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Cities don’t often move. But that’s exactly what Kiruna, an Arctic town in northern Sweden, has to do. It has to move or the earth will swallow it up.
“It’s a terrible choice,” says Krister Lindstedt, who works for the Swedish architect company that is moving the city. They will move this city of 23,000 people away from a gigantic iron-ore mine that is swallowing up the ground beneath its streets. “Either the mine must stop digging, and then there will be no jobs, or the city has to move.”
Kiruna was founded in 1900 by the state-owned Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara mining company (LK). The city became rich thanks to the very large amount of iron ore that is below the town. But the mine that made it rich is now going to destroy it. “The town is here because of the mine,” says Deputy Mayor Niklas Siren.
Located 145km inside the Arctic Circle, Kiruna has a very difficult climate. It has winters with no sunlight and average temperatures of -15C. But the iron ore has kept people here. Kiruna is the world’s largest underground iron-ore mine. It produces 90% of all the iron in Europe. That is enough to build more than six Eiffel Towers every day.
In 2004, the mining company told the town that it would have to move. Underground digging would soon cause buildings to crack and collapse. Ten years later, cracks are starting to appear in the ground, nearer and nearer to the town.
“The people of Kiruna have waited for ten years,” says Viktoria Walldin, a social anthropologist whoworks with the architects. “They have put their lives on hold, unable to make major decisions like buying a house, redecorating, having a child or opening a business.”
At last, the city finally has a plan. Lindstedt has a plan that shows the town’s streets and squares beginning to move east along a new high street. By 2033, the whole city will be far away from the mine.
They are already building a new town square, 3km to the east, with a circular town hall planned by Danish architect Henning Larsen. They will take apart and put together again 20 other important buildings in their new home. Kiruna’s red wooden church was built in 1912 and once voted Sweden’s most beautiful building – it will be in the centre of a new park. But they will not save everything.
“I spoke to an old lady who walks past the bench every day where she had her first kiss,” says Walldin. “It’s things like that – the hospital where your first child was born, for example – that are important to people and all that’s going to disappear.”
The project will get £320 million from the mining company to build new buildings, including a high school, fire station, community centre, library and swimming hall. But most people worry about where they will live and how they will get a house or flat.
“People here pay very low rents and have very high incomes but, in future, this will change” says Lindstedt. LK has agreed to pay the people of Kiruna the value of their homes plus 25% but many people say this is not enough to buy a new house.
If you look more closely, the plan shows that the new town does not look like the old Kiruna at all. The old town has detached houses with gardens. The White architects’ plan shows multi-storey apartment blocks around shared courtyards in long straight streets.
It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to become a town that will attract young people. There will be new cultural places and wonderful things such as a cable car above the high street. But many of the people in Kiruna will probably not have enough money to live there. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
Barack Obama flew back to Washington and his desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday, hours after delivering an election victory speech in Chicago in which he asked the country to unite behind him.
Unlike after his election in 2008, the President is unlikely to get a honeymoon period.
Both the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, and the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, spoke about a need to work together to resolve the economic crisis. But it could become one of the biggest battles yet between the White House and Congress under Obamas presidency.
While Obama easily beat his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, holding swing state after swing state, the election showed again how divided America remains.
While the inauguration is not until January, in effect Obama started his second term on Wednesday. Having disappointed many supporters in his first term, he now wants to establish a legacy that will transform him from a middling president into a great one.
As well as overseeing what he hopes will be continued economic recovery, he hopes to address issues from immigration reform to investment in education and climate change, and, in foreign policy, from Iran to Israel-Palestine.
He comfortably won more than the required 270 electoral college votes, and he also won a higher share of the popular vote.
Boehner, in a statement, sounded conciliatory. He talked about the need for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt.
Reid, also sounded conciliatory, saying: I look at the challenges that we have ahead of us and I reach out to my Republican colleagues in the Senate and the House. Lets come together. We know what the issues are; lets solve them.
The trouble will come when talks move to detail: the Republicans want to protect military spending while the Democrats want cuts. Obama wants tax increases on households earning more than $250,000; Boehner has rejected any tax increases.
In the presidential race, Romney won only one of the swing states, North Carolina, while Obama held New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Colorado.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama referred to the long queues to vote and said there was a need for electoral reform.
He returned to the soaring rhetoric that was his trademark during the 2008 election but which was not seen in 2012 because his campaign team decided it was inappropriate.
But now that he has won, he returned to famous lines from earlier speeches, such as his 2008 slogan about hope.
Obama told the ecstatic crowd of supporters: Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come. In a speech that lasted more than 25 minutes, Obama paid emotional tribute to his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha as well as to his Vice-President, Joe Biden. Then he returned to the message that first brought him to national attention.
We are not as divided as our politics suggests, he said. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.
Obama made clear he had an agenda in mind for his second term. He mentioned changes in the tax code, immigration reform and, as he put it, an America that isnt threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.
Just before, Romney had phoned the President to concede. He said, This is a time for great challenges for America and I pray the President will be successful in guiding our nation.
The campaign almost throughout has been a referendum on Obama. Despite the slow economy recovery and a high unemployment level, Americans decided not to change presidents.
Historically, it would have been a disappointment for African Americans and many white liberals if the first black presidency had ended in failure. | 1 | Intermediate |
The Greek island of Agios Efstratios is very remote. It has been forgotten by the banks, the government and most of the modern world. It doesn’t have a single ATM or credit-card machine. Before the economic crisis in Greece, the people of this peaceful island in the northern Aegean lived quite well. The few rooms to rent were fully booked every summer with people enjoying its empty beaches, clear seas and fresh seafood.
But the island still uses only cash so the closure of the Greek banks has had a serious effect. Local people have to make nine-hour round trips to the nearest big island to get cash. Greek visitors say they don’t have enough cash to come. “Tourist numbers have reduced by 80% this year,” said Mayor Maria Kakali, in an office in the village where she grew up. The village has about 200 people. “Even people born here and living in Athens, who have their own places on the island, aren’t coming.”
Kakali has asked the government and a major Greek bank to install an ATM and this should arrive soon. But tourism is the main business on the island and she feels the ATM may come too late for this season. “We have almost no reservations in August, when usually we are full.” But there is an even bigger crisis ahead – the government has said it will end a tax break for islands.
The tax break was created to help people on islands survive when lots of people were emigrating. Islands that are popular with tourists, such as Mykonos, fear that losing the tax break will make things very hard for them. But, for Agios Efstratios, it is a much bigger problem. “If we have to pay a tax of 23%, we will all die on the island,” says Kakali.
