countries still think of her as someone who supported their freedom.
It was a surprise when Thatcher became party leader in 1975. Within ten years, she had become famous around the world – people both admired and hated her – for her reforms in the UK and her strong beliefs in foreign policy. She had a long battle with the IRA, which almost killed her with a bomb in 1984.
In the UK, Thatcher’s main economic policy was the denationalization of state-owned industry – the new word “privatization” became used in many countries. She also defeated militant trade unions, particularly the National Union of Miners, after a long and terrible strike that lasted almost a year. With money from Britain’s North Sea oil fields, she was able to change the ageing industrial economy and she used the opportunity to defeat her enemies – including some members of her own party.
As the British economy became healthy again after the problems that her policies caused, it seemed for a short time that no-one would ever defeat her. But, as her friends and supporters retired or were replaced, she started to make mistakes and became more and more unpopular. Finally, in 1990, after a vote among Conservative MPs failed to support her, John Major took control of the party.
After she retired, she wrote her memoirs and continued to promote her values around the world.


Until the end, David Bowie, who has died of cancer, still surprised us. His latest album, Blackstar, appeared on his 69th birthday on 8 January 2016. It showed that he hadn’t stopped making challenging, disturbing music.
Throughout the 1970s, Bowie was a trailblazer of musical trends and pop fashion. He became a singer-songwriter, a pioneer of glam-rock, then became involved in “plastic soul”.
He then moved to Berlin to create innovative electronic music. Bowie was born David Robert Jones in south London. At 15, David formed his first band, the Kon-rads, but it was soon clear that David should go solo.
David took the name Bowie so people wouldn’t confuse him with Davy Jones of the Monkees.
Bowie’s first album, released in June 1967, was titled simply David Bowie. In July 1969, Bowie released Space Oddity, the song that would give him his first big success. Timed to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing, it was a top five UK hit. The Man Who Sold the World was released in the US in late 1970 and in the UK the following year. With its daring songwriting and hard-rock sound, it was the first album to really show his talents. He followed it with 1972’s Hunky Dory, a mix of wordy, elaborate songwriting. It was an excellent collection that was not a great success. But that all changed with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars later that year.
This time, Bowie appeared as Ziggy Stardust, a science-fiction character – an intergalactic glam-rock star visiting planet Earth. The hit single Starman brought instant success for the album.
Everything Bowie touched turned to gold. He had his first UK number 1 album with Aladdin Sane (1973), which included the hit singles The Jean Genie and Drive-in Saturday.
His interest in funk and soul music could be heard on the album Young Americans (1975), which included the single Fame (with John Lennon as a guest singer).
With the album Station to Station (1976), Bowie turned himself into a new character, the Thin White Duke.
Bowie and his wife divorced in 1980. This was a year of more creative success, with a good album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and its hit single, Ashes to Ashes.
After this, he played the title role in The Elephant Man on the Broadway stage.
He achieved a number 1 single with his 1981 partnership with Queen, Under Pressure. 1983 was the year in which he put his energy into the album Let’s Dance and his concerts. Let’s Dance turned Bowie into a global rock star – the album and its singles Let’s Dance, China Girl and Modern Love all became huge international hits.
The early 80s was the heyday of MTV. Bowie’s talent for making eye-catching videos increased his popularity and the six-month Serious Moonlight tour attracted lots of people. It was to be the most commercially successful period of his career.
At the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, Bowie was one of the best performers. Also, that year, he worked with Mick Jagger to record the fundraising single Dancing in the Street , which quickly went to number 1.
A few days after he performed at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in April 1992, Bowie married the Somalian model Iman and bought a home in New York.
For the album Black Tie White Noise (1993), he included elements of soul and hip hop. It went to the top of the UK album chart and gave him a top 10 single, Jump They Say .
Bowie performed at the Concert for New York City in October 2001, where he joined Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, the Who and Elton John in a benefit show six weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
During his Reality tour in 2004, Bowie had chest pains while he was performing in Germany and needed emergency surgery in Hamburg.
He saw the medical emergency as a warning and started to slow down. In February 2006, he was given a Grammy lifetime achievement award. He was entered into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
The Next Day (2013) was his first album of new songs in ten years. It included the single Where Are We Now? The album went to the top of the charts in Britain and around the world. In 2014, Bowie was given the Brit Award for Best British Male – he was the oldest person to get the award.
He leaves behind his wife, Iman, their daughter, Alexandria, his stepdaughter, Zulekha, and his son, Duncan, from his first marriage.


Angela Erdmann never knew her grandfather. He died in 1946, six years before she was born. But, on Tuesday April 8th, 2014, she described the extraordinary moment when she received a message in a bottle, 101 years after he threw it into the Baltic Sea. The bottle is possibly the world’s oldest message in a bottle. It was presented to Erdmann by the museum that is now exhibiting it in Germany.
“It was very surprising,” Erdmann, 62, said, when she described how she found out about the bottle. “A man came to my door and told me he had post from my grandfather. Then, he told me that someone had found a message in a bottle and that on the card was my grandfather’s name.” Her visitor was a family-tree researcher who found her in Berlin after someone gave the letter to a museum in the northern city of Hamburg.
The brown beer bottle was in the water for 101 years. A fisherman found it. Holger von Neuhoff, a curator at the museum, said this bottled message was the oldest he had ever seen. “There are documents without the bottle that are older and they are in the museum,” he said. “But, with the bottle and the document, this is certainly the oldest at the moment. It is in very good condition.”
Researchers believe that Erdmann’s grandfather, Richard Platz, threw the bottle into the sea when he was on a hike in 1913. He was 20 years old at the time. A lot of the message on the postcard was impossible to read, but the address in Berlin on the front of the card was legible. Platz asked the person who found it to send the postcard to his home address.
“He also included two stamps from that time that were also in the bottle, so the finder would not have to pay for postage,” Erdmann said. “But he did not think it would take 101 years.”
She said she was moved by the arrival of the message, but she did not known her grandfather because he died, at the age of 54, six years before she was born.
“I knew very little about my grandfather. But I found out that he was a writer. He was very open- minded, and he believed in freedom and that everyone should respect each other,” she said. “He did a lot for the young and later travelled with his wife and two daughters. It was wonderful because I could see where my roots came from.”
Erdmann said she also liked culture and travelling around the world, just like her grandfather. She described herself as open-minded, too. She was very happy to receive the bottled message, she said, but she hoped other people would not do what her grandfather did and throw bottles with messages into the sea. “Today, the sea is so full of bottles and rubbish that we shouldn’t throw more in there,” she said.
The message and the bottle will be on display at Hamburg’s Maritime Museum until the beginning of May 2014. Then, experts will try to decipher the rest of the text. It is not clear what will happen to the bottle after that, but Erdmann hopes it will stay at the museum.
“We want to find a few photos to put with the bottle and give it a face, so visitors can see the young man who threw the bottle into the water,” she said.


Intermediate
Brazil experienced one of its biggest nights of protest in decades as more than 100,000 people took to the streets to express their frustration at aggressive policing, poor public services and high costs for the World Cup.
The major demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, Brasilia, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and elsewhere started peacefully, but several led to clashes with police and arson attacks on cars and buses.
People complained, during previous, smaller protests against bus price increases, that police responded disproportionately with rubber bullets, tear gas and violent beatings.
The rallies came at the same time as the start of the football Confederations Cup. The rallies brought together people who are frustrated with the rising costs and poor quality of public services, large amounts of money being spent on international sporting events, low standards of health care and wider unease about inequality and corruption.
The vast majority of demonstrations were peaceful, but several police were injured, at least one car was overturned and burned, and windows were smashed.
The unrest increased during the night as a large crowd set several fires outside a government office, smashed the buildings windows and painted graffiti on the walls that said Revolution, Down with Paes, down with Cabral [the mayor and state governor] and Hate police. Police inside responded with pepper spray.
The reasons people were protesting varied widely. We are here because we hate the government. They do nothing for us, said Oscar Jos Santos, a 19 year old.
Im an architect but I have been unemployed for six months. There must be something wrong with this country, said Nadia al Husin.
At a far smaller rally in Brasilia, demonstrators broke through police lines to enter the high-security area of the national congress. Several climbed onto the roof.
In Belo Horizonte, police clashed with protesters who tried to get into a football stadium, which was hosting a Confederations Cup match between Nigeria and Tahiti.
In Porto Alegre, demonstrators set fire to a bus and, in Curitiba, protesters tried to force their way into the office of the state governor. There were also rallies in Belem, Salvador and elsewhere.
In So Paulo, large crowds gathered but reports said the marches were peaceful.
Most protesters were young and, for many, it was their first experience of such a giant rally. My generation has never experienced this, said Thiago Firbida, a student. Since the dictatorship, Brazilians never bothered to demonstrate like this. They did not believe they had a reason to. But now Brazil is once again in crisis, with a constant rise in prices, so people are finally reacting.
Comparisons have been drawn with rallies in Turkey and elsewhere. You could see another global link in the demonstrators who wore Guy Fawkes masks, associated with Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Brazils demonstrations are being referred to as the vinegar revolution (after police arrested people for carrying vinegar to fight the effects of tear gas), as well as the 20-cent revolution (due to the bus price rise) and the Passe Livre (after the demand for free public transport).
Some said the protests felt un-Brazilian but liberating. Our politicians need to see the strength we have as one people. Brazilians are too nice sometimes  they enjoy partying rather than protesting  but something is changing, said Deli Borsari, a 53-year-old yoga instructor
After people heard about the costs of new and refurbished stadiums on the news, the Confederations Cup football tournament has been one of the focuses of the protests. Before Saturdays opening match in Brasilia, crowds of demonstrators were dispersed by riot police. Footage showed frightened Japanese supporters rushing from the area holding their children, as they heard the sound of shots  perhaps rubber bullets or tear gas.
Another protest march, near Rios Maracana Stadium, also had a heavy police response.
President Dilma Rousseff believes peaceful protests are legitimate and proper for a democracy and that it is natural for young people to demonstrate.
However, the president was booed at the opening ceremony for the Confederations Cup. She faces a serious political challenge, both now and in 2014, when Brazil will not only host the World Cup but also have a presidential election.


