Intermediate
Junior Smart knows a lot about gangs. He is now 36 and his life can be divided into two phases. When he was a teenager, after his mother died, he joined a south London gang. At the time, it helped fill a big gap in his life.
They became my new support group, he says. At first it was just a bit of fun but then it became more serious, more and more about making money. They got involved in crime. That is how it was. After leaving college, he got a full-time job in administration and worked as a DJ. But, on the side, he was making money illegally as part of the gang.
Eventually he was arrested for serious drug crimes and was sent to prison for 12 years. The first night after I was arrested was the biggest wake-up call of my life, he says. I had been living a double life. I had been living as one person to my peers and another person to my peers enemies. I spent a long time sorting myself out.
Today, Junior Smart runs a team of 12 full-time workers and six volunteers, which aims to turn young criminals and gang members away from crime. Most of the team are ex-criminals like Smart. A few are still in prison but they are allowed out during the day to help. They work with the police, the probation service and other, voluntary organizations to help people who feel trapped and frightened in the violent criminal gangs of London.
For Smart, the extraordinary journey from gang member to mentor began when he was in prison. I was touched by the people who kept coming back in, he says. I couldnt believe that nothing was done about it. I was talking to the prisoners and they knew what changes they needed in their lives, but the problem is that the prison system only deals with the index offence.
One guy had a 300-a-week cocaine habit, which he paid for through burglary. He told me how he would walk into a house, even when he knew people were there. So although he had a drug addiction, that problem was never solved. The thing that shocked me is that it is simply a revolving door.
Smart started working as a prison listener  a prisoner who helps new arrivals during their first days in prison. Then he developed an idea to run his own scheme when he was out of prison  using the experience of ex-offenders to help others reject the revolving door of prison life. He was released early, after five years, and got the opportunity to put his idea into practice.
So what does he think now? Does he believe that things are getting better? He is careful to say positive things about the police; he says much of their work in arresting gang members has been good. But in general he is highly critical of a disjointed government approach that believes that, once the leader of a gang is arrested, the problem is solved. He agrees with a report that says the arrest of gang leaders can even make things worse. He says the effect of removing the leader is often to destabilize the entire gang.
When you arrest the top guy, everyone starts fighting for position. Who was the most loyal? Who had the most respect? It is a bit like a family. They are more likely to be violent. It means that the arrest of the gang leaders has been nullified because it has not had a long-term effect.
Can it actually make the streets more dangerous? It can. People take sides. If one gang knows that an elder [leader] has been arrested, then they suddenly think that gangs weak ... And so there are gang disputes. And what happens when that elder is in prison? He forms alliances with other gang members, or when he is released he then tries to retake control. That is when violence happens.
In order to spread risk down to the lowest levels, he says gangs are now recruiting far more in primary schools. The youngest members are called tinies. Over the last years we have seen more and more of this. The tinies can be just eight to eleven years old. The young protect their seniors from risk. They often do the street dealing or even the stabbing, he says.
Smart says that the challenges are immense, particularly with the current economic problems. I try to help a young person who has been earning 300 a week through illegal methods. It was hard before, to try to convince him. But with unemployment high and cuts to benefits, it makes things more difficult. However, his project, which has over 1,000 clients, is producing results. Fewer than 20% of those who come in for help reoffend. Smart believes that everyone deserves a second chance.


Europe is to become the first place in the world to force 'real-world' emissions tests on car makers, opening up a new front in the fight to tackle air pollution. New regulations will introduce the tests to reveal what cars’ emissions are like when driving on roads and in traffic rather than in ideal, laboratory-like conditions, as is currently the case.
Green lit by European Commission Vice President, Frans Timmermans, the tests are designed to enforce a limit of 80mg of nitrogen oxide per kilometre, a level met by only one car out of 16, according to researchers. Other countries, such as China and Korea, which are also considering real-world emissions tests, will be watching what happens next closely.
Pollutants from diesel engines such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and particulates are thought to be responsible for at least one quarter of the 29,000 annual pollution-related deaths in the UK alone. That figure is likely to rise, when the committee on the medical effects of air pollutants publishes what it calls “strengthening evidence” of damage to public health from nitrogen oxide emissions later in 2015.
But the current 'New European Drive Cycle' laboratory test for measuring these emissions is a quarter of a century old and has been outpaced by technological developments in the car industry. Studies have shown that the results of lab techniques to measure car emissions can easily be fixed by using techniques such as taping up doors and windows to minimize air resistance, driving on unrealistically smooth roads and testing at improbably high temperatures. Campaigners say that car makers also use tricks such as programming vehicles to go into a low emissions mode when their front wheels are spinning and their back wheels are stationary, as happens in such lab experiments.
“The Commission is finalizing a proposal to introduce a new emissions testing procedure that will allow proper assessment of the vehicles in real driving,” said Lucia Caudet, a Commission spokesperson. The proposal still needs approval from other commissioners and a technical committee but “we don’t expect any major internal hurdles,” a European Union (EU) source added.
“One key reason why air pollution kills 400,000 citizens annually is that car makers cheat the tests for diesel cars, causing many times 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. EU states should now support the Commission’s proposals and ignore the whingeing from car makers that the rules are too tough.”
According to research by the International Council on Clean Transportation in 2014, actual nitrogen oxide emissions from cars are seven times higher than the 80mg/km standard, with some models running at 22 times above the recommended limit. Only one car out of 16 met the 80g target. Around one third of all nitrogen oxide pollution comes from road transport – mostly diesel – and, in urban areas, concentrations can rise as high as 64%, European Environment Agency figures indicate.
Campaigners say that the car industry has tried to delay reforms to car test cycles but industry groups deny this, arguing that a five-year lead-time is necessary for technical and economic reasons. “Real Driving Emissions (RDE) is a totally new regulation that will force significant emission control hardware changes that may be demanded in the middle of a vehicle’s production lifetime,” 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.”
In an unusual move, the car association sent Timmermans a draft regulation of their own for him to consider, after EU representatives finally agreed a regulation to implement the nitrogen oxide limits with beefed-up road trials and strict monitoring of exhaust fumes. ACEA’s draft regulation would have covered fewer pollutants and further delayed the regulation’s phased 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 lobbyists were all over this,” Archer said. “This was a real attempt at subversion of the legislative process.”
After Timmerman’s apparent rejection of the ACEA proposal, the regulation will now pass to commissioners for a rubber stamp, and member states for final amendments, before an expected introduction in September. By 2017, the first real-world car emissions tests are expected to begin in earnest. With a similar battle already looming over the testing of CO 2 emissions for cars at the end of 2015 – and with comparable debates in other countries – the introduction of the EU’s new emissions tests will be watched closely.


Some cities have pigeons. Lima has black vultures or gallinazos. They circle in groups overhead and perch on the city’s most emblematic buildings – the decrepit, colonial-era churches and crumbling eighteenth-century piles in the city centre.
In many ways, with their wrinkly heads and beady eyes, they remind Lima residents of the side of their city they would rather ignore: the neglect, poverty and filth. But these carrion-eaters’ natural affinity for dead and decaying things is being turned into a virtue. Environmental authorities are giving these much- maligned birds a PR makeover, kitting them out with GoPro action video cameras and GPS trackers, and giving them a new mission in the fight against fly-tipping and illegal dumping. Samuel is one of the project’s ten certified disease- free Coragyps atratus that have been charged with doing what they do best: sniffing out rubbish. Fitted with his tracker, he is set free above the city, where he identifies clandestine dumps and records the GPS coordinates ona live map.
His trainer at Lima’s Huachipa Zoo, Alfredo Correa, beams with admiration. “They can eat dead animals because their metabolism protects them from viruses and bacteria,” he says. “They’ve got some of the strongest gut flora in the natural world.” The effort is a collaboration between USAID and the Peruvian Environment Ministry to tackle Lima’s rubbish problem.
Samuel’s other airborne companions have been given more evocative names: Capitan Huggin, Capitan Fenix (named after the mythological creature that rises from the ashes) and Capitana Aella ( “Whirlwind”). A tongue- in-cheek video adds a melodramatic voiceover, in which the noble” carthatidae lineage – the vultures” are pitted against pestilence and disease, while “humanity is placidly ignoring the danger”. The project makes a serious point. With just four landfills in a city of nearly ten million inhabitants, there are countless illegal dumps. A fifth of the rubbish ends up there, according to the Environment Ministry. Run-off from the waste contaminates Lima’s main water source, the Rimac river, as well as the Chillon and Lurin rivers, which flow into the Bay of Lima.
The environmental supervision agency, OEFA, says that three poorer neighbourhoods, despite having only 12% of Lima’s population, have by far the most fly-tipped rubbish: Villa Maria del Triunfo (39.4%), Villa El Salvador (25.3%) and El Agustino (18.3%). The problem, in part, is unpaid taxes. Many residents, especially in the barrios , just don’t pay. That means some of the 43 district municipalities lack the resources for basic services such as rubbish collection.
It also means nobody is necessarily going to clean up where the vultures identify illegal rubbish. “We share the vulture’s GPS coordinates with the municipalities,” says Javier Hernandez, the project director. “It’s their job to collect the rubbish and to try and change the habits of their residents.”
The project aims to encourage citizens to be “vultures on the ground ”: to report fly-tipping, cut back on their own waste and recycle. Some residents are responding, posting photos of illicit dumps on the Twitter feed and Facebook page. The idea was hatched at the 2014 United Nations Climate Change Conference, hosted in Lima. “We were looking for ways to involve not just the authorities but also citizens to generate environmental awareness,” Hernandez says. Artist Cristina Planas had placed huge, sculpted vulture heads on top of 25 dead palm trees in a wetland reserve in the south of the city. Rich residents hated it as an ugly imposition but Planas invited citizens to “adopt a vulture” in support of conservation and recycling.
“We are a little scared of the vulture’s appearance,” she said. “But in reality, he is out there sacrificing himself for us. He is out there recycling, in the last place we threw out our rubbish.”