Food and fuel are already more expensive than on mainland Greece. Even in summer, the island has only three shops, two restaurants and not one official hotel. “This is an expensive island. Everything, even milk or bread, takes a long time to reach us and so is very expensive,” said Provatas Costas, a 58-year-old fisherman.6 Things are also difficult for the island of Lemnos, the closest large neighbour of Agios Efstratios. People saw the islands as remote for years partly because the only way to get there was by slow and unreliable ferries. In 2015, they finally had new, efficient ferries and this brought many new visitors to explore these islands. But, then, the bank controls began. “It started as the best season in 30 years and, in one week, it became the worst,” said Atzamis Konstantinos, a travel agent in Lemnos.
Lemnos has wild beaches, where you can swim and sunbathe almost alone, a small nightlife scene and many cultural sites. It is the eighth largest island in Greece so it will have to pay the tax increases in autumn 2015. But Lemnos is far less wealthy than many smaller islands. It has just over 3,000 beds for visitors – Rhodes, for example, has tens of thousands of beds. “We have been suffering economically in recent years and now we will suffer more,” said Lemnos Mayor, Dimitris Marinakis.
If taxes go up, more young people will leave, warns Mayor Kakali. Because it is one of the smallest islands, Agios Efstratios will not have to pay the tax increase until 2017. And Kakali hopes the situation in Greece will change before then. But, if not, she plans to travel to Athens to remind the distant government what the tax rise would cost.
“The government doesn’t pay much attention to the islands of the north Aegean,” she said, “so I would take all the kids from our school to the gates of parliament, to tell them: ‘There is still life in these islands’.” | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), 35.6% of all women around the world will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from a male partner. The report reveals the shocking extent of attacks on women from the men with whom they share their lives, with 30% of women being attacked by partners. It also finds that a large proportion of murders of women 38% are carried out by their partners.
The highest levels of violence against women are in Africa, where nearly half of all women 45.6% will suffer physical or sexual violence. In low- and middle-income Europe, the proportion is 27.2%. However, wealthier nations are not always safer for women a third of women in high-income countries (32.7%) will experience violence at some stage in their lives. 42% of the women who experience violence suffer injuries, which can bring them to the attention of healthcare staff. That, says the report, is often the first opportunity for violence in the home to be discovered and for the woman to be offered help. Violence has a significant effect on womens health. Some arrive at hospital with broken bones, while others suffer pregnancy-related complications and mental illness.
The two reports from the WHO one is on the extent of violence, the other offers guidelines to healthcare staff on helping women are the work of Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno, lead specialist in gender, reproductive rights, sexual health and adolescence at WHO, and Professor Charlotte Watts, an epidemiologist who specializes in gender, violence and health, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
For the first time, we have compared data from all over the world on the extent of partner violence and sexual violence by non-partners and the impact of these sorts of violence on health, said Garcia-Moreno. These included HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, depression, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies and lowbirthweight babies.
There were variations in the rates of violence against women in different regions of the world but, said Garcia-Moreno, in whatever region we looked at, it is unacceptably high. Data from 81 countries shows that, even in high-income countries, 23.2% of women will suffer physical and/or sexual violence from a partner in their lives. The global figure for women attacked by partners was 30%.
More sexual assaults and rapes by acquaintances or strangers are reported in high-income countries than elsewhere the report says that 12.6% of women in wealthy countries will be sexually attacked by a non-partner in their lives, which is higher than the African rate of 11.9%. But, the data on such crimes is not well collected in all regions.
The authors say that their previous research shows that better-educated women and working women are less likely to suffer violence, although not in all regions. There is a need to question social norms, said Watts. What is societys attitude concerning the acceptability of certain forms of violence against women? she asked. In some societies, it is not OK but not all.
I think the numbers are a wake-up call for all of us to pay more attention to this issue, said Garcia-Moreno. Over the past ten years, there has been increasing recognition of the problem, she said, but we have to recognize that it is a complex problem. We dont have a vaccine or a pill.
The new WHO clinical and policy guidelines recommend healthcare staff should be trained to recognize the signs of domestic violence and sexual assault, but they do not recommend general screening that is, asking every woman who arrives in a clinic whether she has been subjected to violence.
But, if you see a woman coming back several times with injuries she doesnt mention, you should ask about domestic violence, said Garcia-Moreno. When I was training in medical school, it wasnt something you learned or knew about. Years later, I was sometimes in a situation where I could tell there was something else wrong with the woman I was interviewing, but didnt know that domestic violence was the issue. Now, I think I would do the interview very differently. | 1 | Intermediate |
More than a third of all women worldwide – 35.6% – will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from a male partner, according to the first comprehensive study of its kind from the World Health Organization (WHO). The report reveals the shocking extent of attacks on women from the men with whom they share their lives, with 30% of women being attacked by partners. It also finds that a large proportion of murders of women – 38% – are carried out by intimate partners.
“These findings send a powerful message that violence against women is a global health problem of epidemic proportions,” said Dr Margaret Chan, director general of the WHO. “We also see that the world’s health systems can and must do more for women who experience violence.”
The highest levels of violence against women are in Africa, where nearly half of all women – 45.6% – will suffer physical or sexual violence. In low- and middle-income Europe, the proportion is 27.2%. Yet, wealthier nations are not necessarily always safer for women – a third of women in high-income countries (32.7%) will experience violence at some stage in their lives. Of the women who suffer violence, 42% sustain injuries, which can bring them to the attention of healthcare staff. That, says the report, is often the first opportunity for violence in the home to be detected and for the woman to be offered help. Violence has a profound effect on women’s health. Some arrive at hospital with broken bones, while others suffer pregnancy-related complications and mental illness.
The two reports from the WHO – one on the prevalence of violence, the other offering guidelines to healthcare staff on helping women – are the work of Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno, lead specialist in gender, reproductive rights, sexual health and adolescence at WHO, and Professor Charlotte Watts, an epidemiologist who specializes in gender, violence and health, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“For the first time, we have compared data from all over the world on the magnitude of partner violence and sexual violence by non-partners and the impact of these sorts of violence on health,” said Garcia-Moreno. These included HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, depression, women turning to alcohol, unwanted pregnancies and low-birthweight babies.
There were variations in the rates of violence against women in different regions of the world but, said Garcia-Moreno, “in whatever region we looked at, it is unacceptably high”. Even in high-income countries, 23.2% of women will suffer physical and/or sexual violence from a partner in their lives, their data from 81 countries shows. The global figure for women attacked by partners was 30%.
More sexual assaults and rapes by acquaintances or strangers are reported in high-income countries than elsewhere – the report says that 12.6% of women in wealthy countries will be sexually attacked by a non-partner in their lives, which is higher than the African rate of 11.9%. But, the data on such crimes is not well collected in all regions.