Intermediate
In an attempt to reduce air pollution, Europe will become the first part of the world to force car makers to use real-world emissions tests. New regulations will introduce the tests to reveal what cars emissions are like when driving on roads and in traffic, not in ideal, laboratory-like conditions, which is what happens at the moment.
The tests, which have been approved by the European Commission, are designed to enforce a limit of 80mg of nitrogen oxide per kilometre, a level that only one car in 16 meets. Other countries, such as China and Korea, which are also considering real-world emissions tests, will be watching what happens closely.
Pollutants from diesel engines such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and particulates are believed to be responsible for at least one quarter of the 29,000 annual pollution-related deaths in the UK alone.
The current New European Drive Cycle laboratory test for measuring emissions is a quarter of a century old. Technological developments in the car industry mean that the test is no longer good enough. Studies have shown that the results of lab techniques to measure car emissions can easily be fixed  car makers fix the results by using techniques such as taping up doors and windows to minimize air resistance, driving on unrealistically smooth roads and testing at very high temperatures.
The Commission wants to introduce a new emissions testing procedure that will allow proper assessment of the vehicles in real driving, said Lucia Caudet, a Commission spokesperson.
One key reason why air pollution kills 400,000 citizens each year is that car makers cheat the tests for diesel cars, causing much more pollution on the road, said Greg Archer, the clean vehicles manager for Transport and Environment. The development of a new, real-world driving emission test is an important step forward in tackling urban air pollution. European Union (EU) states should now support the Commissions proposals and ignore the whingeing from car makers that the rules are too strict.
According to research by the International Council on Clean Transportation in 2014, actual nitrogen oxide emissions from cars are seven times higher than the 80mg per kilometre standard, with some types of cars 22 times above the recommended limit. Only one car out of 16 met the 80mg target. Around one third of all nitrogen oxide pollution comes from road transport  mostly diesel  and in cities concentrations can be as high as 64%, according to European Environment Agency data.
Campaigners say that the car industry has tried to delay reforms to car test cycles. But industry groups deny this  they argue that a five-year delay is necessary for technical and economic reasons. Real Driving Emissions (RDE) is a totally new regulation that will force significant changes to cars, said Cara McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA). However, ACEA fully accepts that RDE will apply to new types of cars from September 2017.
ACEA sent the European Commission their own draft regulation for consideration, after EU representatives finally agreed a regulation to implement the nitrogen oxide limits with strengthened road trials and strict monitoring of exhaust fumes. ACEAs draft regulation would have covered fewer pollutants and delayed the regulations introduction until 2020. Test distances would have been shortened from 1,300m to below 700m, minimum temperatures would have been raised from -7C to -3C and more rural roads would have been used.
The ACEA draft was rejected by the Commission. The new regulation will now pass to commissioners for approval before an expected introduction in September. By 2017, the first realworld CO2 emissions tests are expected to begin in earnest. The introduction of the EUs new emission tests will be watched closely around the world.


People today might not hear the sounds of the natural world because they screen out the noises around them, says a US researcher.
More background noise can make people oblivious to the uplifting sounds of birdsong, water and trees in the wind. You can often hear these sounds even in cities, said Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service.
The problem is even worse because people listen to music through their earphones instead of listening to the birds and other sounds of nature. Natural sounds are easily drowned out by traffic, music and others noises, Fristrup said.
“This learned deafness is a real problem,” Fristrup told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose. “We are training ourselves to ignore the information that comes into our ears.”
“This gift that we are born with – the ability to hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds – might be lost,” he said.
This is the problem: we hear so many noises that we stop listening.
For the past ten years, the US National Park Service has recorded sound levels at more than 600 parks in the US, including Yosemite in California, Yellowstone and Denali in Alaska. There was noise from human activity in all the parks, for example aircraft, motorbikes, motorboats and tour buses.
Fristrup’s team say that noise pollution more than doubles every 30 years. “It’s not surprising people put on earphones,” he said.
“More background noise has the same effect on your hearing as fog has on your vision – you are aware of only a small area around you,” he said. Even in our cities, there are birds and things to appreciate in the environment but we are losing the ability to hear them.
People quickly become used to changes in their environments, including more noise. Fristrup worries that we will forget how much quieter the world could be. “If finding peace and quiet becomes too difficult, many children will grow up without the experience and I think it’s a very big problem,” he said.
Other scientists reported health benefits from listening to natural sounds. Speaking at the same meeting, Derrick Taff, a social scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said that listening to recordings from national parks, of waterfalls, birdsong and wind, helped people feel less stressed.
“We know that natural sounds are very important to people. They are some of the main reasons people visit protected areas. They want to hear the natural quiet, the birdsong, and the wind and water,” Taff said. “We may be losing this as people are listening to their iPods all the time. My advice is to go to your protected areas and experience what you are missing.”


Intermediate
It is no secret that millennials use technology a lot. More than eight in ten say they sleep with a mobile phone by their bed, almost two thirds admit they text while driving, one in  ve has posted a video of themselves online and three quarters have created a pro le on a social networking site. But there is a small percentage of millennials who dont use social media at all. Here are four of them.
Celan Beausoleil, 31, Oakland, California Beausoleil is a social worker and has had an on and off relationship with Facebook. She last deactivated her account in December 2015 because she found the amount of personal information shared by others too heavy to deal with in addition to her work demands.
In my job, I spend a lot of time listening to peoples lives all day, every day and it started to feel so overwhelming to go on social media and see every single detail of everybodys lives, including people that I dont really have a relationship with, she said. Im involved a lot with people in my work life and sometimes it felt like it was too heavy to do in my personal life also.
But Beausoleil loves the way social media connects the world in a truly unique way. One thing I really liked about Facebook was that I could sit for hours and click on a friend and then click on one of their friends and one of their friends and one of their friends and end up on someones Facebook page from the other side of the world, she said. I used to do that all the time.
Jason Mathias, 26, Baltimore, Maryland One day, I realized: Im spending so much time doing this. These little seconds add up. I wonder what it would be like if I didnt spend these seconds here and spent them doing something else. What if I was doing other things with these seconds? What would they become? Would I enjoy it?
Mathias had Facebook and Twitter accounts for years before deleting them both in November 2012. But he quickly forgot that Facebook existed after his impromptu decision to end his social media presence. He can still appreciate the bene ts that come with having social media accounts, for example how easy it is to organize large events online. He now relies on friends for party invites.
But now he loves his extra free time. He spends his lift rides and spare moments at work reading news articles and books. And with no friends accounts to follow online, he has to pick up the phone and call them, something hes come to enjoy.
Lauren Raskauskas, 22, Naples, Florida Raskauskas describes herself as a pretty private person. So social media is not that appealing to her. My privacy is important to me and I have concerns about giving out my data, she said. She recently deleted her Twitter account and deactivated her Facebook account two years ago when she realized that she didnt like everyone knowing what I was doing. But she can see the positive sides of social media. When a friend of hers that shed lost track of moved to Naples for a month, Raskauskas didnt even realize she was there until after shed left, which was a bummer.
But in the end, her privacy concerns outweighed any bene ts social media could give her and she saw a de nite upside when she went through a recent break-up. The last time a relationship of hers ended and she was online, it was not pleasant. One time, I broke up with somebody while I was on Facebook and I was like Oh my gosh, should I change my pro le photo? Should I change my status? And, this time, I dont have to worry about any of that, she said.
Hariharan Rajagopalan, 18, Boston, Massachusetts Rajagopalan, a student at Boston College, doesnt see any problem with not using social media. He claims that he hasnt seen any effect at this point. Even though classmates post about parties and events on Facebook, they make sure to send him a text message, too, he said.
The only time Rajagopalan used social media was when it was unavoidable: it was the only way to reach his new roommate at college. Before starting his  rst year at college, he signed up for his  rst, and only, social media account. He joined Facebook in order to contact his future roommate and talk about their plans for that year.
He still has the account but he admits: I dont use it. I dont check it or anything like that. He has avoided other social media accounts but, as a sports fan, he acknowledged that Twitter is where most of the news  rst appears. But he refused to get an account because, he says, I dont really need one to read tweets.