Up to a billion people will remain in extreme poverty by 2030 unless countries focus on inequalities and confront social, economic and cultural forces that block their escape or pull them back into impoverishment, a major report warns. The report by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) asserts that many people may rise above the poverty line of $1.25 a day, only to tumble back when they are hit by a combination or sequence of shocks such as drought, illness and insecurity or conflict.
Drawing on household panel surveys, the report found that, in parts of rural Kenya and in South Africa, 30 to 40% of those who escaped from poverty fell back, rising to 60% in some areas of Ethiopia between 1999 and 2009. Even in successful countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, the proportion has been 20%. Individual cases highlight the ease with which people can slip back into poverty.
Amin, 61, from rural Bangladesh, has seen his livelihood gradually decline, due to his own and his wife’s illnesses, the cost of his son’s marriage, the death of his father and loss of goods such as fishing nets. Lovemore, 74, from Zimbabwe, has become one of the poorest people in his village. He recently lost his job as a car-park attendant due to ill health and had to take in his five grandchildren after the death of his daughters.
“We need to ensure that people lifted out of poverty remain above the poverty line permanently. Too many families are experiencing 'two steps forward, one step back', where they struggle to recover from personal or bigger setbacks. Governments shouldn’t assume that, just because somebody’s income hits $1.25, that means job done,” said Andrew Shepherd, research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a partner of CPAN, and lead author of the report.
A UN high-level panel considering a new development framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 said the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 was within reach. The report, however, argues that “more of the same” will not get to zero.
Despite a drop in extreme poverty from 1.9bn in 1990 to 1.2bn in 2010, the report says that progress in the next 15 years will be much harder. The big gains in China are unlikely to be matched by similar progress elsewhere, while climate-related shocks and deep poverty in parts of sub-Saharan Africa will slow momentum. The report calls for a shift in thinking about poverty to focus on the chronically poor – those who are poor for many years or their entire lives – and for more emphasis on stopping impoverishment, the descent into poverty. “Governments have been quite good at moving people over the poverty line because that is relatively easy – there is a tendency to pick the low-hanging fruit, but they have shied away from the more difficult job of tackling chronic poverty,” said Shepherd.
The report says progress on poverty reduction, while impressive to date, has had less of an impact on the chronically poor than on those who were already closer to the poverty line. It will not be possible to get to zero unless development policies prioritize those living in chronic poverty, it adds. Policymakers must aim for a “zero tripod” of separate but interdependent objectives: tackle chronic poverty; stop impoverishment; sustain poverty escapes. They put forward a trio of policies, all of which require massive global investment.
The first is social assistance – a safety net – to bring the poorest people closer to a decent standard of living. An example of such a scheme is Ethiopia’s productive safety net programme that allowed thousands of vulnerable households to withstand drought without having to curtail education spending. The second is education, from early childhood to the start of work, to enable people to escape and stay out of poverty. Education also has the advantage of being a “portable” asset. The third is pro-poorest economic growth policies to ensure that the benefits of increasing national prosperity reach the very poorest people.
“Economic growth really is critical, but not just any old growth,” Shepherd said. “It has to generate not just employment but decent jobs, not just insecure low-paying jobs. There are ways of doing this, like India’s rural employment guarantees scheme, which has boosted urban not just rural wages.” Another example cited by the report is South Africa’s extension of the minimum wage to groups such as domestic workers.
All this will take money and the report says one obvious implication is that stronger domestic tax systems and greater tax revenues will be required. Aid will also be needed for the start-up costs for social assistance, universal health coverage and to finance education, including scholarships for the poorest children. “There remains a huge role for aid in the next 20 years, as many developing countries spend less than $500 on each of their citizens a year. Even Nigeria, with its oil wealth, spends only $650 per capita,” Shepherd said.
Against a backdrop of crises in Syria, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, conflict and environmental disasters have to be addressed, and the report says it is essential that governments work to reduce the risk of conflict and to establish inclusive peace settlements.
Choose the best answer according to the text. 1. Who are the 'chronically poor'?
Incorporating “reducing (income) inequality” as a post-2015 goal would steer the international agenda in the right direction, given that lessening or containing inequality speeds up the impact of economic growth on poverty reduction. The report argues that if the inequalities that affect the poorest people – such as access to land, labour markets and the power relationships between men and women – are addressed, this would tackle two goals at the same time: reducing chronic poverty and inequality.
The authors urge governments to develop an inclusive national development plan and to work with civil society to ensure the poorest people are represented politically as well as tackling difficult social norms such as dowries and witchcraft that contribute to extreme poverty: “This often means challenging and, perhaps, sweeping away aspects of the status quo and represents the most marked departure from 'business as usual'.”


The bestselling title on Amazon in the US is not Harper Lee’s hugely anticipated second novel, Go Set a Watchman, nor George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, nor even Zoella’s much-mocked but much-bought young adult hit, Girl Online . Instead, Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford is topping the charts with her colouring books for adults, taking top spots on Amazon.com’s bestseller lists.
Basford’s intricately drawn pictures of flora and fauna in Secret Garden have sold 1.4 million copies worldwide to date, with the newly released follow-up Enchanted Forest selling just under 226,000 copies already. They have drawn fans from Zooey Deschanel, who shared a link about the book with her Facebook followers, to the South Korean pop star Kim Ki-Bum, who posted an image on Instagram for his 1.6 million followers.
“It’s been crazy. The last few weeks since Enchanted Forest came out have been utter madness, but fantastic madness,” said Eleanor Blatherwick, head of sales and marketing at the books’ publisher, small British press Laurence King. “We knew the books would be beautiful but we didn’t realize it would be such a phenomenal success.”
And it is not just Basford who is reaping the benefits of the hordes of adults who, it turns out, just wanted something to colour in. In the UK, Richard Merritt’s Art Therapy Colouring Book sits in fourth spot on Amazon’s bestseller lists, Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom – detailed pictures of animals to colour – sits in seventh and a mindfulness colouring book sits in ninth. Basford’s titles are in second and eighth place – that’s half of Amazon.co.uk’s top ten taken up by colouring books for adults.
At independent UK publisher Michael O’Mara, which has sold almost 340,000 adult colouring books to date, Head of Publicity, Marketing and Online, Ana McLaughlin, attributes the craze to the way the category has been reimagined as a means of relaxation. “The first one we did was in 2012, Creative Colouring for Grown-Ups . It sold strongly and reprinted but it was in 2014 that it all really mushroomed with Art Therapy . It really took off for us – selling the anti-stress angle gave people permission to enjoy something they might have felt was quite childish,” she said.
The Mindfulness Colouring Book pushes this perspective particularly strongly, with its publisher telling readers that it is “filled with templates for exquisite scenes and intricate, sophisticated patterns, prompting you to meditate on your artwork as you mindfully and creatively fill these pages with colour ”, and urging potential colourers to “take a few minutes out of your day, wherever you are, and colour your way to peace and calm ”.
“I think it is really relaxing to do something analogue, to unplug,” said Basford. “And it’s creative. For many people, a blank sheet is very daunting; with a colouring book, you just need to bring the colour. Also, there’s a bit of nostalgia there. So many people have said to me that they used to do secret colouring in when their kids were in bed. Now, it is socially acceptable; it’s a category of its own. These are books for adults. The art in my books is super intricate.”
The illustrator, who lives in Aberdeenshire, has been astonished at the reaction since she released Secret Garden in 2013. “I had a kids’ book commissioned and I told them I would like to do one for grown-ups. It really wasn’t a trend then. I drew up the first story and they thought, ‘Let’s go for it’. I was thinking simply that people like me would like to do it. My intention was just to make a book I would like to have. So it’s been a real surprise to see the category bloom.”
She is currently working on a third book and Michael O’Mara, which already has 17 adult colouring books in circulation, will increase this to 22 by May, with forthcoming titles including The Classic Comic Colouring Book and The Typography Colouring Book. “It’s just an enormous trend and shows no signs of slowing down,” said McLaughlin, adding that those who buy the titles are keen to display their ability to stay within the lines to the world at large.
“The pictures are all over Twitter and Instagram. People are really proud of them – they are so intricate,” she said. “You don’t have to have any artistic talent but what you create is unique. People send us pictures of them, framed and laminated. The appetite is simply enormous. I reckon people are taking their kids’ pictures off the fridge and replacing them with their own.”