The authors say that their previous research shows that better-educated women are less likely to suffer violence, as are those who have jobs, although not in all regions. There is a need to tackle social norms, said Watts. “What is society’s attitude concerning the acceptability of certain forms of violence against women?” she asked. “In some societies, it is not OK – but not all.”
“I think the numbers are a wake-up call for all of us to pay more attention to this issue,” said Garcia-Moreno. Over the past decade, there has been increasing recognition of the problem, she said, but “one has to recognize that it is a complex problem. We don’t have a vaccine or a pill ”.
The new WHO clinical and policy guidelines recommend training for healthcare staff in recognizing the signs of domestic violence and sexual assault, but they rule out general screening – there is not a case for asking every woman who arrives in a clinic whether she has been subjected to violence.
“But, if you see a woman coming back several times with undisclosed injuries, you should be asking about domestic violence,” said Garcia-Moreno. “When I was training in medical school, it wasn’t something you learned or knew about. Years later, I was sometimes in a situation where I could tell there was something else going on in the woman I was interviewing, but didn’t have any sense that domestic violence was the issue. Now, I think I would handle the interview very differently.” | 2 | Advance |
The controversial auction of a Banksy mural that disappeared from the wall of a north London shop in mysterious circumstances was dramatically halted just moments before it was due to go under the hammer.
Slave Labour, a spray-painted artwork depicting a child making Union Flag bunting and seen as a critical social commentary on last year’s diamond jubilee, was expected to sell for about $700,000 in a sale of street and contemporary art in Florida.
But auctioneer Frederic Thut, the owner of the Fine Arts Auction Miami art house, who had refused all week to divulge the identity of the seller or how it came to be listed for sale through his gallery, announced that the piece, along with a second work by the secretive British street artist, had been withdrawn.
He would not give a reason, but community leaders in Haringey, who led a vocal campaign to stop the sale of the artwork that was prised from the wall of a Poundland in Wood Green, were jubilant.
“One of our two demands was that it doesn’t sell and the other was that we get it back again, so we’re halfway there,” said Alan Strickland, a Haringey councillor.
“I will be writing to the auction house as a matter of urgency to clarify what happened and what will happen next, but for now we are really pleased that because of the pressure and the strong views of the people of Wood Green, a community campaign in London has had an impact in the US. It’s a real victory for the people.”
Claire Kober, Leader of Haringey Council, wrote to Arts Council England and the Mayor of Miami, Tomás Regalado, to ask them to intervene to stop the sale but it appears the decision to withdraw the item came from the gallery owners in consultation with their lawyers. The FBI refused to confirm reports they were asked to investigate.
Several hours after the conclusion of the auction, the auction house issued a brief statement claiming it had persuaded the owners of the two Banksys to pull them from the sale. “Although there are no legal issues whatsoever regarding the sale of lots six and seven by Banksy, FAAM convinced its sellers to withdraw these lots from the auction.”
About 30 potential buyers attended the sale of 106 lots listed in the catalogue for the modern, contemporary and street art sale in Miami’s trendy Wynwood neighbourhood. The three-hour auction continued with other early lots selling in excess of their asking prices.
Critics have accused the auction house of dealing in stolen property but Thut insisted earlier in the week that the seller, who he described as a “well known collector ”, was the rightful owner and that the sale was legal.
He added that his gallery had been inundated with emails and phone calls from the UK, saying that many of them were abusive or offensive, but said he supported the inclusion of the pieces in the sale because it would preserve them.
The second Banksy due to be auctioned, a 2007 artwork entitled Wet Dog that was removed from a Bethlehem wall and is estimated to be worth up to $800,000, disappeared from the auction house’s online catalogue at lunchtime on Saturday, but Slave Labour was still listed for sale right up to the 3pm start time.
Thut said the two pieces, supplied to him by separate owners, neither of them British, were important works in the street art scene and deserved buyers “whose first interest is in art and its preservation ”.
He said he would maintain the privacy of the collector who put it up for sale. “We respect our clients and their confidentiality. It’s not our decision to have [the Banksy] returned. We only sell it. We do not have control of it.”
A spokesperson for Poundland said it had no idea who removed the 4ft x 5ft slab from the side of the shop it rents in Turnpike Lane. Lawyers for the owner of the building, a company called Wood Green Investments Ltd, have refused to confirm if it had anything to do with the episode.
Banksy himself has not commented on the Slave Labour furore, but has previously condemned those who have tried to sell his artwork, speaking out before the proposed sale of five of his pieces at a 2011 auction in New York. None found a buyer.
Stephan Keszler, the dealer behind that auction, believes selling Banksy’s works without his permission is legitimate.
“He does something on other people’s property without asking. The owner of the property can do whatever they want with it,” Keszler said. | 2 | Advance |
Maria is waiting on a black plastic chair. When she is called, she picks up a brown paper bag full of food: pasta, eggs and cornflakes. She can also choose between butternut squash or carrots as this week’s vegetables.
Maria is the 34th “client” today at East Hampton Food Pantry, very close to some of the most expensive houses in the world.
Every day in the winter, more than 400 families collect their weekly food parcel from the food pantry. The food helps them get through the cold, dark Long Island winter.
The Hamptons are historic, oceanfront towns and villages 100 miles from Manhattan, New York. In the summer, it is full of billionaires. But, in early September, the rich and famous shut up their mansions and go back to Manhattan or Beverly Hills. The people who live here all year are mostly immigrants.
“The people who come here are rich and famous but we who live here are not,” says Maria. She works 14-hour days in the summer cleaning mansions. She often has no work at all in the winter.
Maria laughs when asked if she has enough money. “There is no work in the winter, only in the summer,” says Maria. She, like many of the workers in the Hamptons, is from Latin America. “Here, lots of people live in a single room because they can’t pay the rent.”
Lots of her friends can’t pay for heating or medicine and many would be hungry if they did not get food from the East Hampton Food Pantry, she says.
Vicki Littman, chairperson of the East Hampton Food Pantry, which gave more than 31,000 food parcels in 2015, says there are more and more people coming to the food pantry.
Littman says that, when she talks to the people who come for the summer about the food pantries, they are always shocked. They know only the glamorous side of the Hamptons: the big parties and the beaches and mansions.
“But, what the rich people don’t know is that the gardeners, the nannies, the waitresses, they all need their summer earnings to get them through the winter.”
Housing is the biggest cost in the Hamptons. Larry Cantwell, who has lived in East Hampton all his life, says homes often cost more than $25 million. “It is very difficult to find your first home here,” Cantwell says. “If you can find a home to buy anywhere in East Hampton for less than $500,000, you’re very lucky.”