Intermediate
Sometimes life isnt fair. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and is now worth an estimated $48bn. James Goodfellow also invented something used by millions of people around the world every day  the cash machine  but it didnt make him rich. In fact, he earned just 10 from the patent and has not made a penny more from it since.
You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting 1m bonuses. What have they contributed to the banking industry, compared to me, to merit a 1m bonus, Goodfellow says. He invented something that generated billions of pounds and he got nothing.
There have been arguments for years over who is the inventor of the ATM and, in 2005, a man called John Shepherd-Barron received a UK honour as the inventor of the automatic cash dispenser. But, the UK government is now saying it was Goodfellow who invented the ATM  so it seems that, after all the arguments, he now has his place in history.
Back in the mid-1960s, Goodfellow was working as a development engineer and was asked to devise a way to allow customers to withdraw cash from banks on Saturdays. Most people worked during the week and couldnt get to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would give cash to a recognized customer, he remembers. I wanted to develop a cash-issuing machine and, to make this a reality, I invented the PIN [personal identi cation number] and a coded token.
This token was a plastic card with holes in it. The patent documents described a system with a card reader and buttons mounted in an external wall of the bank. After Goodfellow produced a model that showed how the machine would work, prototypes were built and the  rst machines were installed in 1967. At around the same time, Shepherd-Barron was developing a rival machine. His machine didnt use plastic cards  instead, it used cheques containing carbon-14, a mildly radioactive substance. The machine detected the carbon-14, matched the cheque against a PIN and paid out the cash.
It is widely accepted that the Shepherd-Barron ATM was the worlds  rst to be installed and used by the public; the  rst one, at a bank in north London, was opened on 27 June, 1967  a month before Goodfellows ATM appeared. However, the patent for Goodfellows machine was lodged on 2 May, 1966, 14 months before Shepherd-Barrons ATM machine was first used.
Shepherd-Barron received an of cial honour for his achievement and Goodfellow says: My one big regret is that I never said anything about it until John Shepherd-Barron received the OBE in 2005 for inventing the automatic cash dispenser. That really stuck in my throat and I kicked up a fuss.
Shepherd-Barron is no longer alive but, in a 2005 interview, he was quite critical of his rival: I dont know him but its clear that the difference between Goodfellow and us was that we thought through the whole system concept and that was important to the banks who bought it. His invention reminds me of the hovercraft, an elegant failure."
The cash machine is now used all over the world and nothing  the contactless revolution, bitcoin, wearable technology, etc  is slowing its growth: there are now 3m ATMs worldwide and, by 2020, there will probably be 4m.
The good news for Goodfellow is that he is beginning to be recognized for his invention. The website ATMInventor.com says: Who invented the idea of an ATM? We believe it was Luther George Simjian. Who invented the ATM as we know it? We have to think it was James Goodfellow for holding a patent date of 1966. Who invented the ATM design we recognize today? We think it was John D White in the US.
Even better for Goodfellow, his achievement has been of cially recognized in the latest edition of a 180-page guidebook called Life in the United Kingdom. In the section about great British inventions of the twentieth century, it states: In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937-) invented the cash-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) or cashpoint.
So after all these years, Goodfellow is  nally among a group of famous British inventors with John Logie Baird (the television), Alan Turing (the Turing machine), Sir Frank Whittle (the jet engine) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the World Wide Web). Asked what he did with the 10 he received in the 1960s, Goodfellow says he thinks he blew it on a night out. He added: It didnt change my life.


Facebook has lost millions of users every month in its biggest markets. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9 million monthly visitors in the US and 2 million in the UK.
It has stopped growing in the US, UK and other major European countries. In the last month, the world’s largest social network lost 6 million US visitors, a 4% fall. In the UK, 1.4 million fewer users went on Facebook last month, a fall of 4.5%.
People are also using Facebook less in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan.
“The problem is that, in the US and UK, most people who want to join Facebook have already done it,” said new media specialist Ian Maude at Enders Analysis.
People get bored, he says, and they “like to try something new”.
Other social networks are also very popular with younger people. Instagram, the photo-sharing site, got 30 million new users in the 18 months before Facebook bought the business.
Path, the mobile phone-based social network started by ex-Facebook employee Dave Morin, is gaining 1 million users a week. It now has more than 9 million users. 500,000 Venezuelans downloaded the app in just one weekend.
Facebook is still growing fast in South America. The number of users in Brazil increased by 6% in the last month to 70 million, according to Socialbakers, whose information is used by Facebook advertisers. And there has been a 4% rise in India to 64 million users – still only a small part of the country’s population, so there is the possibility for more growth.
Global numbers of visitors to Facebook reached 1.05 billion a month in January, but they fell by 20 million in February. Numbers rose again in April. The social network has now lost nearly 2 million visitors in the UK since December, with its 27 million total the same as a year ago.
The number of minutes Americans spend on Facebook is falling, too. The total was 121 billion minutes in December 2012, but that fell to 115 billion minutes in February.
As Facebook has already said, we spend less time using Facebook on our personal computers because we now prefer to use our smartphones and tablets.
Wall Street expects Facebook’s income this quarter to be $1.44 billion, an increase from $1.06 billion a year ago.
The company said that it might be losing “younger users” because they now prefer to use “other products and services similar to, or as an alternative to, Facebook”.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has created some new initiatives for smartphone users in the last year. One initiative, Facebook Home, is software that you can download onto Android phones to feed news and photos from friends – and advertising – directly to your home screen.


When Larry Pizzi first heard about electric bikes nearly 20 years ago, he asked: “Why would anyone want to spoil a bike by putting a motor and batteries on it?”
It’s a question that some people still ask. Many bicycle shops in the US do not sell e-bikes.
Pizzi is CEO of Currie Technologies, the number one seller of e-bikes in the US. He believes that things will change very soon. Other people who sell bikes agree. Familiar brands including Trek, Raleigh and Specialized all offer electric bikes and they believe that the market is going to grow.
The US is different from other countries when it comes to electric bikes. Nearly 32 million e-bikes were sold in 2014, most of them in China, where people mostly use them for transportation. They are popular in many parts of Europe, too. They’re common in the Netherlands and Switzerland; German postal workers use them and BMW sells one for about $3,000.
Electric bikes are different from motorcycles or mopeds, which use motors; you pedal an electric bike with – or without – help from an electric motor. Riding an e-bike feels like riding a normal bike with a strong wind behind you; the motor just helps you go faster or climb hills. You can usually ride e-bicycles on bike lanes and they can’t travel faster than 20mph.
E-bikes are banned in some states in the US, including New York. Some bike shops don’t like putting motors on bicycles because it makes them too heavy. Some e-bikes weigh nearly 30kg.
E-bikes are also expensive. While cheap bikes sell for just $700, you will pay at least $1,500 for a quality e-bike with a good battery. The best bikes cost more than $3,000.
But e-bike technology, particularly the batteries, is improving. “Batteries are getting smaller, they’re getting lighter, they’re getting more reliable and they are lasting longer,” says Don DiCostanza, the CEO of Pedego, an electric bikemaker and retailer.
Perhaps most importantly, more cities are building bike lanes so bicycle commuting has become more popular. Electric bikes make commuting more practical – and fun – because people don’t have to worry about hills, strong winds, tiredness and sweat.
Most of our customers are “baby boomers who want to have the cycling experience they had as a kid,” says Pedego’s Don DiCostanza. “The main reason they stopped riding bikes was because of hills.” Pedego has opened nearly 60 stores in the US.
ElectroBike has 30 stores in Mexico. It opened its first American store in Venice Beach, California in 2014 and hopes to have 25 US stores in a year. CEO Craig Anderson says: “We want to help reduce traffic, help reduce our carbon footprint and encourage a healthy lifestyle.” He tells customers: “Ride this bike once and try not to smile.”
Currie’s Larry Pizzi thinks that e-bikes will become popular in North America. “A lot of young people are using e-bikes for transportation, instead of cars.”
There is even a cargo bike with a stronger motor and rack at the back. “You can carry two children,” says Pizzi. “You can carry 45kg of shopping. It’s a minivan alternative.”