Intermediate
Our new international survey across 33 countries shows how wrong people around the world are about key social realities.
British people think the top 1% wealthiest households own 59% of their countrys wealth, when they actually only own 23%. Americans think that 33% of their population are immigrants, when in fact it is only 14%.
Brazilians think the average age in their country is 56, when it is only 31. Russians think that 31% of their politicians are women, when it is only 14%.
In Britain, people think that 43% of young adults aged 25-34 still live at home with their parents, rather than the actual 14%. In India, the online population think 60% of the whole country also has internet access, when in fact only 19% do.
Why are people across the world so often clueless about these realities?
It is partly that we just struggle with basic maths and some of us clearly misunderstand the questions or interpret them differently. For example, most countries hugely overestimate how many people are not religious: across the 33 countries, respondents think that 37% are not religious but the average is actually just 18%. This is because we are thinking of how many people practise their religion, rather than how many people see themselves as having a religion.
People also take mental shortcuts, where they take easily available information even if it doesnt quite  t the question. Our huge overestimates of the rural populations in most countries will be affected by how large rural areas are, rather than a careful calculation of how many people live in them. In Daniel Kahnemans terms, answers to these sorts of questions are classic examples of fast thinking, rather than slow.
We see things from our own perspective and struggle to imagine the variety in our countries. This was highlighted by our Indian respondents who massively overestimated their populations access to the internet. Our study was mostly carried out through an online survey  and, in developing countries, this will be representative of a more wealthy, connected group rather than the general population. What we  nd throughout the study is that people generalize from their own situations and forget how unrepresentative they are.
We suffer from what social psychologists call emotional innumeracy when we are estimating realities: this means we are sending a message about what is worrying us as much as trying to get the right answers.
For Britain, worries are part of the explanation for peoples huge overestimates of how much the wealthiest own, how many young people are still living at home and what proportion of the population are immigrants (the guess is 25%, when it is really only 13%). People are worried about these things and, because of this, they overestimate how big the problems are.
But, the survey suggests there are also some issues where people are not as worried as they should be. For example, most countries hugely underestimate how much of their population is overweight or obese. The worst case is Saudi Arabia, where people think only 28% are, when 71% are. Britons think it is 44% when it is actually nearly half as much again  62% are either overweight or obese.
And, in many ways, it is not our misperceptions but these realities across different countries that are the most interesting and important aspects of the study. The top 1% in Russia own 70% of the nations wealth while the top 1% in New Zealand only own 18%. Half of Italians aged 25-34 still live with their parents, when it is only 4% in Norway. The average age in India is 27; it is 47 in Japan. Only 10% of politicians are women in Brazil, Hungary and Japan, when 44% are in Sweden.
When the reality is so strange and varied, it is no wonder were so wrong.


Not nearly enough exercise classes have a tea break halfway through. But Margaret Allen’s does. After a gentle warm-up and a few pulse-raising numbers, the 93-year-old great-grandmother lets her charges rehydrate with a cup of tea and a quick sit down.
Some of the eight-strong class look as if they need it more than others. Allen herself, wearing a thick turquoise shirt, navy knitted waistcoat, black slacks and sensible shoes, has not broken into a sweat. Despite an “excruciating” trapped nerve in one leg and a knee in need of replacement, she looks as though she could go on for hours.
The general rule is that eating directly before sport is not the best idea, let alone part way through. But, on the afternoon I visit Allen’s class at a church hall in Saltburn-by-the-Sea near Middlesbrough, slices of fruitcake are being passed around during the break. The cake has been baked in honour of Allen’s recent birthday by her 89-year-old sister, Joan, known locally as the “scone queen of Saltburn”.
The ladies have barely swallowed their last crumb when Allen is up again, leading the group through a jaunty Scottish number involving lots of toe pointing and leg kicking. Forty-five minutes later, the class is finally over.
Allen, a former volunteer with the Red Cross, has been leading classes in the north-east seaside town for 45 years. Not particularly sporty at school, she started playing the piano for a keep-fit class during the second world war – “just for something to do during the blackouts, really” – and eventually took over in her 40s when the previous instructor retired. At its peak, Allen’s class had more than 18 regulars, each paying £1 a time. But, these days, her flock is diminishing fast – during the teabreak, the ladies discuss a funeral that most of them had attended that week for one of the younger members of the group who had just died, aged 68, from motor neurone disease.
Allen is the oldest, followed by her sister. The baby of the group is 60-year-old Jean Cunion, who credits the group with supporting her through a difficult time when her mother died. She is somewhat embarrassed to admit that she is perhaps the least fit of the group. “I remember, the first time I came, Margaret said: 'Who’s that huffing and panting?' and I had to admit it was me.” Ruth Steere, 76, marvels at how Allen never misses a trick, despite always having her back to the class: “She always shouts at us if we go wrong. She’s remarkably good at knowing what we are doing.”
Allen, a keen dancer, has never done any formal training to be a fitness instructor. Instead, she choreographs her own moves based on five tapes from the BBC’s first ever fitness guru, Eileen Fowler, who died in 2000 when she was 93, Allen’s age now. Allen thinks her good health is largely down to keeping busy, especially since her husband Joe died in 1997. She took up writing poetry when she was 80.
“I write poems about everything. I’m a prolific writer. I just can’t stop,” she says, phoning me a few days after the interview to read out a ditty she has written about the joys of exercise. One of the class, 84-year-old former teacher Winnie Robertson, thinks the secret to staying fit is never letting yourself go: “Use it or lose it, that’s what I say.”
Allen still plays the piano and gives speeches. She is president of the Women’s Fellowship at the local methodist church and is one of three 90-plus year olds at the scrabble club of the University of the Third Age. She did a computer course when she was 88 and tried to get online, but it didn’t work out.
Ageing is no fun, she admits, reading me a few lines from a poem she has written called 'That Beast Called Age'. She happily recalls a doctor who saw her for the first time a few years back, who said she couldn’t possibly be more than 78: “I said, 'Thank you, doctor. You can go now.'”
She also has a no-nonsense attitude to weight gain: “I just think people shouldn’t eat too much. Whenever I hear someone saying, 'Oh, I can’t lose weight’, I say:’ Sellotape.'” She mimes taping her mouth shut. “I said this just the other day to a big fat man. Everything in moderation is my motto.”
Earlier in 2013, Allen was watching the news and saw a woman being given the British Empire Medal. I think she means Margaret Chartwood from Horley, who was given the honour in January, at the age of 77. “She was saying: 'I’m 80 and I’m the oldest fitness instructor in the country!' I was thinking: 'No, you’re not.' But I shan’t be writing to Buckingham Palace.”


The UK prime minister, David Cameron, says he is happy about the result of the Scottish referendum. 55% of people in Scotland voted to keep the 307-year-old union with England and Wales, and 45% voted against it. The prime minister promised more devolution in Great Britain.
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, said he accepted Scotland had not decided to vote for independence this time. He said the referendum was a “triumph for democratic politics” and he said he would work with the government in London in the best interests of Scotland and the rest of the UK. “We have touched sections of the community who have never before been touched by politics,” he said.
The yes campaign had four big successes – it won 53% of the vote in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow, 57% in Dundee and 51% in North Lanarkshire. But the no campaign won in 28 areas. It won easily in areas where people expected it to do well, including Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire and Borders. But it also did well in areas that people said might go to the yes campaign, including the Western Isles. In total, the no campaign won 2,001,926 votes (55.3%) and the yes campaign won 1,617,989 votes (44.7%).
In his speech, Cameron said that there would be constitutional reforms, including in Scotland, but not until after the general election. And he said that there would be changes in England, too. “We have heard the voice of Scotland and, now, we must hear the millions of voices of England,” he said.
Cameron added: “The people of Scotland have spoken and it is a clear result. They have kept our country of four nations together and, like millions of other people, I am delighted. As I said during the campaign, it would have broken my heart to see our United Kingdom come to an end. So, now, it is time for our United Kingdom to come together and to move forward with a balanced settlement, fair to people in Scotland and, importantly, to everyone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well.”
Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, said the referendum was a vote from the Scottish people for change. “We know our country needs to change. We will deliver stronger powers for a stronger Scottish parliament, a strong Scotland.” But he said that would go beyond Scotland. “We will also make changes in England, Wales, and the whole of the United Kingdom.”
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said a vote against independence was “not a vote against change”. “We must now deliver the radical new powers to Scotland,” he added.
The UK Independence Party leader, Nigel Farage, said Cameron’s offer of more devolution for England did not go far enough. “The English are 86% by population of this union. They’ve not been a part of this for the last 18 years. We still have a situation where Scottish MPs can vote in the House of Commons on English-only issues. I think what most English people want is a fair settlement,” he said.
Cameron will try to calm tensions when he makes another statement on the result. The prime minister will explain how he will give more powers to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. The prime minister wants to move fast to show that the three main UK party leaders will keep the promises they made during the referendum campaign.