Cantwell says more than half the town’s homes are empty for most of the year. The population goes from 80,000 in August to 10,000 in the winter months.
“There’s a lot of wealth here but almost all of that wealth is in second homes only used in the summer,” says Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother. “But, the rest of us live here all year.”
“There are famous and very wealthy people but also hard-working and poor people. You’ve got to remember that this used to be a farming and fishing community – a real working-class community.”
Eddie Vallone, 22, says, “People only see the Hamptons as a rich town but there are a lot of problems here, especially drugs. It’s hard to understand. You think, ‘OK, the summer is over. What am I going to do for the winter?’” Vallone says, “I want to work but there’s no work.”
Vallone works cleaning swimming pools. He says that, if he is careful, he can make his summer earnings last until November. “But, work doesn’t start again until May or the beginning of June.” | 0 | Elementary |
Two mothers in South Africa have found out that they are raising each other ’s daughters after someone switched them at birth by mistake in a hospital in 2010.
One of the women wants to get her biological child back; the other refuses to hand back the girl she has raised as her own daughter.
Henk Strydom, a lawyer for one of the mothers, said the switch was a tragedy that will probably not have a happy ending.
Both mothers gave birth at the Tambo Memorial Hospital in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on the same day in 2010.
In 2013, one of the mothers, who is 33 and unemployed, wanted her ex-partner to pay maintenance for her daughter. The man said he was not the father. Strydom says, “A DNA test was done. They found that it was not his baby and not her baby. She was devastated. She didn’t know what to do.”
She met the other mother and now they go to joint counselling sessions, organized by the hospital. Here, both mothers met their biological daughters.
Strydom said about the mother: “You can see it’s not easy for her. She has to care for a child that is not hers on her own while her child is with someone else.”
The woman became unhappy and asked the children’s court to give her custody of her biological child, but the other mother refused.
“It’s a tragedy. She wants the baby back, but it’s four years later: you can understand that the other mother doesn’t want to give up her baby, ” Strydom said.
The High Court in Pretoria has asked the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Child Law to find out what will be best for the children.
Strydom added: “Whatever happens, someone won’t be happy. ”
Karabo Ngidi, a lawyer with the centre, said: “We must do what is best for the children. Biology is important but it is not the only important thing.”
It is not the first time babies have been switched by mistake in South Africa. In 1995, two mothers were paid damages after their sons, born in 1989, were switched by mistake at the Johannesburg hospital where they were born. | 0 | Elementary |
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have won the first part of their fight for privacy. A French magazine was told to stop selling or reusing photos of the royal couple. The pictures show the duchess sunbathing topless while on holiday in the south of France.
It is possible that the magazine editor and the photographer or photographers will also have to go to a criminal court.
The French magazine Closer was told to give digital files of the pictures to the couple within 24 hours.
Closer’s publisher, Mondadori Magazines France, was also told to pay €2,000 in legal costs. The magazine will have to pay €10,000 for every day it does not give the couple the files.
The court decided that every time Mondadori – the publishing company owned by the ex Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – publishes a photograph in the future in France, they will get €10,000 fine.
The couple welcome the judge’s decision. “They always believed the law was broken and that they had a right to their privacy.”
The royal couple are pleased with the decision, but they want to have a much more public criminal trial against the magazine and photographer or photographers.
Under French law, if you do not respect someone’s privacy, you may have to spend a maximum of one year in prison and pay a fine of €45,000.
This punishment would send a message to the world and, the couple hope, stop paparazzi taking photos like this in the future.
On Saturday the Irish Daily Star also published the photos. And the Italian celebrity magazine Chi published a special edition of 26 pages with the photos of the future queen. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
It began with a bogus scallop, but a menu scandal that has affected some of Japans top hotels and department stores now threatens the international reputation of the countrys food.
Since one luxury hotel chain admitted lying about ingredients on its menus, Japanese media have written stories of similar incidents in restaurants run by well-known hotels and department stores
The story 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, which affected an estimated 78,000 diners.
One of the worst menu misdemeanours was a red salmon caviar dish that was actually the less luxurious eggs of the flying fish.
The hotel groups president, Hiroshi Desaki, went on television to announce a 20% pay cut for himself and 10% for other executives but this did not make consumers any less angry.
Days later, Desaki resigned, saying that the hotel group had betrayed our customers. One of the hotels head chefs later declined a medal of honour he was going to receive from the government.
The company has so far refunded 20 million yen to more than 10,000 consumers. The final bill is expected to reach 110 million yen.
Consumers who believed they had eaten expensive kuruma shrimps were told they had in fact eaten the much cheaper black tiger version.
The scandal started when a diner complained in a blogpost that a scallop dish he had ordered at the Prince Hotel in Tokyo contained a similar, but cheaper, type of shellfish.
The hotel started an investigation and as a result corrected 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 top ingredients.
The Hotel Okura chain whose guests have included Barack Obama said they had also injected beef with fat to make it juicier and incorrectly described 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; shop-bought chocolate cream that the menu said was home-made; imported beef sold as expensive wagyu.
Even the governments top spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, commented on the scandal. This inappropriate labelling has resulted in the loss of trust among consumers, he told reporters.
The fraudulent menu scandal has exploded at just the wrong time. Japan is trying to persuade South Korea and other countries to lift a ban on food imports that began after the Fukushima nuclear accident. And UNESCO is considering a request to add Japanese cuisine to its cultural heritage list.
One local newspaper had the headline, Japans proud food culture in tears, while the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun said it was shocked by the industrys lack of morals.
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 preferences, and, when they couldnt get the ingredients on the menu, hotels just used food from different places, Hiroshi Tomozawa, a hotel and restaurant consultant, told Kyodo News.
The industrys biggest problem will come from Japans demanding consumers. In 2009, 72% of diners in Japan said that, when they were choosing from a menu, where the food is from was the most important thing for them, followed by the amount of calories and other nutritional details. | 1 | Intermediate |
They call him the Robin Hood of the banks. He is a man who took out loans for almost half a million euros and never paid the money back. Enric Duran gave the money to projects that created and supported alternatives to capitalism.
Duran has spent 14 months in hiding. He will not say he is sorry, even though he might go to prison for what he has done. “I’m proud of what I’ve done,” he said in an interview by Skype from a secret location.
From 2006 to 2008, Duran took out 68 loans from 39 banks in Spain. He gave the money to social activists. They used the money to pay for speaking tours against capitalism and TV cameras for a media network. He said that these social activists didn’t have enough money but, at the same time, constant economic growth created money from nothing.
The loans he took out dishonestly from banks were his way of showing that this situation was wrong, he said. He started slowly. He tried to take out bank loans using his real details. The banks said no.