On the top of a hill, above Northumberland’s beautiful Kielder Water lake, a group of people are waiting in a car park next to a strange wooden building. They are here because of the darkness and this is Kielder Observatory, the centre of Britain’s latest industry – astrotourism. The people who are waiting outside are lucky. Many more people apply for a night of stargazing at the observatory but not everyone can come because numbers are strictly limited.
Inside, the observatory’s founder and lead astronomer, Gary Fildes, speaks to his colleagues and volunteers. The team discusses that they might see the northern lights but Fildes doesn’t think they will. Instead, they decide to use their powerful telescopes to look at Jupiter and Venus and, later, to find stars such as Capella and Betelgeuse. An extra attraction is the appearance of the International Space Station.
Fildes is a leading figure in the UK’s growing astrotourism industry. The key moment for Northumberland came in 2013 when the entire national park, about 1,500 square kilometres in area, got Dark Sky Park status. It is the only one in England. Dark Sky Parks are rare. Research in 2013 showed that only 5% of the UK population can see more than 31 stars on a clear night.
The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) gives the status of Dark Sky Park only to places that take big steps to prevent light pollution. The areas must also prove their night skies are very dark. In Northumberland Dark Sky Park, it is so dark that Venus casts a shadow on the Earth.
Duncan Wise, visitor development officer for the Northumberland National Park, helped to lead the campaign for dark-sky status. “We usually think that 'landscape' is everything up to the horizon,” Wise said. “But what about what’s above the horizon?” Wise and others spent years preparing their application to the IDA – they collected thousands of light readings.
Because of their hard work, many of the 1.5 million tourists who visit Northumberland each year are now aware of its Dark Sky status. “A lot of people come here to see the sky now,” says a man who works for a local car-hire company. “They come in autumn and winter, when it’s darkest. It’s good for the local hotels because tourists come all year round now.”
Wise agrees that Northumberland needs to do more to take advantage of its dark skies, which are very rare. He believes the region needs more observatories to make sure that visitors will see what they came for. A new £14-million national landscape discovery centre will have an observatory when it is completed in a couple of years.
Fildes has big ambitions. He is planning Britain’s first “astrovillage” – it would have the largest public observatory in the world, a 100-seat auditorium, a 100-seat planetarium, and radiomagnetic and solar telescopes. The multimillion-pound project would also have a hotel and attract 100,000 visitors a year – that is four times the number that are currently able to use the observatory.
However, Northumberland has competition. Galloway Forest Park in Scotland also has Dark Sky Park status. Exmoor in south-west England became Europe’s first International Dark Sky Reserve – one level below Dark Sky Park – in 2011. A number of local businesses there now offer stargazing holidays. The UK is not as good as northern Chile, which has more than ten tourist observatories and some of the clearest skies in the world.
So, why do people want to look at the night sky? The media have helped. TV programmes about astronomy have attracted a new generation of stargazers. Technology has also made astronomy more popular. Apps such as Stellarium now turn smartphones into pocket-size planetariums. But Fildes believes that, most importantly, people are starting to appreciate the sky. “If you had to build a visitor attraction from the beginning, what could be better than the universe?”


Intermediate
Sweden is the best country for older people, Afghanistan the worst  but the general wealth of a country does not always mean better conditions for the over-60s, according to the first global index on ageing. Swedens top ranking  followed by Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada  is predictable, but the Global AgeWatch index provides some surprising results.
The US, the worlds richest country, is only in eighth place, while the UK is 13th. Sri Lanka is 36th, far above Pakistan at 89th, despite similar levels of gross domestic product (GDP). Bolivia and Mauritius score higher than the size of their economies may suggest and, while Brazil and China are relatively high on the index, India and Russia are much lower.
This survey shows that history counts, said Mark Gorman, director of HelpAge International. The top-ranked countries are what you would expect, but Scandinavian countries were not wealthy when they introduced pensions for everyone. The older population in Sri Lanka today is benefiting from good basic education and health care  those countries made certain policy choices. Everybody has scarce resources, but they should not forget that, when they make investment decisions, they should also consider issues of old age.
The index, developed with the UN Fund for Population and Development, covers 91 countries and 89% of the worlds older people. The survey comes during a major demographic change: by 2050, there are expected to be two billion people aged 60 and over, making up more than a fifth of the worlds population.
Population ageing  when older people form an increasingly large proportion of people  is happening fastest in developing countries. More than two-thirds of older people live in poor countries; by 2050, this proportion is expected to be about four-fifths. The fastest ageing countries  Jordan, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Vietnam  are in the lower half of the ranking, which suggests that politicians there need to look at the question of ageing if they are to provide enough support to their populations.
There are gender differences among ageing populations, with women generally living longer than men. In 2012, for every 84 men aged 60 and over, there were 100 women. Many women face disadvantages in old age because of lack of paid work (and therefore also savings), less decision-making power in the family and the fact that they are vulnerable to violence.
However, population ageing does not always lead to significantly higher health care spending, according to the report, which highlights the importance of long-term investments in education and health care for older people. Bolivia, ranked 46, despite being one of the poorest countries, has introduced good policies for older people, with a national plan on ageing, free health care and a noncontributory pension for everyone.
Good basic health care introduced decades ago in Chile and Costa Rica has helped the ageing populations of those countries. A good education system is of great benefit later in life  basic literacy is crucial for older people as they deal with the pensions paperwork. In the Philippines, older people have benefited from the educational reforms introduced after independence in 1946, which made elementary and high school education compulsory. The same is true for Armenia, which, like other countries of the former Soviet Union, benefited from a strong education system. South Korea came a surprisingly low 67 on the ageing index, partly because it introduced a pension only recently.
The ageing index is calculated using 13 indicators under four headings: income security, health care, employment and education, and a positive environment. All indicators have equal weight, except for pension income coverage, life expectancy at 60, healthy life expectancy at 60 and psychological well-being. These categories have increased importance because of better data quality and countries were included only if there was enough data.
Professor Sir Richard Jolly, creator of the human development index, said: This groundbreaking index helps us to better understand the needs and opportunities of older people thanks to its pioneering application of human development methodology. It challenges countries in every part of the world to raise their sights as to what is possible.


Intermediate
The forests  and suburbs  of Europe are echoing with the growls and howls of large predators according to a new study. The study shows that brown bears, wolves and lynx are thriving on the crowded continent. Rising human populations and overconsumption make many people believe that such animals will soon become extinct. But the study has found that large-predator populations are stable or rising in Europe.
Brown bears, wolves and the Eurasian lynx are found in nearly one-third of mainland Europe (excluding Belarus, Ukraine and Russia), with most living outside nature reserves. This indicates that changing attitudes and conservation measures are successfully protecting species that have suffered massive persecution throughout human history.
Bears are the most abundant large carnivore in Europe  there are around 17,000 of them. There are 12,000 wolves and 9,000 Eurasian lynx. Only Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in mainland Europe  like Britain  have no breeding populations of at least one large carnivore species. But the studys main author and other conservationists said that these animals now live in well-populated regions of Europe, so even the British countryside could support big predators.
Guillaume Chapron from Swedens University of Agricultural Sciences and researchers across Europe found wolves, in some cases, living in suburban areas alongside up to 3,050 people per square kilometre. On average in Europe, wolves live on land with a population density of 37 people per sq km, lynx in areas with a population density of 21 people per sq km and bears among 19 people per sq km. The population density of the Scottish Highlands is just nine people per sq km.
In order to have wolves, we dont need to remove people from the landscape, said Chapron. He adds that the big-carnivore revival shows the success of a land-sharing model of conservation  unlike the policy of keeping predators and people apart by fencing off wilderness areas, as occurs in North America and Africa.
Im not saying its a peace-and-love story  coexistence often means conflict  but its important to manage that conflict and resolve the problems it causes. Wolves can be difficult neighbours, said Chapron. We shouldnt be talking about people-predator conflict; we have conflict between people about predators. These animals are symbolic of difficult questions about how we should use the land.
According to the researchers, this land-sharing approach could be applied elsewhere in the world. The reasons for its success in Europe include political stability, growing populations of prey species such as wild deer, and financial support for nonlethal livestock protection such as electric fences, which mean that farmers do not have to shoot wild predators. Most crucial, said Chapron, has been the EU Habitats Directive, which has forced member states to protect and revive rare species.
Without the Habitats Directive, I dont think we would have had this recovery, he said. It shows that, if people are willing to protect nature and if politicians introduce strong legislation, its possible to achieve results in wildlife protection. The revival was welcomed by author George Monbiot, who is launching Rewilding Britain, a new charity to encourage the return of wild landscape and extinct species.
It is great to see this trend continuing but Britain is completely anomalous  weve lost more of our large mammals than any country except for Ireland, he said. Apart from the accidental reintroduction of wild boar, weve done almost nothing, whereas in much of the rest of Europe weve got bears, lynx and wolves coming back.
The survey found that the Eurasian lynx lives permanently in 11 population groups in 23 European countries and only five of these were native populations. This indicates the success of reintroduction efforts. According to Monbiot, support for the reintroduction of the lynx into the Scottish mountains is growing.
If it works in the rest of Europe, theres absolutely no reason why it cant work in the UK, he said. He points out that bears and wolves live within an hour of Rome. Theres no reason why we cant have a similar return of wildlife in the UK.