Coal will probably rival oil as the world’s biggest source of energy in the next five years. This might be a disaster for the climate.
One of the biggest reasons behind the rise in coal use is the big increase in the use of shale gas in the US.
New research from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that all over the world people are using more coal, except in the US, where shale gas is now more popular than coal. Because the US is using less coal, coal prices across the world have reduced. This has made coal more attractive, even in Europe.
Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of the IEA, said that the amount of coal we use “continues to grow each year and, if no changes are made, coal will catch oil within ten years.”
Coal is available in large amounts and it can be found in most regions of the world, unlike oil and gas, and it is cheap to extract. The IEA says that China and India will drive world coal use in the next five years, and India will probably overtake the US as the world’s second biggest consumer. China is the biggest coal importer, and Indonesia is the biggest coal exporter.
According to the IEA’s Medium-Term Coal Market Report, the world will burn 1.2bn more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared with today.
With the highest carbon emissions, coal makes climate change a lot worse, especially when it is burned in old-fashioned, inefficient power stations. Coal can also produce sulphur emissions – these lead to acid rain – and mercury and soot-particle pollution.
Van der Hoeven says that we should make coal more expensive so that people prefer to use cleaner technologies such as renewable power. Providing cheaper gas is the only way to reduce demand for coal. This has happened in the US because of the big increase in the production of shale gas there in the past five years.
She said: “The US experience suggests that a more efficient gas market can reduce coal use, carbon dioxide emissions and electricity bills. Europe, China and other regions should take note.”
If something isn’t done soon there will be more climate change.


It began with a bogus scallop, but a menu scandal that has engulfed some of Japan’s most prestigious hotels and department stores now threatens to undermine the international reputation of the country’s vaunted cuisine.
Since one luxury hotel chain admitted lying about the provenance of ingredients on its menus, Japanese media have served up almost daily revelations of similar transgressions by restaurants run by well-known hotels and department stores.
The frenzy began when the Hankyu-Hanshin hotel chain, based in Osaka, admitted it had given false descriptions of dozens of menu items at some of its restaurants between 2006 and October 2013, affecting an estimated 78,000 diners.
Among the chief menu misdemeanours was a red salmon 'caviar' dish that turned out to be the less sumptuous eggs of the flying fish.
A televised attempt by the hotel group’s president, Hiroshi Desaki, to limit the damage by announcing a 20% pay cut for himself and 10% for other executives, failed to mollify angry consumers.
Days later, Desaki resigned, conceding that the hotel group had “betrayed our customers”, although he added: “We never had the intention to deceive them.” One of the hotel’s head chefs later declined a medal of honour he was due to receive from the government.
The company has so far refunded more than 10,000 consumers to the tune of 20m yen; the eventual bill is expected to reach 110m yen.
Japan’s version of the UK horsemeat scandal has since spread to several household names in catering. While, as in the UK, no one has fallen ill from eating mislabelled produce, the outbreak of anger shows no sign of abating. Consumers who believed they had eaten prized kuruma shrimps, for example, were told they had in fact dined on the much cheaper black tiger version.
The first incident went almost unnoticed. The Prince Hotel in Tokyo was forced to come clean after a diner complained in a blogpost that a 'scallop' dish he had ordered contained a similar, but cheaper, type of shellfish.
The hotel launched an investigation and went on to correct more than 50 menu items at dozens of its restaurants. Its report scared Hankyu-Hanshin and other hoteliers into admitting that they, too, had hoodwinked diners who believed they were paying high prices for premium ingredients.
The Hotel Okura chain – whose guests have included Barack Obama – confessed myriad sins, including injecting beef with fat to make it juicier and incorrectly describing tomatoes as organic.
“We deeply apologize for betraying the expectations and confidence of our clients,” it said in a statement.
The list of fraudulent ingredients continues to grow: orange juice from cartons sold as freshly squeezed; Mont Blanc desserts topped with Korean chestnuts instead of the promised French ones; bought-in chocolate cream masquerading as home-made; imported beef sold as high-end wagyu.
Even the government’s top spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, was moved to comment on the scandal. “These incidents have surfaced one after the other and this inappropriate labelling has resulted in the loss of trust among consumers,” he told reporters. “These are clearly cover-ups.”
The fraudulent menu scandal has exploded at just the wrong time. Japan is trying to persuade South Korea and other countries to lift bans on food imports imposed in response to the Fukushima nuclear accident, while UNESCO is considering a request to add Japanese cuisine to its intangible cultural heritage list.
One local newspaper ran the headline, “Japan’s proud food culture in tears,” while the mass circulation Yomiuri Shimbun said it was “astonished by the industry’s lack of morals.”
The newspaper voiced concerns that the scandal could “harm the credibility of brand Japan, products and services, which are praised by foreign countries and tourists for their safety and security.”
Industry experts said the global financial crisis in 2008 had forced luxury hotels to cut costs while attempting to woo diners with detailed menu descriptions.
“Menu descriptions were created to meet consumers’ preference for brand products, and, when they couldn’t obtain the ingredients stated on the menu, hotels just used food from different places of origin,” Hiroshi Tomozawa, a hotel and restaurant consultant, told Kyodo News.
While they count the cost to their reputations, the hotels and restaurants involved are unlikely to face legal action. Menus are not covered by the agricultural standards law or by a new food labelling law due to go into effect in 2015. The authorities’ only legal weapon is a law banning misleading representations of goods and services.
The industry’s biggest nemesis will be Japan’s discerning and demanding consumers. In a 2009 poll conducted by an online restaurant guide, 72% of respondents said provenance was the most important factor in selecting dishes from a menu, followed by calorific and nutritional details.


Intermediate
Clay Cockrell is sitting in his of ce across the street from 1 Central Park West, the address of the Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.
Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker who is now a therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a con dant and counsellor to some of New Yorks wealthiest people
Many of the extremely wealthy  the 1% of the 1%  feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are, he says.
So, what issues do Americas 1% have? There is guilt because they are rich, he said. There is the feeling that they have to hide the fact that they are rich. And, then, there is the isolation  being in the 1% can be lonely.
Counsellors argue that things have become worse since the  nancial crisis and the discussion about income inequality brought on by movements like Occupy Wall Street.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality but it singled out the 1% as something negative, said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. The media, she said, is partly to blame for making the rich feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed.
Traeger-Muney runs a global business and specializes in working with inheritors, who often get a bad reputation in the press. Sometimes, I am shocked by things that people say. You would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealthy people.
Its really isolating to have a lot of money. Peoples reactions to you can be scary, said Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. We are all taught not to talk about money. Its not polite to talk about money. But its harder to talk about having money than it is to talk about not having money. Its much more socially acceptable to say I am broke. Things are hard. You cant say I have a ton of money. You have to keep a lot of your life private.
As a result, Cockrell says, the rich usually hang out with other rich Americans who understand them and their problems.
In the US, over the last three decades, the number of extremely wealthy people has been increasing. According to research from Spectrem Group, in 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more  excluding the value of their main home  increased by 500,000 to 10.1m. Households worth $5m or more reached 1.3m and 142,000 households are now worth $25m or more.
Since the 2008  nancial crisis, the income gap has grown and the situation has gotten worse for the wealthy, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or with your money.
Someone else who is also a billionaire  they dont want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with other people, I think that is dif cult, said Cockrell. As the gap has widened, the rich have become more and more isolated.
These are real fears of the richest of the rich. In 2007, the Gates Foundation and Boston Colleges Center on Wealth and Philanthropy started to document what it felt like to be in Americas 1%. For the next four years, researchers surveyed 165 of Americas richest households  120 of those households have at least $25m. The report, The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth, was 500 pages long and seemed to prove the old saying that money cant buy happiness.
Wealth can stop you from connecting with other people, said the wife of a tech entrepreneur who made about $80m. Some Americans keep their wealth secret. We talk about it as stealth wealth. There are a lot of people that hide their wealth because they are worried about negative judgment, said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about the problems that come with their wealth, people often say Oh, poor you. There is not a lot of sympathy there, she said.
Speaking in his soft, soothing voice that makes you want to tell him all your worries, Cockrell said that a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make is letting their money define them.
If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems and they are real to you. Even when you say, I dont have to struggle for money, there are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing that de nes you, he said. Your problems are real.


Every morning, before India’s capital gets too hot, some old friends meet. On the dry grass not far from the India Gate monument at the centre of Delhi, they stretch, breathe and meditate.
“It is the only healthy way to start the day. Much better than an egg or a sandwich or a cup of tea,” said Arvind Singh at 6.15am as he did his breathing exercises.
Singh, a 42-year-old salesman, and his friends are not alone. All across India you can see people doing yoga together.
On 21 June – the new International Day of Yoga – Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, hopes the world will join in. On the grass near India Gate, up to 45,000 people will take part in a 35-minute class. They hope it will be the biggest yoga session ever.
The participants will include 64-year-old Modi, most of his government and celebrities.
Modi wants to encourage Indians, and others, to stretch. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party won the Indian election in 2014. In May 2015, he told schools to make sure students attended yoga events on the International Day of Yoga.
Everybody in India knows that their police officers are out of shape. So, India wants to introduce compulsory yoga for them. And, three million civil servants and their families will get free daily yoga lessons. Air India, the national airline, has also said it will introduce yoga for trainee pilots.
Modi is a vegetarian and a yoga practitioner. He suggested an international yoga day when he spoke to the United Nations on a visit to New York in 2014.
Modi said that yoga is a gift of India’s ancient tradition. He said that, when you do yoga, you bring together mind and body, thought and action, and create harmony between man and nature. He added that “It is not about exercise – it is about feeling in harmony with yourself, the world and nature”.
Yoga is between 3,000 and 6,000 years old. It is connected with local religious traditions including Buddhism and Jainism, as well as Hinduism, which is practised by 80% of Indians. In ancient India, yoga was part of daily life.
Modi has been criticized for creating a view of Indian culture that doesn’t give other traditions a fair place.
Suneel Singh, a guru in south Delhi, said that yoga does not just belong to one religion: “Is t’ai chi just Chinese? Is football just English? It is the same with yoga – yoga is for everybody. It is a cheap way to stay healthy.”