Then, he learnt how to get money from the banks. “I was learning all the time.” By the summer of 2007, he learnt how to make the system work – he took out loans under the name of a false television production company. This way, he got a lot of money. €492,000, to be exact.
Duran was arrested in Spain in 2009. He spent two months in prison; then, they let him out on €50,000 bail. In February 2013, with the possibility of eight years in prison, he decided to run away.
His actions in 2006 to 2008 made many people notice the anti-capitalist movement for the first time. This happened at a time when many Spanish people were looking for alternatives to a system that has caused problems in their lives.
In today’s Spain, thousands of people support the anti-capitalist movement and groups such as the Indignados.
Duran says he does not want to give back the money to the banks but he can offer them something. He learnt a lot in the years when he was taking loans out dishonestly, so he can show the banks how they can improve things for people in general and for bank workers. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
Thousands of people protested on Australias beaches against a shark cull that is being carried out in Western Australia. They called on the states prime minister to end the policy, and RSPCA Australia and Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson spoke out against it. The catching and killing of sharks longer than three metres began after what the state government called an unprecedented number of shark attacks on Western Australias coast. A 35-year-old surfer, killed in November 2013, was the sixth person to die from a shark attack in two years.
However, the whole of Australia has had an average of just one shark-related death a year for the last 50 years. Kate Faehrmann, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said from a protest in the state capital, Perth: Weve always said that this policy wont work. Drumlines used to catch the sharks kill sharks whether theyre one, two, three metres or more, as well as dolphins, turtles and other things. Thats why the community doesnt want it.
Thousands of people protested on beaches in the cities of Perth, Sydney and Adelaide, and at beaches in Victoria and Queensland. Faehrmann said the protests had shown that Australians wanted sharks protected: Whats amazing is so many people in Australia love sharks. This has demonstrated something about the national psyche; that, despite all the fear, thousands of people are coming out across the country to say, Thats their ocean. We respect them, we love them and we dont want them killed. Anthony Joyce, a surfer who once had his foot caught in a sharks mouth, said: The number of sharks they are going to kill is going to make no difference.
The state government has refused to say how many sharks have been killed, though there have been reports of sharks smaller than three metres being released after getting caught on drumlines, oating drums xed to the sea bed with bait hanging on hooks underneath them. Conservationists say there is no evidence the cull will reduce the number of shark attacks on humans, because no previous cull has only used drumlines. Researchers at the University of Western Australia say the increased number of shark attacks in the state is probably because the state has the fastest-growing population in Australia, not because of a rising number of sharks.
Richard Peirce, of the UK-based conservation charity, the Shark Trust, said that the cull would be ineffective and could bring more predators towards the coast. The activity in Western Australia is compounding the human tragedy of shark attacks. It is very sad that a government has ignored the best advice and chosen an approach that is ineffective and counterproductive, he said. People often dont consider that that drumlines are indiscriminate even if monitored through the day, leaving the lines in at night has the potential to attract other predators into the area, attracted by those sharks and other species hooked and injured.
Worldwide, in 2012, there were 80 attacks by sharks, seven of which were fatal, compared to nearly 100m sharks killed by humans each year. RSPCA Australia said in a statement that it believes the cull is unjusti ed. There is no evidence that the increase in attacks is a result of increasing shark numbers. Instead, it is consistent with a changing population and human behaviour; that is, there are greater numbers of people in the water, it said.
Richard Branson said the policy was not working. Im sure one of the reasons Western Australia Premier, Colin Barnett, did it was because he was thinking it would encourage tourism. Its going to do quite the reverse, I think. Youre advertising a problem that doesnt exist in a major way and youre deterring people from coming to Perth and your beautiful countryside around it. All youre going to achieve, I think, is to worry people unnecessarily. | 1 | Intermediate |
Throughout a momentous day at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral for the families of the 96 people who died so needlessly at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough football ground, one phrase dominated above all else: the truth. These were the words most infamously abused by a headline in The Sun newspaper, above stories which we now know, in extraordinarily shocking detail, were fed by the South Yorkshire Police to deflect their own culpability for the disaster on to the innocent victims.
Margaret Aspinall, whose son James, then 18, died at what should have been a joyful day out, an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, said the families had been forced to fight, for 23 years, for just that: the truth. Aspinall, Chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, said that, although the families’ loss would never fade, she was “delighted” at the unequivocal, “profound” apology given for Hillsborough’s savage failings by David Cameron.
The Hillsborough Independent Panel had inspected 450,000 documents generated by the police, Sheffield Wednesday and all other bodies responsible, and delivered its remarkable 395- page report indicting official failings and vindicating the victims and football supporters.
Some of what happened to cause the disaster, and the police’s subsequent blame-shifting, has been exposed before. But the depth of what the families call a cover-up, in particular the deliberate police campaign to avoid its own responsibilities and falsely blame the supporters, was still startling.
In a concerted campaign – led, the panel found, by the Chief Constable, Peter Wright – the South Yorkshire Police put out their story that drunken supporters or those without tickets had caused the disaster. The victims had their blood tested for alcohol levels. This was “an exceptional decision ”, the panel said, for which it found “no rationale ”. When victims had alcohol in their blood, the police then checked to find if they had criminal records.
The report, substantially authored by Professor Phil Scraton of Queen’s University, Belfast, and unanimously agreed by the panel of eight experts, found there was “no evidence … to verify the serious allegations of exceptional levels of drunkenness, ticketlessness or violence among Liverpool fans ”.
The report found that even as the nightmare began for the families of the victims, Wright was meeting his police federation in a Sheffield restaurant to prepare “a defence” and “a rock- solid story ”. The Secretary of the South Yorkshire Police Federation branch, Constable Paul Middup, told the restaurant meeting before Wright turned up: “The Chief Constable had said the truth could not come from him, but had given the secretary a totally free hand and supported him,” as had many senior officers.
The meeting was held just four days after the disaster. It was the day that The Sun splashed its headline “The Truth” over lies fed to it by four senior South Yorkshire police officers. Middup was encouraged to continue this police campaign of defaming Liverpool supporters for supposed drunkenness and misbehaviour and “to get the message – togetherness – across to the force ”.
The panel’s report sustained the allegation made in parliament that the orchestrated changing of junior officers’ statements by senior South Yorkshire police officers amounted to a “black propaganda unit ”. The officers’ statements, presented as official police accounts to the subsequent inquiry, were changed to delete criticism of the police themselves on the day, and, largely, emphasize misbehaviour by supporters. The panel found that 116 of 164 statements were amended “to remove or alter comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire police ”.