They may not know who Steve Jobs was or even how to tie their own shoelaces, but the average six-year-old child understands more about digital technology than a 45-year-old adult, according to an authoritative new report.
The advent of broadband in the year 2000 has created a generation of digital natives, Ofcom (which checks standards in the UK communications industries) says in its annual study of British consumers. Born in the new millennium, these children have never known the dark ages of dial-up internet and the youngest are learning how to operate smartphones or tablets before they are able to talk.
“These younger people are shaping communications,” said Jane Rumble, Ofcom’s media research head. “As a result of growing up in the digital age, they are developing fundamentally different communication habits from older generations, even compared to what we call the early adopters, the 16-to-24 age group.”
Ofcom devised a “digital quotient”, or DQ, test to put 800 children and 2,000 adults through their paces, which, rather than measuring intelligence, as an IQ test would, attempts to gauge awareness of and self-confidence around gadgets from tablets to smart watches, knowledge of superfast internet, 4G mobile- phone networks and mobile apps.
Among 6- to 7-year-olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and online television, the average DQ score was 98, higher than for those aged between 45 and 49, who scored an average of 96. Digital understanding peaks between 14 and 15 years of age, when the average is a DQ of 113, and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age.
People are now being invited to test their digital knowledge with an abbreviated version of the questionnaire that will give any member of the public a DQ score, along with advice on how to improve their understanding and protect themselves and their families online.
The ways in which millennial children contact each other and consume entertainment are so different from previous generations that forecasters now consider their preferences a better indication of the future than those of trendsetting young adults.
The most remarkable change is in time spent talking on the phone. Two decades ago, teenagers devoted their evenings to monopolizing the home telephone line, dissecting love affairs and friendships in conversations that lasted for hours.
For those aged 12 to 15, phone calls account for just 3% of time spent communicating through any device. For all adults, this rises to 20% and, for young adults, it is still three times as high at 9%. Today’s children do the majority of their remote socializing by sending written messages or through shared photographs and videos. “The millennium generation is losing its voice,” Ofcom claims.
Over 90% of their device-time is message based, chatting on social networks like Facebook, sending instant messages through services like WhatsApp or even firing off traditional mobile- phone text messages. Just 2% of children’s time is spent emailing, compared to 33% for adults.
Away from their phones, 12- to 15-year-olds have a very different relationship with other media, too. A digital seven-day diary shows live television accounts for just half of viewing for this age group, compared to nearly 70% for all adults. They spend 20% of their time viewing short video clips, for example on YouTube, or news clips distributed via Facebook and other social sites. The rest of their viewing is shared between DVDs, streamed content through Netflix or iTunes and recorded television programmes.
Young adults aged 16 to 24 are voracious consumers of almost all media. However, live radio and print-based media have all but disappeared from their daily diet.
Younger people are moving away from live television and moving to streaming and catch- up services. Even among adults, television is becoming less important. Television viewing among 16- to 24-year-olds has been dipping each year since 2010, but 2013 was the first year where researchers found viewing fell across all age groups. The theory is that tablet computers – among the most popular Christmas presents in 2012 and 2013 – have brought many older people online for longer. With large screens and simple, touch-based interfaces, tablets are being credited with a jump in internet access among the over-65s.
“For years, there has been a very stubborn resistance by the over-65s to accessing the internet,” said James Thickett, Research Director at Ofcom. “In the last three years, we have seen that change and we think that’s down to tablets.”
Britain is embracing internet-enabled devices across the generations, to the extent that the balance between sleep and screen-based activities has now tipped. The typical adult spends eight hours and 41 minutes each day communicating or consuming media, including old-fashioned books and newspapers, and just eight hours and 21 minutes asleep.


Intermediate
On one day in August, one in seven people on Earth, 1 billion people, used Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. In ten years, the social network has completely changed peoples relationships, privacy, their businesses, news media, helped to end regimes and even changed the meanings of common words.
A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities and a stronger society, wrote Zuckerberg.
These are just some of the ways his company changed everything  for better or worse.
1 Facebook has changed the de nition of friend To friend is now a verb. And, unlike in real life, it is easy to unfriend someone, a word invented to describe ending a Facebook friendship when that person is no longer improving your Facebook newsfeed.
Although the meanings of the words share and like are basically the same, Facebook has made the terms more important to us.
School and university reunions are unnecessary  you already know whose career is going well, whether the perfect pair have split and youve seen pictures of your schoolmates babies. You wont be surprised to see an ex in the street with a new girlfriend or boyfriend: you already know theyre dating someone else from the romantic sel es.
But, unlike in real life, on Facebook, all your friends have the same importance. A classmate from university who you havent seen for 15 years, a friend-of-a-friend from a party or a colleague youve never actually spoken to in person  they are all Facebook friends in the same way as your closest friend or your spouse or your mum.
It doesnt necessarily mean we see them the same way. Professor Robin Dunbar is famous for his research that suggests a person can only have about 150 people as a social group. Facebook hasnt changed that yet, he believes. But Dunbar says he fears it is so easy simply to end friendships on Facebook that, eventually, people may not need to learn to get on with each other.
2 We care less about privacy The surprising thing is that Facebook users happily hand over their information.
Pew Research Center found that most young people are more than willing to hand over their details. Ninety- one per cent post a photo of themselves, 71% post the city or town where they live, more than half give email addresses and a  fth give their phone number.
But, because so much of a persons life is shared online, Facebook gives people a way to create an image and a fanbase. Academics have described a new phenomenon: the Facebook self.
More than 80% of Facebook users list their interests, which allows brands to target them effectively. But most younger users limit who can see their pro les, with 60% allowing friends only.
3 Facebook has created millions of jobs  but not in its own of ces Facebook provides indirect employment for people whose job it is to make Facebook work for their brand.
It is a tool like no other, said Michael Tinmouth, a social media strategist who has worked with brands such as Vodafone and Microsoft. Marketers have an understanding of a brands customers like they have never had before. The data available is extraordinary. You know who your customers are, who they are friends with and how they engage with your brand.
And advertisers pay a lot for that. Facebook reported advertising revenue had increased by 46%, reaching $3.32bn.
Facebook is also a mine eld for brands. Suddenly, customers dont simply complain on the phone to a customer service representative or on a small specialist internet forum  angry customers can post their complaints for hundreds of their friends to see or even on the brands own page.
4 Facebook has been the tool to organize revolutions Organizing demonstrations and direct action has been revolutionized by Facebook. Manchester Universitys Olga Onuch found Facebook had been the key way for reaching half of all the Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine.
 Many of the people interviewed in Onuchs research said they relied on Facebook for the truth about what was happening  they dont trust traditional media.
5 Facebook makes news, breaks news and decides what is news About 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds say the internet is their main news source and 63% of users overall, according to the Pew Research Center. About a third of Facebook users post about politics and government.
Most people will  rst read an item of breaking news via Facebook or other social media, mostly on mobiles.
Facebook has also changed the ways journalists write stories. It is a resource many reporters cannot now live without. For better or (often) worse, it is a place to  nd information on almost any ordinary person, who might suddenly  nd themselves at the centre of the days biggest news story.
6 Users are changing Facebook It used to be a site for students of top US universities.
In 2014, ten years after its launch, 56% of internet users aged 65 and older have a Facebook account. And 39% are connected to people they have never met in person.
More than ever, the site is a gateway not just to your friends but to the rest of the internet.
We may as well get used to it, said David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. It might very well go away further down the road but something this big takes a long time to disappear, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme. Facebook has proven its ability to change and it will continue to be a very, very major player.


On an average day its outlets are a hive of social activity, hosting everything from business meetings to reading groups looking for that all-important morning caffeine rush. But Starbucks should be careful what it wishes for.
The direct action group UK Uncut plans to turn dozens of the coffee empire’s UK branches into crèches, refuges and homeless shelters to highlight the chain’s tax avoidance tactics.
The announcement of the action comes on the day a Starbucks executive faces questions from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee over why the company paid no corporation tax in the UK during the past three years, despite senior US management trumpeting the company’s profitable operations in Britain.
In his appearance before the committee, Starbucks’ Chief Financial Officer, Troy Alstead, will attempt to repair the company’s reputation, which continues to suffer because of the controversy.
MPs accused HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) officials of having cosy relationships with big businesses. Speaking about the arrangements with Starbucks, the Conservative MP Richard Bacon said: “It smells. And it doesn’t smell of coffee – it smells bad.”
The campaign group UK Uncut is attempting to draw a link 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 faced cuts unless companies paid their fair share of tax. HMRC estimates around £32bn was lost to tax avoidance in 2011.
Greene said the government could easily bring in billions that could fund vital services by clamping down on tax avoidance.
The group, which rose to prominence after staging a sit-in at Vodafone stores, Topshop and Fortnum & Mason, turned its attentions to Starbucks last month after an investigation by Reuters discovered the company had paid only £8.6m in corporation tax since launching in the UK in 1998, despite cumulative sales of £3bn.
Longstanding Uncut campaigner Anna Walker said “We’ve chosen to really highlight the impact of the cuts on women. So there is going to be a real focus on transforming Starbucks into those services that are being cut by the government … [such as] refuges and crèches.
“Starbucks is a really great target because it is on every high street across the country and that’s what UK Uncut finds really important: people can take action in their local areas,” she said.
Several international organizations have faced criticism over their UK accounts, with Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google and Ikea all paying little or no corporation tax despite large British operations.
However, according to pollsters at YouGov’s BrandIndex, Starbucks has suffered the deepest damage to its image.
The coffee store chain 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 despite recent suggestions to the contrary.
“Over the last three years alone, our company has paid more than £160m in various taxes, including National Insurance contributions, VAT and business rates.”
Margaret Hodge, who chairs 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: “I’m not happy with the current situation. I think [HMRC] needs to look at it very carefully. We do need to make sure we are encouraging these businesses to invest in our country as they are, 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 complies with tax laws and accounting rules in each of the 61 countries where we do business, including the UK – a market that we remain committed to for the long term. We’ve 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 take into account the indirect employment created by Starbucks’ investments in the UK, the company’s extended economic impact to the UK economy exceeds £80m annually.
“We hope that UK Uncut will respect the wellbeing of our partners and customers, and recognize the value that we add to the economy, creating jobs and apprenticeships, as well as paying our fair share of taxes in the UK.”