Illegal downloading is a kind of “moral squalor” and theft, as much as reaching in to someone’s pocket and stealing their wallet is theft, says author Philip Pullman. In an article for Index on Censorship, Pullman, who is president of the Society of Authors, makes a robust defence of copyright laws. He is highly critical of internet users who think it is OK to download music or books without paying for them.
“The technical brilliance is so dazzling that people can’t see the moral squalor of what they’re doing,” he writes. “It is outrageous that anyone can steal an artist’s work and get away with it. It is theft, as surely as reaching into someone’s pocket and taking their wallet is theft.”
His article comes after music industry leaders met British Prime Minister David Cameron in Downing Street, where the issue of web piracy was discussed.
Pullman, writer of the His Dark Materials trilogy, says authors and musicians work in poverty and obscurity for years to bring their work to the level “that gives delight to their audiences and, as soon as they achieve that, the possibility of making a living from it is taken away from them”. He concludes: “The principle is simple, and unaltered by technology, science or magic: if we want to enjoy the work that someone does, we should pay for it.”
Pullman is writing in the next issue of the campaign group’s magazine in a dialogue with Cathy Casserly, chief executive of Creative Commons, which offers open content licences “that lets creators take copyright into their own hands”. Casserly argues that there is much wrong with copyright, which was created “in an analogue age”. She writes: “By default, copyright closes the door on countless ways that people can share, build upon and remix each other’s work, possibilities that were unimaginable when those laws were established.”
She says artists need to think creatively about how they distribute and monetize their work, quoting the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who said: “My problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity.”
Index on Censorship agrees. The magazine’s editor, Rachael Jolley, said: “Existing copyright laws don’t work in the digital age and risk criminalizing consumers. We need new models for how artists, writers and musicians earn a living from their work.”
The debate is a lively one and the scale of illegal downloading vast. Data collected by Ofcom (the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries) suggests that, between November 2012 and January 2013 in the UK, 280 million music tracks were digitally pirated, along with 52 million TV shows, 29 million films, 18 million ebooks and 7 million software or games files.
Ofcom has said 18% of internet users aged over 12 admit to having recently pirated content, and 9% say they fear getting caught. Pullman writes in his article: “The ease and swiftness with which music can be acquired in the form of MP3 downloads is still astonishing to those of us who have been building up our iTunes list for some time.”
One thing to emerge from the Downing Street meeting was Cameron’s appointment of the Conservative MP Mike Weatherley to be his adviser on the subject. A spokesman for the BPI, the record industry trade body, said: “Mike Weatherley is a strong champion of copyright and the artists and creative producers it’s there to protect. We hope his influence and the prime minister’s endorsement of copyright will be brought to bear on the approach of the UK’s intellectual property office.”


Intermediate
Water scientists have given one of the strongest warnings ever about global food supplies. They say that the worlds population may have to change almost completely to a vegetarian diet by 2050 to avoid catastrophic shortages.
Humans get about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now. However, this may need to decrease to just 5% to feed the extra two billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the worlds top water scientists.
There will not be enough water to produce food for the expected nine-billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards diets common in western nations, the report by Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.
There will be just enough water if the proportion of animal-based foods is limited to 5% of total calories.
Warnings that water scarcity could limit food production come at the same time as Oxfam and the UN prepare for a possible second global food crisis in five years. Prices for items such as corn and wheat have risen nearly 50% on international markets since June. The price increase has been caused by severe droughts in the US and Russia, and weak monsoon rains in Asia. More than 18 million people are already facing serious food shortages across the Sahel.
Oxfam says that the price increase will have a devastating effect in developing countries that rely heavily on food imports, including parts of Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East. Food shortages in 2008 led to fighting and riots in 28 countries.
Changing to a vegetarian diet is one way to increase the amount of water available to grow more food in a world where the climate is becoming increasingly erratic, the scientists said. Animal protein-rich food uses five to ten times more water than a vegetarian diet. One third of the worlds arable land is used to grow crops to feed animals. Other options to feed people include stopping waste and increasing trade between countries that have a food surplus and countries that dont have enough food.
Nine hundred million people already go hungry and two billion people are malnourished although per-capita food production continues to increase, they said. Seventy per cent of all water is used in agriculture, and growing more food to feed an extra two billion people by 2050 will place greater pressure on water and land.
The report is being released at the start of the annual world water conference in Stockholm, Sweden, where 2,500 politicians, UN groups, non-governmental groups and researchers from 120 countries meet to discuss global water supply problems.
Competition for water between food production and other uses will increase pressure on essential resources, the scientists said. The UN predicts that we must increase food production by 70% by mid-century. This will put additional pressure on our water resources, which are already stressed, at a time when we also need more water to satisfy global energy demand and to create electricity for the 1.3 billion people who are without it, said the report.
Overeating, malnourishment and waste are all increasing. We will need a new recipe to feed the world in the future, said the reports editor, Anders Jgerskog.


Felix Baumgartner stood at the edge of space above New Mexico and paused for a moment. It was a small step away from the capsule, but a 24-mile drop back down to Earth. “Our guardian angel will take care of you,” said mission control, and Baumgartner jumped.
Ten frightening minutes later, the Austrian landed back on Earth. He fell at speeds of up to 725 miles per hour, and he broke three world records. He became the world’s first supersonic skydiver when he broke the sound barrier. “We love you Felix,” shouted his team in the control room.
He was wearing a special suit to protect him against the very big pressure changes during the jump. Without the suit, a man’s blood would boil and his lungs would explode. Baumgartner later said that all he could think about was getting back alive, but he also said: “Sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are.”
His other two records were for the highest altitude manned balloon flight and the highest altitude skydive. The jump was on a sunny morning in good weather. Baumgartner went up into clear skies in an enormous balloon – it was 30 million square cubic feet and its skin was one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag. At the bottom of the balloon was a capsule, where Baumgartner sat in his suit.
At the correct height, Baumgartner went through a checklist of 40 things with his helper Joe Kittinger. Kittinger held the record for the highest altitude manned balloon flight before Baumgartner. Baumgartner had a problem with his visor. “This is very serious, Joe,” he told Kitttinger. “I can’t see when I breathe out.” But they decided to continue, and a record 8 million people watched live on YouTube.
The ascent, during which the skies slowly turned black, took two and a half hours. But the descent was much quicker.
Three cameras, which were attached to Baumgartner’s suit, recorded his free-fall of just over four minutes and then the parachute opening.
Baumgartner has done lots of dangerous things before. He has parachuted off buildings and mountains and once into a 600 foot deep cave. He did two practice free-falls to prepare for this jump – one from 71,000 feet and a second from 97,000 feet. But nothing can compare with his jump above the town of Roswell, a place famous for its UFO sightings.
He was trying to break five different records: the first human to ever break the sound barrier in free-fall; the highest free-fall altitude jump; the highest manned balloon flight; the longest free-fall; and his jump platform is probably the largest manned balloon in history. The jump beat two of Kittinger’s records: before, the retired US air force colonel held the high altitude and speed records for parachuting. Kittinger jumped from a balloon 19 miles above the Earth in 1960 and gave advice to Baumgartner during the ascent.
Someone asked him, “What do you want to do next?” Baumgartner said: “I want to inspire young people. I’d like to sit in the same place in the next four years as Joe Kittinger. If there is a young guy who wants to break my record, I want to give him advice.” He said the most exciting moment for him was when he was standing outside the capsule “on top of the world”. He added: “The most beautiful moment was when I was standing on the landing area and Mike Todd [the man who dressed Baumgartner in his suit] came and he had a smile on his face like a little kid.”
Baumgartner said that he felt like Todd’s son. He said: “Todd was so happy that I was alive.” Earlier, Todd said: “The world needs a hero right now, and they have got one in Felix Baumgartner.” This will be the last jump, Baumgartner said. He has promised to settle down with his girlfriend, and fly helicopters on rescue missions in the US and Austria.