The police had claimed this was done only to remove “conjecture” and “opinion” from the statements, but the panel had no doubt the operation, to craft a case rather than deliver truthful police accounts, went further. “It was done to remove criticism of the police,” Scraton said.
This propaganda did not convince the original inquiry, which ruled as quickly as August 1989 that the police stories of fan drunkenness and misbehaviour were false, and criticized the police for making the claims. The report revealed that Sheffield Wednesday’s football ground was unsafe in crucial respects, that the Football Association had selected it as the venue for the match without even checking if Hillsborough had a valid safety certificate, which it did not.
In that landscape of neglect, it was the mismanagement of the crowd by the police, commanded by an inexperienced Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, that was “the prime cause” of the disaster. The police lost control outside the ground, where 24,000 Liverpool fans had to be funnelled through just 23 turnstiles, so Duckenfield ordered a large exit gate to be opened and a large number of people to be allowed in. His “blunder of the first magnitude ”, according to the inquiry, was the failure to close off the tunnel that led to the already overcrowded central section of the Leppings Lane terrace.
The inquiry report established this but the police, undaunted, repeated their claims to the subsequent inquest. Its procedure was marked by the coroner’s decision not to take evidence of what happened after 3.15pm on the day of the disaster, thereby excluding an emergency response the panel found to have been chaotic. The finding that 41 of the 96 who died could possibly have been saved had the police and ambulance service done their jobs decently is damning of those bodies and, Aspinall said, difficult for the families to contemplate.
In the light of the panel’s report, the Attorney General will now consider whether to apply to the High Court for the inquest verdict of accidental death to be quashed and a new inquest held. There may be prosecutions too, after all these years, of Sheffield Wednesday, South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield City Council, which failed in its duty to oversee the safety of the football ground. Trevor Hicks, the President of the HFSG, both of whose teenage daughters, Sarah and Victoria, died in the crush, said: “The truth is out today. Tomorrow is for justice.” | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
The controversial auction of a Banksy mural that disappeared from the wall of a north London shop was dramatically stopped just moments before it was going to be sold.
Slave Labour is a spray-painted artwork showing a child making British flags and is seen as a critical social commentary on last years diamond jubilee. It was expected to sell for about $700,000 in a sale of street and contemporary art in Florida.
But auctioneer Frederic Thut, the owner of the Fine Arts Auction Miami art house, who had refused all week to give the name of the seller, announced that Slave Labour, together with a second work by the secretive British street artist, had been removed from sale at the auction.
He would not give a reason, but community leaders in Haringey, London, who led a campaign to stop the sale of the artwork that was removed from the wall of a Poundland shop in Wood Green, were extremely happy
One of our two demands was that it doesnt sell and the other was that we get it back again, so were halfway there, said Alan Strickland, a Haringey councillor.
I will be writing to the auction house to clarify what happened and what will happen next, but for now we are really pleased that a community campaign in London has had an impact in the US. Its a real victory for the people.
Claire Kober, Leader of Haringey Council, wrote to Arts Council England and the Mayor of Miami, Toms Regalado, to ask them to stop the sale, but it appears the decision to remove the item from sale came from the gallery owners.
Several hours after the auction, the auction house said it had persuaded the owners of the two Banksys to remove them from the sale. Although there are no legal issues whatsoever regarding the sale of lots six and seven by Banksy, FAAM convinced its sellers to remove these lots from the auction.
Critics have accused the auction house of buying and selling stolen property but Thut said that the seller, who he described as a well known collector, was the rightful owner and that the sale was legal.
He added that his gallery had received many emails and phone calls from the UK, but said he supported selling the two pieces of artwork because it would preserve them.
The second Banksy to be auctioned, a 2007 artwork called Wet Dog that was removed from a Bethlehem wall and is estimated to be worth up to $800,000, was removed from the auction houses online catalogue, but Slave Labour was still listed for sale right up to the 3pm start time.
Thut said the two pieces, supplied to him by separate owners, neither of them British, were important works in the street art scene and deserved buyers whose first interest is in art and its preservation.
A spokesperson for Poundland said it had no idea who removed the 4ft x 5ft mural from the side of one of its shops in London.
Banksy himself has not commented on the Slave Labour controversy, but he has previously condemned people who have tried to sell his artwork. He spoke out before five of his pieces were going to be sold at a 2011 auction in New York. None found a buyer.
Stephan Keszler, the dealer at that auction, believes selling Banksys works without his permission is legitimate.
He does something on other peoples property without asking. The owner of the property can do whatever they want with it, Keszler said. | 1 | Intermediate |
Facebook has lost millions of users per month in its biggest markets, independent data suggests, as alternative social networks attract the attention of those looking for fresh online playgrounds.
As Facebook prepares to update investors on its performance in the first three months of the year, with analysts forecasting revenues up 36% on last year, studies suggest that its expansion in the US, UK and other major European countries has peaked. In the last month, the world’s largest social network has lost 6m US visitors, a 4% fall, according to analysis firm Socialbakers. In the UK, 1.4m fewer users checked in in March, a fall of 4.5%. The declines are sustained. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK.
Users are also switching off in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan, where Facebook has some of its biggest followings. A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment.
“The problem is that, in the US and UK, most people who want to sign up for Facebook have already done it,” said new media specialist Ian Maude at Enders Analysis. “There is a boredom factor where people like to try something new. Is Facebook going to go the way of MySpace? The risk is relatively small, but that is not to say it isn’t there.” Alternative social networks such as Instagram, the photo-sharing site that won 30m users in 18 months before Facebook acquired the business, have seen surges in popularity with younger age groups.
Path, the mobile phone-based social network founded by former Facebook employee Dave Morin, which restricts its users to 150 friends, is gaining 1m users a week. It has recently topped 9m users, with 500,000 Venezuelans downloading the app in a single weekend.
Facebook is still growing fast in South America. Monthly visitors in Brazil were up 6% in the last month to 70m, according to Socialbakers, whose information is used by Facebook advertisers. India has seen a 4% rise to 64m – still a fraction of the country’s population, leaving room for further growth.
But in developed markets, other Facebook trackers are reporting declines. Analysts at Jefferies bank have developed an algorithm that interfaces directly with Facebook software and it “suggests user levels in [the first quarter] may have declined from peak”.
Jefferies saw global numbers peak at 1.05bn a month in January, before falling by 20m in February. Numbers rose again in April. The network has now lost nearly 2m visitors in the UK since December, according to research firm Nielsen, with its 27m total flat on a year before.
The number of minutes Americans spend on Facebook appears to be falling, too. The total was 121 billion minutes in December 2012, but that fell to 115 billion minutes in February, according to comScore.