Intermediate
Sleep deprivation used to be a sign that you were busy and important and very much in demand. Sleep was for wimps. Now, however, Arianna Huffingtons The Sleep Revolution, a book that promises to completely change your life one night at a time, is a New York Times best-seller.
Meanwhile, businesses have realized that they can make money from the sleep revolution. A whole range of businesses are reinventing where, when and how we sleep, as well as how much were prepared to pay for it. Luxury hotels are offering sleep retreats; more than $1,000 gets you dinner and a movie about sleep. And, if youre staying home, you can upgrade your bedroom with everything from a mattress cover with a sensor that monitors your sleep ($249) to a sleeping mask that monitors your brainwaves and lets you nap more efficiently ($299).
Sleep has not only become big business  it has made its way into corporations. A number of companies already have sleeping areas and Huffington predicts that nap rooms in offices are going to become as common as conference rooms in the next two years. So, how did this happen? How did sleep, something humans have done since long before Huffington, suddenly become so fashionable?
Many people these days find it normal to pay $10 for green juice and $34 for an indoor cycle class. And getting enough sleep fits into this kind of lifestyle. Then, theres wearable technology. Our bodies have become machines that we monitor and optimize for greater efficiency and sleep has become another data set to be monitored. What Huffington emphasizes about sleep, after all, is not that it rests you but that it restores you. Sleep, she says, is the ultimate performance enhancer and getting eight hours of rest has become the ultimate status symbol.
You know how Arianna Huffington gets her eight hours? Well, she has nine or so assistants. Huffington calls them her A-Team. They do everything for her. They run her errands, plan her travel and load The Huffington Post on her computer in the morning. According to the New York Times, most of the A-Team can only survive about 12 months in the job because its so taxing. The low pay also means many of them take second jobs. Basically, they dont sleep so that Huffington can  and can sell books about it.
Getting enough sleep isnt just a question of valuing sleep enough to go to bed at the right time; its a question of going to bed in the right neighbourhood and in the right body. Numerous studies show that youre more likely to sleep badly if youre poor. Its hard to sleep if youre worried about your safety or havent had enough to eat. Its hard to sleep if youre one of the 15 million American shift workers who work irregular hours. Research has also found that theres a black/white sleep gap. One study shows that white people sleep an average of 6.85 hours but African Americans sleep an average of 6.05 hours. They also have a lower quality of sleep. Researchers say this is partly due to the stress of racism.
Do you know who gets the most sleep and the best quality of sleep in America? Rich white women. Who are probably the same people Huffington wrote her book for. Huffington describes her promotion of sleep as a revolution but, really, its a rebranding. The very real sleep crisis isnt that a few rich people think its a waste of time; the problem is the 99% who cant afford to spend time sleeping.
Sleep may be a performance enhancer but its an inefficient one. The real prize is finding a way to negate sleep deprivation so humans can work on less sleep. Unsurprisingly, the military is at the forefront of this research. In 2008, the Pentagon published a report called Human Performance. It examined the possibility of a future in which soldiers could perform at their peak with only a couple of hours sleep. Imagine that you could make a human who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per night). This would lead to a twofold decrease in the casualty rate. An enemy would need approximately 40% more soldiers to compensate for this advantage.
Eventually, humans will find a way to remove the need for sleep completely. Spending a third of your life unconscious wont be a luxury anymore; itll be something only the poor will be forced to do. At that point, we may need a whole new sort of sleep revolution.


The auction of a Banksy painting that disappeared from the wall of a north London shop was stopped just moments before it was going to be sold.
Slave Labour is a spray-painted artwork that shows a child making flags. The expected price was about $700,000. It was going to be in a sale of street art in Florida.
But Frederic Thut, the owner of the Fine Arts Auction Miami art house said that Slave Labour and a second work by the secretive British street artist were removed from sale at the auction. He did not want to give the name of the seller.
People in Haringey, London, were very happy, because they led a campaign to stop the sale of the artwork that was removed from the wall of a Poundland shop in Haringey.
“I will write to the auction house to find out what will happen next, but for now we are really pleased that a people’s campaign in London has had an impact in the US. It’s a real victory for the people.” said Alan Strickland, a Haringey councillor.
The auction house said it had told the owners of the two Banksys that they should remove them from the sale. “There are no legal problems with the sale of the artwork by Banksy, but FAAM told its sellers they should remove them from the auction.”
Critics have said the auction house was buying and selling stolen property but Thut said that the seller was the real owner and that the sale was legal.
He added that his gallery had received many emails and phone calls from the UK, but said he thought it was right to sell the two pieces of artwork because it would keep them safe.
The second Banksy that was going to be auctioned was a 2007 artwork called Wet Dog that was removed from a Bethlehem wall. Its estimated price is up to $800,000.
Poundland said it had no idea who removed the 4ft x 5ft mural from the side of its shop.
Banksy himself has not commented on the sale of Slave Labour, but he has condemned people who have tried to sell his artwork in the past.
Stephan Keszler, the dealer at a 2011 auction in New York that also planned to sell Banky’s paintings, believes selling Banksy’s works without his permission is fair.
“He does something on other people’s walls and houses without asking. The owner of the property can do whatever they want with it,” Keszler said.


The government is bracing itself for thousands of legal claims from people who were imprisoned and allegedly mistreated during the final days of the British Empire after the High Court in London ruled that three elderly Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion have the right to sue for damages.
The court on Friday rejected claims from the government’s lawyers that too much time had elapsed since the seven-year insurgency in the 1950s, and it was no longer possible to hold a fair trial. In 2011 the same High Court judge, Mr Justice McCombe, rejected the government’s claim that the three claimants should be suing the Kenyan government as it had inherited Britain’s legal responsibilities on independence in 1963.
Human rights activists in Kenya estimate more than 5,000 of the 70,000-plus people detained by the British colonial authorities are still alive. Many may bring claims against the British government. The ruling may also make it possible for victims of colonial atrocities in other parts of the world to sue.
But many more men and women around the world who were imprisoned and allegedly mistreated during the conflicts that often accompanied the British retreat from empire may also be considering claims: cases that could bring to light evidence of brutal mistreatment of colonial subjects and result in a new and uncomfortable understanding of recent British history.
The Foreign Office acknowledged that the ruling had “potentially significant and far-reaching legal implications ”, and said it was planning to appeal. “The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is three to six years,” a spokesman said. “In this case, that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision makers are dead and unable to give their account of what happened.”
Friday’s historic victory for Paulo Muoka Nzili, 85, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, 84, and Jane Muthoni Mara, 73, was the result of a three-year battle through the courts. They had suffered what their lawyers describe as “unspeakable acts of brutality” including castration, beatings and severe sexual assaults. A fourth claimant dropped out while a fifth, Susan Ciong’ombe Ngondi, died two years ago, aged 71.
In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, the news from London was relayed to two of the complainants, Nyingi and Mara, by mobile phone. They had been sitting silently with their supporters in a sun-scorched garden and reacted with joy when the word came, hugging, dancing and eventually raising their hands to the sky to pray.
Nyingi, who was detained for about nine years, beaten unconscious and bears the marks from leg manacles, whipping and caning, said: “For me … I just wanted the truth to be out. Even the children of my children should know what happened. What should happen is that people should be compensated so they can begin to forgive the British government.” Mara said: “I’m very happy and my heart is clean.” Asked what she would tell her four children, she said simply: “I will tell them I won.”
McCombe said in 2011 that there was “ample evidence … that there may have been systematic torture of detainees ”. On Friday he ruled that a fair trial was possible, and highlighted the fact that thousands of documents came to light in 2011 after the Foreign Office admitted to a secret archive of colonial-era files.
During the course of their attempts to have the claims struck out – efforts that the claimants’ lawyer, Martyn Day, described as “morally repugnant” – the British government’s lawyers accepted that all three of the elderly Kenyans were tortured by the colonial authorities.
Day said: “The British government has admitted that these three Kenyans were brutally tortured by the British colony and yet they have been hiding behind technical legal defences for three years in order to avoid any legal responsibility. There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care.”
Among those who are known to have been watching the case closely are a number of veterans of the Eoka insurgency in Cyprus in the 1950s. One has already met the Mau Mau claimants’ lawyers. Any Cypriot claimants would be able to rely not only on British documentation, but upon the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Those files are kept secret for 40 years, and then opened to public scrutiny. The Red Cross documented hundreds of torture cases in Cyprus, where reporters covering the conflict referred to British interrogators as HMTs – Her Majesty’s Torturers.
There may also be claims from Malaysia, where large numbers of people were detained during the 12-year war with communist insurgents and their supporters that began in 1948. Relatives of 24 unarmed rubber plantation workers massacred by British troops are currently fighting through the British courts for a public inquiry. Many former prisoners of the British in Aden may also have claims against the British government, although, as Aden is now part of Yemen, British lawyers may have difficulty making contact with potential clients there.