Intermediate
It is hard to tell exactly where the noise is coming from, but impossible to miss it from anywhere in Damascus. All day and all night you can hear the sound of guns, rockets or planes attacking rebel positions  the sound of war getting closer to Syrias capital. Just over two years after the Syrian crisis began, the people of Damascus have learnt to ignore the sound of death and destruction just a few miles away.
Actually you do get used to it after a while, said George, an IT technician. But you never know exactly what they are hitting. That usually becomes clear later from video clips posted by the opposition on YouTube.
The constant background noise is more worrying because the government tries so hard to keep an atmosphere of business as usual. As you can see, everything here is fine but we have to hit the terrorists, these extremists, an army officer announced. One government official said: If I was afraid, I would just shut my door and stay inside. I have to work and I am not afraid. If I dont defend my country, who will?
In private conversation, ordinary people are less defiant. In the centre of town, a shopkeeper complained sadly that his baby daughter cries at the sound of explosions. Zeina, a twentysomething student, is afraid she might become desensitized to suffering  and perhaps to danger too. In the beginning, when there started to be explosions, I used to have nightmares, she reflected. Now I can sleep through anything.
And, the risks are increasing even closer to home. In Sabaa Bahrat Square, in what was supposed to be the safest part of Damascus, a car bomb exploded, leaving the front of a building black, its windows broken and also damaging the imposing structure of the Syrian Central Bank next door. The square is often used for televised pro-regime rallies, with people chanting slogans under giant banners of President Bashar al-Assad.
That bombing was not the worst Damascus has experienced as the situation has deteriorated. In February, reports say that 80 people, including schoolchildren, died near the ruling Baath Party headquarters in Mazraa. You can still see the crater, marked by an enormous patch of fresh asphalt on the main road going north. I live nearby but luckily I wasnt there, recalled Munir, a university lecturer.
Mortar bombs, fired from rebel-held areas now very close to the city, have become a worrying new development. The bombs killed 15 students in a university cafeteria on 28 March. The intended target was probably a government building.
There has been increased security since the bombing of the national security crisis cell in July 2012, when four of Assads most senior aides were killed. Concrete blast barriers  often painted in the Syrian flags black, red and white  now protect official buildings, not just the military or defence installations that are obvious targets. The Iranian Embassy in Mezze now looks like a fortress. The regime did manage to set up a ring of steel round Damascus, a foreign diplomat said. He added that there are now holes in that ring of steel and that brings home the reality of the war.
All this means that moving around has become difficult, unpredictable and time-consuming  another part of life today in an understandably nervous city. Checkpoints on main roads stop traffic for ID checks and baggage searches with handheld explosive detectors  vital to stop future bombers. Only drivers with an official security clearance can use special fast lanes to avoid the wait.
It is hard, however, to avoid the question on everyones mind: will there be a battle for Damascus  the worlds oldest continually inhabited city, as the guidebooks say  like the one that has so damaged Aleppo? Parts of the city already feel like a war zone: its most exclusive and expensive hotel is almost empty, although many rooms are being used as offices by international agencies with white UN vehicles parked behind the blast barriers outside. The streets empty soon after 9pm.
One view is that the fight for Syrias capital is coming, but not quite yet  in the summer perhaps, some predict, when the rebels have made further progress in the south. Others argue that a complete victory by either side is unlikely and hope for a political solution that comes from abroad. But few people here seem to expect things to get any better.


It is no longer legal to smoke a cigarette inside a bar in the world ’s drinking capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans city government has begun trying to reduce noise problems. The city is now stricter on noise in bars and nightclubs – and, at the same time, it has introduced new rules on noise.
“It is the wrong time for this,” complains bar-owner William Walker. He hates the anti-smoking law. “If they force people outside the bar to smoke, it is going to increase the tension that’s already there.”
Many of New Orleans’s best bars are in quiet neighbourhoods. Martha Wood lives beside a loud bar that has live music. “The bar was one reason I bought the house so I won’t ever complain about the noise,” says Wood. She also manages a live-music bar.
The Maple Leaf club became smoke-free in 2014. Another club also became smoke-free because performers asked for smoke-free nights. “A lot of the performance venues were already starting to show that consideration to performers. I wish the city had just let that happen, not force the ban into every bar that doesn’t have music,” says Zalia BeVille, manager of the All Ways Lounge.
Luckily, All Ways has an outdoor patio. Another bar, Lost Love Lounge, doesn’t have a patio. The owner, Geoff Douville, loves the ban – before, he felt forced to live with smoke to keep his bar popular. “I couldn’t ban smoking in my bar without a ban in the whole city,” says Douville. “People think I have that choice. But, if I make a no-smoking rule, they will choose another bar with smoking.”
Many small business owners also fear that the smoke-free rule will make them lose money. Neil Timms owns an English pub and saw a smoking ban before, in England. “Back home in England, every pub I knew closed because of the smoking ban,” remembers Timms of England’s ban, which began in 2007. To avoid the same problems, he’s spending money to build a patio.
But Douville feels the ban could be a great business opportunity. “There are lots of people who would enjoy coming to our bar but they never came because they didn’t want to smell like smoke for the next seven days – now, those people can come.” Douville isn’t worried about noise complaints: “No court is going to say a bar is a ‘nuisance’ after the city has introduced a smoking ban that forces you to go outside!” he says.
Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who introduced the ban, disagrees: “The responsibility is on the bar-owner to keep their customers respectful outside as well,” she says. “The owners need to tell them to go and have a smoke but be respectful to their communities. The idea that we can’t have clean air because it will cause noise problems is ridiculous. We can have clean air without noise problems – I think it’s about communication and creating partnerships between the communities and the businesses.”
Many people were worried that the police would not have time to give bars warnings and fines. So the health department will do it. Bar customers must “fill out a form or call 311 and include photographs of illegal smoking”.
Geoff Douville says that he’s used to noise complaints. “You will see: the neighbours who complain about the noise now are going to be the same ones who wanted the smoking ban. Of course they’re going to complain, ” he adds. “But it doesn’t mean they’re going to win.”


Intermediate
Nobody knows which came first: the economic crisis in Greece or shisha, the drug now known as the cocaine of the poor. But what everyone knows is that shisha is a killer. And it costs only 2 or less a hit.
It is the worst kind of drug. It burns your insides, it makes you aggressive and makes you go totally mad, said Maria, a former heroin addict. But it is cheap and it is easy to get, and it is what everyone is taking.
This drug crisis has put Athenss health authorities, already having to deal with large financial cuts, under further strain.
The drug of preference for thousands of homeless Greeks forced on to the streets by poverty and despair, shisha is described by both addicts and officials as a drug that is related to crystal meth. The synthetic drug is frequently mixed with battery acid, engine oil and even shampoo. It has the potential to send users into a state of mindless violence. And, even worse, it is not only easily available, but also easy to make.
It is a killer, but it also makes you want to kill, Konstantinos, a drug addict said. You can kill without understanding that you have done it. And it is spreading faster than death. A lot of users have died.
For Charalampos Poulopoulos, the head of Kethea, Greeces anti-drug centre, shisha symbolizes the crisis that has led to record levels of destitution and unemployment. It is, he said, an austerity drug  it is the response of dealers who have become more and more clever at producing synthetic drugs designed for those who can no longer afford more expensive highs from such drugs as heroin and cocaine.
The crisis has given dealers the possibility to promote a new, cheap drug, a cocaine for the poor, said Poulopoulos at a centre for addicts in Exarcheia, in Athens. Shisha can be sniffed or injected and it can be made in home laboratories  you dont need any specialized knowledge. It is extremely dangerous.
Across Greece, six years of recession have been brutal and cruel. Depression, together with drug and alcohol abuse, has risen dramatically. Crime has soared as a result of austerity measures that have cut the income of ordinary Greeks by 40%. Prostitution  the easiest way of paying for drugs  has similarly skyrocketed.
Many women agree to have unprotected sex because that way theyll make more money, said Eleni Marini, a psychologist with Kethea. Shisha has been linked to a very intense sexual drive but it attacks your ability to think clearly and were seeing a lot more pregnancies among drug addicts who engage in prostitution. In 2012, two sex workers gave birth on the streets of Athens.
As the number of suicides has also increased and HIV infections are spreading, drug addicts (a population believed to be around 25,000) have become increasingly self-destructive. And, experts say, young Greeks marginalized by record rates of unemployment  at 64% Greece has the highest youth unemployment in the EU  are leading the way.
The crisis has created a widespread sense of pessimism, said Poulopoulos. For those who might have stopped taking drugs, there is now no incentive. Instead, theres an atmosphere of misery, where people who know they wont find work are becoming a lot more self-destructive. In Athens, where the economic crisis has hit hardest, shisha is part of that.
Just when the need for help has never been greater, state-funded organizations such as Kethea have had their money cut by a third at the request of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. These organizations are trying to stop the Greek economy from sinking.
Since the financial crisis began in 2009, Kethea has lost 70 of its 500 staff. The cuts come despite studies that show that, for every euro they spend on anti-drug programmes such as Kethea, the Greek state saves about 6 in costs to the criminal justice and healthcare systems. The cuts we have witnessed are a false economy, a huge mistake, said Poulopoulos.
On the streets of Athens, where shisha is growing in popularity, there is a fear that austerity not only doesnt work  it kills.