As Facebook itself has warned, the time spent on its pages from those sitting in front of personal computers is declining rapidly because we are switching our screen time to smartphones and tablets.
While smartphone minutes have doubled in a year, to 69 a month, that growth is not guaranteed to compensate for dwindling desktop usage.
Facebook is the most authoritative source on its own user numbers, and the firm will update investors on its performance for the quarter. Wall Street expects revenues of about $1.44bn, up from $1.06bn in 2012.
Shareholders will be particularly keen to learn how fast Facebook’s mobile user base is growing, and whether advertising revenues are increasing at the same rate.
Mobile usage represented nearly a quarter of Facebook’s advertising income at the end of 2012, and the network had 680m mobile users a month in December.
The company warned in recent stockmarket filings that it might be losing “younger users” to “other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook”.
Wary of competition from services that were invented for the mobile phone rather than the PC, founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently driven through a series of new initiatives designed to appeal to smartphone users. The most significant is Facebook Home, software that can be downloaded onto certain Android phones to feed news and photos from friends – and advertising – directly to the owner’s locked home screen. | 2 | Advance |
Vienna is the world’s best city to live in, Baghdad is the worst and London, Paris and New York do not even make it into the top 35, according to international research into quality of life.
German-speaking cities dominate the rankings in the 18th Mercer Quality of Life study, with Vienna joined by Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt in the top seven.
Paris has tumbled down the league, falling ten places to 37th, just ahead of London at 39th, almost entirely because of the city’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks.
The study examined social and economic conditions, health, education, housing and the environment, and is used by big companies to assess where they should locate and how much they should pay staff.
Viennese-born Helena Hartlauer, 32, said she was not surprised at her city’s top position. The municipality’s social democratic government has a long tradition of investing in high-quality social housing, making Vienna almost uniquely affordable among major cities.
“I live in a 100sq-metre turn-of-the-century apartment in a good area about 20 minutes’ walk from the city centre. But my rent is just €800 (£625) a month.” An equivalent apartment in London would cost upwards of £2,000 and even more in New York, ranked 44th in the table.
US cities perform relatively poorly in the study, largely because of issues around personal safety and crime. The highest ranking city in the US is San Francisco, at 28th; Boston is 34th. Canadian cities, led by Vancouver, far outrank their US rivals in the table.
“You don’t realize how safe Vienna is until you head abroad,” said Hartlauer. “We also have terrific public transport, with the underground working 24 hours at weekends, and it only costs €1 per trip.”
Vienna benefited enormously from the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming the gateway to Eastern European countries that often have historic ties to the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
“Our big USP is our geographical location,” said Martin Eichtinger, Austrian ambassdaor to London, who lived in Vienna for 20 years. “The fall of the Berlin Wall helped define Vienna as the hub for companies wanting to do business in Central Europe.”
According to the World Bank, Austria has one of the highest figures for GDP per head in the world, just behind the US and ahead of Germany and Britain, although quite some way below neighbouring Switzerland.
Zurich in Switzerland is named by Mercer as having the world’s second highest quality of life but the Viennese say their city is far more fun. “There are more students in Vienna than any other German-speaking city,” said Hartlauer. “It’s a very fast growing, young and lively city,” she added – though she conceded she works for the city’s tourist board.
Vienna has long been overlooked by British weekend city break tourists, who instead flock to Barcelona or Berlin and tend to think of Austria as somewhere for skiing, lakes and mountains. But, after an increase in budget flights from regional British cities such as Manchester and Edinburgh, Vienna is fast catching up as a popular destination. In 2015, there were 588,000 British visitors to Vienna, up 18% on the year before. The flow is both ways; Eichtinger said London has become the number one city destination for Austrian visitors.
“Vienna has ranked top in the last seven published rankings,” said Mercer. “It scores highly in a number of categories; it provides a safe and stable environment to live in, a high level of public utilities and transport facilities and good recreational facilities.”
The European migrant crisis, which has seen large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers pass through Vienna en route to Germany, has had little impact on the city of nearly 1.8 million people, said Eichtinger. “We have managed to accommodate 90,000 refugees in Austria but the numbers have slowed in recent months.” London has never been in the quality-of-life top ten, says Mercer, damaged by its poor scores for air pollution, traffic congestion and climate. After London, Edinburgh is the next-ranking British city, in 46th place.
Paris has suffered the biggest fall in the most recent rankings. “Paris remained stable for several years but has, this year, dropped ten places in the overall ranking,” said Mercer.
“The drop was essentially due to the terrorist attacks in 2015. However, it is important to highlight that safety issues are a very highly weighted factor within the ’basket’ so any small adjustments can have a big impact on the ranking.”
Auckland in New Zealand was the highest ranking English-speaking city in the survey, in third place, followed by Vancouver in fifth. Australian cities also perform very highly in the survey, with Sydney 10th and Melbourne 15th. The Economist has consistently ranked Melbourne as the world’s most liveable city, although its survey has been criticized as too Anglocentric.
War and political unrest are behind all the worst-ranked cities in the world. Surprisingly, Damascus is named as only the seventh worst, ranked better than not just Baghdad but also Bangui in Central African Republic, Sana’a in Yemen, Port-au-Prince in Haiti, Khartoum in Sudan and N’Djamena in Chad. | 2 | Advance |
Chemists have waited a long time to find a new element and, now, researchers in Japan, Russia and the US have discovered four. The four new elements will be added to the periodic table. They are the first elements to be added since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were included. The new elements, all very radioactive, complete the seventh row of the periodic table.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is the global organization that controls chemical names. IUPAC confirmed the new elements on 30 December, 2015. The scientists who found them must now think of formal names for the elements, which have the atomic numbers, 113, 115, 117, and 118. The atomic number is the number of protons in an element’s atomic nucleus.
IUPAC said that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had discovered elements 115, 117 and 118. The organization said a team of scientists from the RIKEN Institute in Japan discovered element 113. The decision means Japan becomes the first Asian country to name an element. Under IUPAC rules, new elements can be named after mythological concepts, minerals, a place or country, or a scientist.
In 2012, scientists chose the formal name flerovium for element 114, after the Flerov Lab at Dubna’s Joint Institute of Research. And they chose the formal name livermorium for element 116, after the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the US.
The elements were discovered there. Kosuke Morita, who led the research at RIKEN, said his team now planned to “look to element 119 and beyond”. Jan Reedijk of IUPAC said: “Chemists want to see the periodic table finally completed down to the seventh row.”
The Japanese team is considering three names for element 113: japonium, rikenium and nishinarium, after the Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, where they found the element. Polly Arnold, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh University, said, “This is very difficult and slow work. The work helps us understand radioactive decay. If we understand it better, hopefully we can find a better way to deal with nuclear waste and things that are important in the real world. And, when they build the equipment to make these discoveries, it also leads to fantastic improvements in technology.”