Our new international survey, including 33 countries, shows how wrong people around the world are about some important things.
British people think the richest 1% own 59% of their country’s wealth, when they actually “only” own 23%. Americans think that 33% of their population are immigrants but it is really 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 43% of young adults aged 25-34 still live at home with their parents, rather than the actual 14%. In India, people who did the online survey think 60% of the whole country also has internet access, when really only 19% do.
So, why do people across the world know so little about these things?
Some of us don’t understand the questions. For example, most countries overestimate how many people are not religious: in the 33 countries, people thought 37% are not religious but the real number is actually just 18%. This is because we are thinking of how many people practise their religion, rather than how many people say they have a religion.
Rural areas are large so that is why people overestimate how many people live in the countryside.
We see things from our own perspective and find it difficult to imagine that there is a lot of variety in our countries. For example, the people from India who did the survey really overestimated their population’s access to the internet. Most people did the study online – and, in developing countries, this means the people who did the survey were probably wealthy. What we found from the survey is that people generalize from their own situations and forget that other people’s situations might be different.
In Britain, this is probably the reason why people overestimated how much the richest people 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%). People are worried about these things and, because of this, they overestimate.
But, the survey suggests there are also some problems that people are not very worried about but they should be more worried. For example, most countries really underestimate how much of their population is overweight. The worst case is Saudi Arabia, where people think only 28% are overweight, when 71% are. Britons think it is 44%, when actually 62% are overweight.
In many ways, it is the differences between 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 but 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 not surprising that we’re often so wrong.


Sleep deprivation used to be a badge of honour: a sign you were busy and important and very much in demand. Snoozing was losing and sleep was for wimps. Now, however, Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution, a 'call to bed' that promises to transform your life “one night at a time”, is a New York Times best-seller and Huffington is urging people to “sleep their way to the top”. Meanwhile, the sleep industry has woken up big time and a whole range of start-ups are reinventing where, when and how we sleep, as well as how much we’re prepared to pay for it. For the more upmarket snoozer, luxury hotels are offering “sleep retreats”; more than $1,000 gets you dinner and a movie about sleep. And, if you’re staying home, you can upgrade your bedroom with everything from a mattress cover with a sensor that tracks your sleep ($249) to a brainwave-monitoring sleeping mask that lets you nap more efficiently ($299).
Sleep hasn’t just been corporatized – it has infiltrated corporations. A number of companies already have nap pods and Huffington predicts that nap rooms in offices are going to become “as common as conference rooms“ in the next two years. So, how did this happen? How did sleep, something humans have done since long before Huffington awoke to it, suddenly become so fashionable?
Getting enough sleep is a natural fit for the sort of lifestyle in which paying $10 for green juice and $34 for a SoulCycle class is the norm. Then, there’s the rise of the quantified self through wearable technology. Our bodies have become input/output devices that we monitor and optimize for greater efficiency and sleep has become another data set to be tracked. What Huffington emphasizes about sleep, after all, is not that it rests you but that it restores you. Sleep, she says, is the ultimate performance enhancer and getting eight hours of rest has become the ultimate status symbol.
You know how Arianna Huffington gets her eight hours? Well, for one thing, she has “nine or so” assistants, according to a recent New York Times profile. Huffington calls them her “A-Team”; they do everything from running her errands to planning her travel to loading The Huffington Post on her computer in the morning. According to the Times, most of the A-Team can only endure about 12 months of the work because it’s so taxing. The low pay also means many of them take second jobs. Basically, they don’t sleep so that Huffington can … and can sell books about it.
Getting enough sleep isn’t just a question of valuing sleep enough to go to bed at the right time; it’s a question of going to bed in the right neighbourhood and in the right body. Numerous studies show that you’re more likely to sleep poorly if you’re poor. It’s hard to sleep if you’re worried about your safety or haven’t had enough to eat. It’s hard to sleep if you’re one of the 15 million American shift workers who work irregular hours. Research has also found that there’s a black/white sleep gap. One study shows that, while white people sleep an average of 6.85 hours, African Americans sleep an average of 6.05 hours. They also have a lower quality of sleep. Researchers have attributed this, in part, to the stress of discrimination.
Want to know who gets the most sleep and the best quality of sleep in America? Wealthy white women. Which, if I’d hazard a guess, is probably the same demographic Huffington is targeting her book at. Huffington describes her promotion of sleep as a “revolution” but, really, it’s a rebranding. The very real sleep crisis we face isn’t down to a few rich people thinking it’s a waste of time; it’s down to the 99% not being able to afford to spend time sleeping.
While sleep is currently enjoying a moment, it will probably be short-lived. Sleep may be a performance enhancer but it’s an inefficient one. The real prize is finding a way to negate sleep deprivation so humans can function on less sleep. Unsurprisingly, the military is at the forefront of this research. In 2008, the Pentagon published a report called “Human Performance” which examined the possibility of a future in which soldiers could perform at their peak with only a couple of hours’ sleep. “Suppose a human could be engineered who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per night).
This would lead to an approximately twofold decrease in the casualty rate. An adversary would need an approximately 40% increase in the troop level to compensate for this advantage.” The report goes on to look at the effects of ampakines, a class of drugs that modulate neurotransmitters in the brain, to remove the effects of sleep deprivation.
Eventually, humans will figure out a way to get rid of sleep. Spending a third of your life unconscious won’t be a luxury anymore; it’ll be something only the poor will be forced to do. At which point, we may need a whole new sort of sleep revolution.


Cathal Redmond was swimming off the Greek coast. He took some photos of colourful fish with his first underwater camera and he was sure they would be great. But, when he looked at the photos later, they were brown and murky. The photos were bad because he was holding his breath underwater so he didn’t have enough time to take the pictures. He thought that all he needed was a little more time to photograph the fish in their natural environment.
To help with this problem, he has invented the Express Dive. It is a refillable air storage device, which you hold in your mouth. It lets you swim underwater for two minutes. It is somewhere between snorkelling, which is very limited, and scuba diving, which gives people the freedom to breathe underwater but needs heavy and expensive gear. The prototype of his invention looks like a combination of a scuba mouthpiece and a water bottle.
“I wanted to let people to do more – not just get underwater and spend 30 seconds holding their breath,” says Redmond, 27. In 2006, the Irish designer completed a scuba-diving course and loved the feeling of being able to breathe underwater and watch fish in their natural environment. But all the equipment he needed was less enjoyable.
“I didn’t like that I had about 50kg of equipment on me. And getting into the water was quite strange when you are used to trying to stay at the surface. It was a very surreal experience,” he says. “The real problem is that scuba diving limits what you can do. It allows you to stay underwater for longer but it takes a lot of planning. You have 20kg to 50kg of gear with you – you can’t just walk on the beach and decide you want to go in. Planning is a very big part of it.”
It was during a final-year project for his degree that Redmond produced the Express Dive. The device has two main parts. When above the surface, the device takes in air through a vent in the mouthpiece. The air is compressed and stored in a tank, which has a light that flashes green when it is full. When it has finished taking in air, the vent closes and, when the person dives, air is fed back through the mouthpiece. The light turns from green to red when the air starts to runs out. The device can take in enough air for two minutes of diving and takes approximately the same amount of time to refill.
Redmond says the mouthpiece feels similar to a snorkel. They have tested the prototype in parts. Redmond says he has shown that the motor can compress two minutes of air into the device and that a person can hold the device in their mouth.
What he has not yet done is test the device on a diver, completely underwater for two minutes. But, with enough testing, Redmond is sure the device will work well and that it will not be dangerous for swimmers underwater. The device will probably cost £280, he says, and it will probably weigh from 1kg to 3kg.
Perhaps some people think two minutes of air is not enough and is not much better than snorkelling. But, Redmond says two minutes can make all the difference underwater. The typical swimmer can hold their breath for about 40 seconds while underwater. “Two minutes is not a lot of time but it is a lot longer than that,” he says.