Intermediate
A subway system has billions of inhabitants: the bacteria of Swiss cheese and kimchi, bubonic plague and drug-proof bugs and human skin. Now, for the  rst time, scientists have started to catalogue and map the bacteria in a citys subway  and they have found many interesting results.
Dr Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College, led a team that, for 18 months, tested the New York City subway system for the microscopic life forms that cover its turnstiles, seats, ticket booths and stations. His team found meningitis at Times Square, a trace of anthrax on the handhold of a train carriage and bacteria that cause bubonic plague on a rubbish bin and ticket machine at stations in uptown Manhattan.
The team have strongly downplayed the  ndings of plague and anthrax. They say that there is only an extremely small trace of the latter, that rats likely carried the former and that no one has fallen ill with plague in or around New York for years.
The results do not suggest that plague or anthrax is prevalent, the study says. Nor do they suggest that New York residents are at risk.
In fact, most of the bacteria identi ed by the team are either harmless to humans or bene cial in the citys thriving world of microorganisms.
Some of the results were expected and should be a gentle reminder for people to wash their hands, Mason said. He also said that they found many bacteria of the same sort as those that are bene cial and helpful, like the one used for making cheese.
Bacteria appeared to re ect the eating habits of various neighbourhoods. All around the subway, bacteria associated with cheeses  brie, cheddar, parmesan and the mozzarella found on New York pizza  appeared. The distinctive bacteria of Swiss cheese were more limited to midtown Manhattan and the  nancial district, and the bacteria used to ferment cabbage for kimchi and sauerkraut showed up in the  nancial district and Bay Ridge.
Bacteria associated with illness and infections were extremely common. Species that cause diarrhoea and nausea, as well as E.coli, and the bacteria that can cause skin infections and urinary-tract infections were common all over the city. The species that produces tetanus appeared in Soho and bacteria that cause dysentery appeared at a station in the Bronx and another in Harlem.
Mason and his team collected more than 1,000 samples at all of New Yorks 466 open subway stations. They put the organic materials through a DNA sequencer and, then, through a supercomputer. They identi ed 15,152 distinct species, nearly half of which were bacteria.
The good news, the researchers said, is that these potentially infectious bacteria are not spreading sickness or disease throughout New York. They seem to be normal co-habitants of a city.
In short, the researchers conclude, the subway and city are about as safe as everyone thought.
Mason said people should not be concerned about getting urinary-tract infections from subway seats. You should wash your hands, he said, and probably get some sleep, eat salads and go to the gym, and thats about the same today as it was yesterday.
In fact, he added, Ive become much more con dent riding the subway.
Many  findings made sense: stations like Grand Central and Times Square, where there are more people, had more bacteria and more diversity among them. The Bronx, with its diverse neighbourhoods and stations, had the greatest diversity of bacteria; Staten Island, with just three stops, had the lowest.
The researchers found marine bacteria at South Ferry, a station that  ooded during Hurricane Sandy  but they were surprised to note the species included some normally associated with Antarctica and  fish.
The next steps, Mason said, are studies of other cities, which have begun in Paris, Sa_o Paolo and Shanghai, and continued studies of New York, for instance to see how the results change with the seasons. He said he hoped the research would provide a baseline of research for health of cials and geneticists, and could help health of cials to prevent and track diseases and pathogens.


When Larry Pizzi, a veteran bicycle industry executive, first heard about electric bikes nearly 20 years ago, he asked: “Why would anyone want to screw up a bike by putting a motor and batteries on it?”
It’s a question that still puzzles traditionalists. Bicycle shops have been slow to stock e-bikes, even though they have been around since the late 1990s. Sales in the US have been modest.
Pizzi, who is now CEO of Currie Technologies, the number one seller of e-bikes in the US, believes that’s about to change. Others in the industry agree. Familiar brands including Trek, Raleigh and Specialized all offer electric models and they’re betting the market is about to take off.
“We’re on the cusp of mainstream adoption,” Pizzi said. “There are more players entering the category, it seems, with every passing month.”
The US is an outlier when it comes to electric bikes. Nearly 32m e-bikes were sold in 2014, the vast majority in China, where they are primarily used for transportation. They are popular in much of Europe, too. They’re common in the Netherlands and Switzerland; German postal workers use them to get around and BMW offers one for about $3,000.
Electric bikes are different from motorcycles or mopeds, which rely on motorized power; they are bicycles that can be pedalled with – or without – assistance from an electric motor. Riding an e-bike feels like riding a conventional bike with a brisk tailwind; the motor helps you go faster or climb hills but it’s typically not the primary source of propulsion. Unlike mopeds, e-bicycles are usually permitted on bike paths and they can’t travel faster than 20mph.
There’s debate about how many electric bikes are sold in the US and there is no official count.
Estimates of annual sales range from about 50,000 to 175,000. That’s comparable to the number of electric cars sold in the US – 118,000 in 2014. Yet, while many people are aware of the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and Tesla, few have heard of e-bike companies Currie, Pedego or ElectroBike.
To succeed, the electric bike business in the US must clear legal, cultural and financial hurdles. E-bikes are banned in some states, including New York, although the law isn’t strictly enforced. Traditionalists who own and staff bike shops don’t like putting motors on bicycles, citing, among other things, the added weight. Some e-bikes are close to 30kg.
E-bikes are also pricey. While low-end models sell for as little as $700, Court Rye, the founder and editor of ElectricBikeReview.com, a popular website, says riders should expect to pay at least $1,500 for a quality e-bike with a good battery. Top-of-the-line models cost more than twice that.
The companies that make and sell e-bikes say they can overcome those obstacles.
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 founder and CEO of Pedego, an electric bikemaker and retailer.
Companies like Bosch, the German electronics giant, and Shimano, the leading manufacturer of bicycle gears, are entering the business, which should help erode resistance from bike shops. “This has really caught the attention and the imagination of bicycle dealers,” says Currie’s Larry Pizzi. Pedego and startup ElectroBike aren’t waiting for the shops to come around; they are building their own stores. In the meantime, lobbying efforts are underway to permit the use of e-bikes everywhere.
Perhaps most importantly, as more cities build cycling infrastructure, including dedicated bike lanes, bicycle commuting has become more popular. As the US Census Bureau reported in 2014, the number of bike commuters grew from about 488,000 in 2000 to 786,000 in 2012. That’s a “larger percentage increase than that of any other commuting mode,” the report notes. Electric bikes make commuting more practical – and fun – by easing worry about hills, headwinds, fatigue and sweat.
Most of our customers are “ageing baby boomers who want to rekindle the 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 and it has sold bikes to tour companies in San Francisco and Washington, DC.
ElectroBike, which operates 30 stores in Mexico, opened its first American store in Venice Beach, California in the autumn of 2014 and hopes to grow to 25 US stores in a year. CEO Craig Anderson says: “We want to help reduce traffic, help reduce our carbon footprint and promote a healthy lifestyle.” He tells customers: “Ride this once and try not to smile.”
Startups like Pedego and ElectroBike will have to compete with big companies like Trek and Currie, which, in 2012, was acquired by the Accell Group, a public company based in the Netherlands that is Europe’s market leader in e-bikes. Accell owns the Raleigh brand, as well as Haibike, an award-winning German electric bike.
“Accell has great expectations about e-bikes in North America,” Currie’s Larry Pizzi says. “While baby boomers are still a very important segment, we’re finding that a lot of younger people are using e-bikes for transportation, instead of cars.”
Accell’s Yuba brand even sells a cargo bike with a stronger motor and rear rack. “You can carry two children,” says Pizzi. “You can carry 45kg of shopping. It’s a minivan alternative.”