More than 100,000 people went onto the streets in Brazil to show their anger at violent police, poor public services and high costs for the World Cup.
The demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasilia, Belem, Belo Horizonte and Salvador started peacefully, but there were some clashes with police and people set fire to cars and buses.
People complained that police used rubber bullets, tear gas and violent beatings. Happening at the start of the football Confederations Cup, the rallies brought together people who are angry with the high costs and poor quality of public services, the large amounts of money spent on international sporting events, low standards of health care, inequality and corruption.
Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but several police were hurt, at least one car was burned and windows were broken.
People were demonstrating for different reasons. “We are here because we hate the government. They do nothing for us,” said Oscar José Santos, 19 years old.
“I’m an architect but I have been unemployed for six months. There must be something wrong with this country,” said Nadia al Husin.
At a smaller rally in Brasilia, demonstrators entered the high-security area of the national congress. Several climbed onto the roof.
In Belo Horizonte, police clashed with protesters who tried to get into a football stadium, where there was a Confederations Cup match between Nigeria and Tahiti.
In Porto Alegre, demonstrators set fire to a bus and, in Curitiba, protesters tried to enter the office of the state governor. There were also rallies in Belem, Salvador and other places.
In São Paulo, there were large groups of people but the marches were peaceful.
Most protesters were young and, for many, it was their first experience of such a giant rally. “My generation has never experienced this,” said Thiago Firbida, a student. “Since the dictatorship, Brazilians have never demonstrated like this. They did not believe they had a reason to. But now Brazil once again has problems, with a constant rise in prices, so people are finally reacting.”
Brazil’s demonstrations have been given special names – the “vinegar revolution” (because police arrested people for carrying vinegar to stop the effects of tear gas), the “20-cent revolution” (because of the bus price rise) and the Passe Livre (because of the demand for free public transport).
Some said the protests did not feel Brazilian but they were liberating. “Our politicians need to see the strength we have as one people. Brazilians are usually too nice; they enjoy partying, not protesting, but something is changing,” said Deli Borsar, a 53-year-old yoga teacher.
After people heard about the costs of new and improved stadiums on the news, the Confederations Cup football tournament has been one of the reasons for the protests. Before Saturday’s match in Brasilia, groups of demonstrators were dispersed by riot police. Frightened Japanese supporters ran from the area holding their children, when they heard shots – perhaps rubber bullets or tear gas.
Another protest march, near Rio’s Maracana Stadium, also had a heavy police response.
President Dilma Rousseff “believes peaceful protests are correct and proper for a democracy and that it is natural for young people to demonstrate.”
But people booed the president at the opening ceremony for the Confederations Cup. She will have serious political problems, both now and in 2014, when Brazil will host the World Cup and also have an election.


They call him the Robin Hood of the banks, a man who took out dozens of loans, worth almost half a million euros, with no intention of ever paying them back. Instead, Enric Duran handed the money out to projects that created and promoted alternatives to capitalism.
After 14 months in hiding, Duran is unapologetic, even though his activities could land him in jail. “I’m proud of what I did,” he said in an interview by Skype from an undisclosed location. The money, he said, had created opportunities. “It generated a movement that allowed us to push forward with the construction of alternatives. And it allowed us to build a powerful network that groups together these initiatives.”
From 2006 to 2008, Duran took out 68 commercial and personal loans from 39 banks in Spain. He farmed the money out to social activists, funding speaking tours against capitalism and TV cameras for a media network. “I saw that, on one side, these social movements were building alternatives but that they lacked resources and communication capacities,” he said. “Meanwhile, our reliance on perpetual growth was creating a system that created money out of nothing.”
The loans he swindled from banks were his way of regulating and denouncing this situation, he said. He started slowly. “I filled out a few credit applications with my real details. They denied me, but I just wanted to get a feel for what they were asking for.”
From there, the former table-tennis coach began to weave an intricate web of accounts, payments and transfers. “I was learning constantly.” By the summer of 2007, he had discovered how to make the system work, applying for loans under the name of a false television production company. “Then, I managed to get a lot.” €492,000, to be exact.
Duran was arrested in Spain in 2009, on charges brought against him by six of the 39 banks that had lent him money. He spent two months in prison before being bailed for €50,000. In February 2013, facing up to eight years in prison, he decided to flee rather than stand trial. “I don’t see legitimacy in a judicial system based on authority, because I don’t recognize its authority,” he said.
His actions, he said, were in the vanguard of a worldwide debate on the economic crisis. The timing pushed the anti-capitalist movement into the light, just as many Spaniards were seeking alternatives to a system that had wreaked havoc on their lives.
While the same actions would probably be better understood in today’s Spain, he said that they would not be needed. The anti-capitalist movement has grown from a fringe movement to one supported by thousands of Spaniards, he said, evidenced by the widely supported movements such as the Indignados.
Success has helped the movement become self- sufficient. “We now have the capacity to generate resources,” said Duran, adding somewhat ironically that this was exactly what banks issue credit for – “to advance and generate a situation that allows you to be independent”. Duran is widening his focus to include Spain’s justice system, by promoting restorative justice. “The people in Spain who believe that banks don’t work, they think that I don’t owe anything. I’ve already done my work,” he said. “But there is a part of a population that is not in agreement with us and I think I should respond to that.”
In his case, he said, the element of reciprocity he could offer to banks might lie in the insight he gleaned from years of obtaining bank loans fraudulently. He could share his thoughts on “which best practices work and the bad ones that don’t,” he suggested, “for the general population and for bank workers”.


Bogus allergy tests are convincing thousands of people to take unnecessary treatments and put themselves or their children on inadequate diets, sometimes resulting in malnutrition, a group of experts and charities has said. Allergies and food intolerances are soaring but confusion between the two, as well as the many misdiagnoses, are causing real harm, said the information organization Sense About Science, which has produced a guide in collaboration with allergy specialists and charities.
“It’s probably the biggest mess for science communication, where myths, misinterpreted studies and quackery collide with under- and over-diagnosis,” said Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science. “The costs are huge – unnecessary actions for some and not enough action for those whose lives depend on it.”
Experts fear that restaurants and caterers are seeing so many people claiming they have allergies (which can be dangerous for the individual), when in fact they have a food intolerance (which is not), that they may not take all the precautions they should when serving a person who has a genuine allergy.
“It matters very much,” said Moira Austin of the Anaphylaxis Campaign. “If a caterer thinks somebody is just avoiding a food because they don’t want to get bloated, they may be less careful. There have been a number of fatalities where people have gone to a restaurant and alerted staff that they have an allergy to a particular food and the meal has been served up containing that allergen.”
The guide says most internet and shop-bought allergy tests have no scientific basis. They include a home-testing kit that looks for specific IgG (immunoglobulin G) antibodies against food stuffs in the blood. While these antibodies are part of the immune system’s response to infections, “the best medical evidence has shown elevated IgG levels do not suggest an allergy”, the guide says. “Results are frequently positive in individuals who do not have an allergy or a food intolerance.”
Also debunked is a test, a mixture of acupuncture and homeopathy, which attempts to measure electronic resistance across the skin while the child or adult holds the suspect food in their hand. Hair follicle testing is also pointless, the guide says. “Hair is not involved in allergic reactions so testing hair samples cannot provide any useful information on allergic status.” Nor should people be deceived into thinking allergies are caused by an “energy blockage” that can be diagnosed by muscle testing and cured by acupuncture.
“I commonly see children who’ve been put on to unnecessarily restricted diets because their parents assume, in good faith, that they have allergies to multiple foods on the basis of 'allergy tests' that have no scientific basis,” said Paul Seddon, a consultant paediatric allergist, on behalf of the UK Cochrane Centre, an independent organization that assesses medical evidence. “This needs to stop, which can only happen if we debunk these 'tests'.”
Another consultant paediatric allergist, Adam Fox from Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital in London, said: “I get a number of patients, and my colleagues likewise, who will come in having sent their hair off for analysis or having excluded a whole range of foods for their children. It is very difficult to untangle that. There are two challenges. Children need to be given proper diets but more of it is the unnecessary avoidance of things that aren’t harmful, which has a huge impact on the quality of life. A child who can’t eat wheat or drink milk can’t go to parties.”
The conviction that a child’s chronic lethargy or headaches or eczema are caused by an allergy takes a long time and many tests to prove or disprove. It is tempting to go to an alternative therapist who will do a single test and provide a quick, but inaccurate, answer.
Allergies are on the rise across developed countries. The percentages of children diagnosed with allergic rhinitis and eczema have both trebled in the last 30 years. While there is now better diagnosis, the rise in incidence is real, leading many more people to suspect allergies are the reason for their own or their children’s health issues. The guide lists a number of myths about the sources of allergies, from the suggestion that they are caused by E numbers in food colourings to “toxic overload” and fast food.