Is this the moment when streaming goes truly mainstream?
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), there were just 41m subscribers using music streaming services globally in 2014. It might be the biggest revenue growth area for the record business but it is still incredibly niche. Not only that, but a significant number of those subscribers come from bundled deals with mobile phone operators so it is debatable just how “active” its users are. Apple’s greatest conjuring trick is to take something that already exists in the market – downloads (iTunes), digital music players (the iPod) and smartphones (the iPhone) – and adapt it to make it irresistible to the mainstream consumer. Leaked information recently suggested that Apple is aiming to reach 100m subscribers, which, based on a subscription fee of $120 per year, would generate $12bn annually. To put that in context, the entire global worth of recorded music in 2014 was just under $15bn. Apple is good at mainstreaming products but it’s not that good.
Is this the end of downloading?
The iTunes Store arrived in 2003 (2004 in Europe) at a time when MP3 piracy seemed insurmountable. Apple managed to persuade consumers to pay for downloads and grew a huge business, which it dominated, with an estimated 70% market share. Downloads still hold the biggest share of digital income for recorded music, making up 52% of total digital income in 2014 according to IFPI numbers. Apple holds the lion’s share of this, making it the single biggest music retailer in the world. But download revenue peaked in 2013 in the UK at £283m and fell to £249m in 2014. The decline in download sales hit the US in 2013 so Apple bought Beats in 2014 for $3bn, not only to get into the premium headphone market, but also to make the transition from music ownership (downloads) to music access (subscription streaming). Apple, and the record industry, cannot afford to get rid of the download market just yet – so streaming and downloading will have to coexist under the Apple brand, one representing the future as the other gets progressively slower and sicker. The vast majority of people out there like music but don’t love it enough to pay $120 a year to listen to it; a sporadic download purchase here and there will suit them just fine. The average spend of a music buyer in the UK in 2014, for example, was just £39.52, according to research. Expecting most of them to triple their annual spend on recorded music is something that even Apple will seriously struggle with.
Has Apple Connect made Apple the most artist-friendly service?
Apple have previously tried to build an artist-friendly platform via iTunes. They called it Ping and it didn’t work. Apple Connect is something very different, somewhere in the middle of YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud, letting artists post music, videos, photos and more to their profile pages. It couldn’t be any more 2015 if it tried. Apple, partly because of its scale and also partly because it treats music as “art” rather than “content”, has generally had strong relations with not just the music industry but artists themselves and, generally, it has a good reputation among artists. Compare that to Spotify, which has been criticized by artists from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift. In contrast, Apple comes across as a benevolent uncle. There is the smell of revolution in the air and Apple is making sure it’s on the right side of the battle lines when they are drawn up.
Where are the artist exclusives?
This is going to be the interesting bit when the service actually goes live. Getting exclusives for big albums is going to become crucial to streaming. Spotify paid a lot of money to get Led Zeppelin and Metallica exclusively. Apple will have been watching this carefully and making its own notes. It already has AC/DC and the Beatles’ catalogues exclusively for download on iTunes but it remains to be seen if it can persuade these two to make the jump into streaming. It also managed to get the surprise Beyoncé album in 2013 before anyone else so it is inevitable that it will want more like that. There is plenty of speculation about Apple looking to get exclusive rights to the new Adele album.
Giving iTunes the download exclusive on an album was not that big a leap of faith for acts given just how much of the download market it controls but trying to do that in streaming is not the same thing. Add into this the fact that streaming now counts towards the album chart in markets like the UK and US and artists, who still see the chart as a measure of success, will not want to limit their audience by restricting themselves to one service.
Is this going to kill Spotify?
Some people are already saying that Apple Music will destroy rivals like Spotify. However, it’s not that simple. Apple is entering a market where others have been working and gaining experience for many years. It has a lot of catching up to do. The winner of this battle will not be the company with the best service; it will be the company with the most money. Apple’s competitors have a head start in the market but they are losing huge amounts of money. Spotify, for example, lost €93.1m in 2013. Apple, on the other hand, started 2015 by becoming the most profitable company in corporate history, with $178bn in the bank. If Apple Music loses Apple money, the company will not continue it for long but it will not stop investment without at least trying to beat the competition.


A long time ago, cinema audiences were taken to a galaxy far, far away.
That was 1977 but, in 2015, just before its seventh film, interest in Star Wars is not slowing down. Now, there is news of a new film about Han Solo and of a reappearance for Darth Vader.
“Fans around the world are always waiting for new poster art, new trailers and other information,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst. “I don’t think any other movie franchise could cause this much excitement.”
The latest Star Wars mania started after Disney bought Lucasfilm from Star Wars creator, George Lucas, in 2012. After Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm, it announced that there would be three more Star Wars films – VII, VIII and IX – plus plans for spin-off movies.
They have now announced details of the second spin-off. It is a story about Han Solo, the character played by Harrison Ford in the first three films. This second new film will be released in May 2018.
Before that, they will release Episode VII in December 2015, directed by JJ Abrams and called Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Episode VIII will come out in 2017 and a spin-off called Rogue One will arrive in cinemas in 2016.
Lots of people are very interested in the rumour that Darth Vader, the villain from the original films, will reappear in Rogue One. This interest shows the power of Star Wars.
Lucasfilm-Disney are creating a cinema “universe” around Star Wars, with many different characters and stories. They are doing the same thing as the very successful films produced by Marvel Studios. Disney also bought them, in 2009.
Disney knows a lot about marketing: Dergarabedian says the decision to make all six existing Star Wars films available on streaming services is “a brilliant way to make people excited about the new film”.
There has been much enthusiasm for Star Wars for at least twenty years. This is shown by the huge number of novels, comic books, video games and merchandising that Lucasfilm has created.
Michael Rosser, news editor for the magazine Screen International, says this is what makes Star Wars the top film franchise. “The great thing about the first Star Wars films was that they created a huge universe of characters and stories,” he said.
“For years, people have wondered how the different parts of the story fit together. This new film goes back to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker so it will reconnect with the first Star Wars film. The prequels did not do that.”
Rosser is talking about the three films Lucas directed between 1999 and 2005, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. They were about the life of Luke Skywalker ’s father, Anakin, who becomes Darth Vader. They got quite bad reviews but they made $2.5 billion.
“It shows the power of Star Wars – the prequels were disappointing but they still made a lot of money,” said Rosser.
“The movie studio wants to continue the franchise and make sure new films are of good quality. They also want people to go to the cinema at a time when lots of people are watching films at home. But you don’t want to watch Star Wars on your iPhone.”
Dergarabedian expects big business when The Force Awakens opens at cinemas in December 2015. “It should make at least a billion dollars. Star Wars is the ultimate movie franchise.”


When it comes to climate change, we have the bad habit of focusing on the first part of the story, the part about the problem, and forgetting the second part about the many available solutions. These solutions are speeding up recycling, slowing down emissions and providing sustainable alternatives to plastic, air conditioning, smartphones and fast fashion.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently gathered in Copenhagen to present its latest report on the impacts and pace of climate change. Climate change is now measured on all continents and our efforts to lower emissions must be intensified to avoid it escalating out of control. Along with outlining the risks and challenges, Copenhagen also embraced and focused on the solutions.
In the spirit of focusing on what can be done, Sustainia Award, chaired by Arnold Schwarzenegger, celebrated ten leading sustainability solutions deployed in 84 countries. From food to fashion, energy to transportation, education to health, the awards showcased an alternative to the grim-future scenarios we are so often presented with and made sustainability tangible to the innovators, investors, consumers and policy makers across sectors and regions.
From California, we saw how we can now produce plastics from greenhouse gases that are competitive with normal oil-based plastics in price and quality. From Switzerland, we learned how we can recycle and reuse old clothes and shoes more effectively in a recycle system currently deployed in over 60 countries. And from Canada, we learned how smartphones can make bike- sharing more convenient.
The ten projects presented each offered unique solutions to sustainability challenges but it was the Nigerian initiative, Wecyclers, that won Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, and the rest of jury’s, vote and took the Sustainia Award 2014.
Wecyclers enables low-income communities to make money on waste piling up in their streets. By deploying a fleet of cargo bicycles to collect and recycle unmanaged waste in Lagos, Wecyclers lets families exchange garbage for consumer goods via an SMS-based point system.
Recycling companies purchase Wecyclers’ sorted waste for reprocessing into products – they turn it into mattresses, pillows and trash bags. Wecyclers is a response to local waste issues, where it’s estimated that only 40% of the city’s rubbish is collected. According to the World Bank, only 46% of municipal solid waste in Africa is collected. More than 5,000 households have signed up so far and there are plans to extend the initiative to other cities throughout Nigeria.
Solutions to combat climate change are often perceived as hi-tech innovations focused on cutting emissions, creating infrastructure or efficiency. However, to successfully solve the variety of challenges, we need variety in our solutions as well. Sustainability is not solely a matter of bringing down emissions; it is also a question of using our natural resources more intelligently and creating healthier lives for ourselves. Initiatives might be low-tech in innovation but high-impact when it comes to creating sustainable change for entire communities.
With a wide range of solutions addressing the equally wide range of challenges, we must focus more on the important part of the story that creates enthusiasm and momentum, and spurs action for much-needed change.


Intermediate
To tourists, Amsterdam still seems very liberal. Recently the citys Mayor assured them that the citys marijuana-selling coffee shops would stay open despite a new national law to prevent drug tourism. But the Dutch capitals plans to send nuisance neighbours to scum villages made from shipping containers may damage its reputation for tolerance.
The Mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, says his controversial new 810,000 policy to deal with antisocial behaviour is to protect victims of abuse and homophobia. The camps, where antisocial families will be rehoused for three to six months, have been called scum villages because the policy is similar to proposals from Geert Wilders, the far-right politician, who last year said that repeat offenders should be sent to a village for scum.
Bartho Boer, a spokesman for the Mayor, says that the plans are not illiberal. We want to defend the liberal values of Amsterdam, he says. We want everyone to be who he and she is  whether they are gay and lesbian or resist violence and are then victims of harassment. We as a society want to defend them. According to Boer, the villages are not for a problem neighbour who has the stereo too loud on Saturday night but people who are extremely violent and intimidating and in a clear situation where a victim is being harassed again and again.
People found guilty of causing extreme havoc will be evicted and put in basic temporary homes, including converted shipping containers in industrial areas of the city. We call it a living container, says Boer. Housing antisocial families in these units, which have showers and kitchens and have been used as student accommodation, will mean that they are not rewarded for their behaviour by being put in better accommodation.
Dutch newspaper the Parool has written that in the 19th century troublemakers were moved to villages in Drenthe and Overijssel, which rapidly became slums. But Boer insists that the government has learned from past mistakes and is not planning to house antisocial families together.
It would be more accurate to call them scum houses than scum villages, says Boer, because we dont want to put more than one of these families in the same area. After a maximum of six months in these houses, in different parts of the city, the families will be found permanent homes. The city government expects to move around ten families a year into this programme, which starts in 2013.
The temporary accommodation will be heavily policed, but antisocial families will also have access to doctors, social workers and parole officers. They are taken care of so the whole situation is not going to repeat at the new house they are in, says Boer.