Scientists must find new names for the elements but, also, they must suggest two-letter symbols for the elements. When IUPAC has received the researchers’ suggestions, they will tell the public so that people can comment on the names. That allows scientists and others to find any problems with the names. In 1996, someone suggested the symbol Cp for copernicium, or element 112, but it was changed to Cn, when scientists complained that Cp was already the symbol for another substance.
To discover the elements, researchers at the three labs crashed lighter nuclei into one another and looked for the radioactive decays that should come from the new elements. 113 and 115 are probably metals. 117 could be a metalloid – a material with some metallic characteristics. The fourth element, 118, may be a gas.
Paul Karol, chair of the IUPAC panel that checked the elements, said: “It will be a long time before we can find practical uses for the new elements.” | 0 | Elementary |
The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara Desert and at the centre of the North African country’s “Ouallywood” film industry, it has played host to big-budget location shots in Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones.
Now, the trading city, nicknamed the “door of the desert”, is the location for another blockbuster – a complex of four linked solar mega-plants, which, alongside hydro and wind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco’s electricity from renewables by 2020 with, it is hoped, some spare to export to Europe. The project is a key plank in Morocco’s ambitions to use its untapped deserts to become a global solar superpower.
When the full complex is complete, it will be the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world and the first phase, called Noor 1, will go live in November 2015. The mirror technology it uses is less widespread and more expensive than the photovoltaic panels that are now familiar on roofs the world over but it will have the advantage of being able to continue producing power even after the sun goes down.
The potential for solar power from the desert has been known for decades. In the days after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the German particle physicist Gerhard Knies calculated that the world’s deserts receive enough energy in a few hours to provide for humanity’s power needs for a whole year. The challenge, though, has been capturing that energy and transporting it to the population centres where it is required.
As engineers put the finishing touches to Noor 1, its 500,000 crescent-shaped solar mirrors glitter across the desert skyline. The 800 rows follow the sun as it tracks across the heavens, whirring quietly every few minutes as their shadows slip further east.
When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580 mega-watts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW.
Morocco’s Environment Minister, Hakima el-Haite, believes that solar energy could have the same impact on the region this century that oil production had in the last. But the $9bn project to make her country’s deserts boom was triggered by more immediate concerns, she said.
“We are not an oil producer. We import 94% of our energy as fossil fuels from abroad and that has big consequences for our state budget,” el-Haite told the Guardian. “We also used to subsidize fossil fuels, which have a heavy cost, so when we heard about the potential of solar energy, we thought, 'Why not?'”
Solar energy will make up a third of Morocco’s renewable energy supply by 2020, with wind and hydro taking the same share each.
“We are very proud of this project,” el-Haite said. “I think it is the most important solar plant in the world.”
Each parabolic mirror is 12 metres high and focused on a steel pipeline carrying a 'heat transfer solution' (HTF) that is warmed to 393C as it snakes along the trough before coiling into a heat engine. There, it is mixed with water to create steam that turns energy- generating turbines.
The HTF is made up of a synthetic thermal oil solution that is pumped towards a heat tank containing molten sands that can store heat energy for three hours, allowing the plant to power homes into the night. The mirrors are spaced in tier formations to minimize damage from sand blown up by desert winds.
Technicians say that the Noor 2 and 3 plants, due to open in 2017, will store energy for up to eight hours – opening the prospect of 24/7 solar energy in the Sahara and the surrounding region.
“The biggest challenge we faced was being able to finish the project on time with the performance level we needed to achieve,” said Rashid al-Bayad, the project director.
But, even as the first phase of the project nears completion, Morocco is eyeing grander international ambitions. “We are already involved in high tension transportation lines to cover the full south of Morocco and Mauritania as a first step,” says Ahmed Baroudi, manager of Société d’Investissements Energétiques, the national renewable energy investment firm. But he says the project’s ultimate impact will go far wider – even as far as the Middle East. “The ultimate objective given by his majesty the king is Mecca.”
Whether that ambition is achieved remains to be seen but exporting solar energy could have stabilizing effects within and between countries, according to the Moroccan solar energy agency (Masen). Talks are ongoing with Tunisia and energy exports northwards across the Mediterranean remain a key goal.
“We believe that it’s possible to export energy to Europe but, first, we would have to build the interconnectors which don’t yet exist,” said Maha el-Kadiri, a Masen spokeswoman. “Specifically, we would have to build interconnections, which would not go through the existing one in Spain, and, then, start exporting.”
Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France. The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020.
In the meantime, Morocco is focused on using solar to meet its own needs for resource independence. This could, one day, include water desalination, in a country that is increasingly being hit by drought as the climate warms. Officials are keenly aware of the running they are making in what is the most advanced renewable energy programme in the Middle East and North African region. “We are at the avante-garde of solar,” el-Kadiri says.
About $9bn has been invested in the Noor Complex, much of it from international institutions such as the European Investment Bank and World Bank and backed by Moroccan government guarantees. Undisclosed energy subsidies from Morocco’s unelected ruler, King Mohammed VI, have prevented the cost from being transferred to energy consumers.
One month before launch, over a thousand, mostly Moroccan, workers are still racing to fix electric wires, take down scaffolding and wrap rockwool insulation around steel pipelines. They bustle past in yellow and orange bibs, working 12-hour shifts against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. Harnesses with hammers and gloves strapped to their belts swing by their sides. Ubiquitous hard hats, safety shoes and ear plugs give the scene an air of theatrical camp.
For Hajar Lakhael, a 25-year-old environment and security manager from Meknes, rehearsals are almost over and the blockbuster production is nearly ready for action.
“We’ve done the construction and, now, we will see how these projects look when they start,” she says. “It is exactly like the preparation for a grand performance.”
A global audience will be watching with interest. | 2 | Advance |
“I got a Dyson vacuum cleaner but I don’t even know if I want it,” said 56-year-old Louise Haggerty, as she left the Black Friday sales at one o’clock in the morning. “It was crazy in there. It was absolutely disgusting, disgusting.”
Haggerty went with a friend to a 24-hour Sainsbury’s supermarket in north-east London. She hoped to buy a bargain flat-screen TV. “But so many people pushed in the queue that we didn’t have a chance,” she said. “The poor woman who was second in the queue was pushed out by a crowd of youths. She didn’t get anything. People were behaving like animals – it was horrible,” she said. “I only saw two security guards.”
Haggerty was frustrated when she was unable to buy a TV, which was reduced from £299.99 to £149.99, so rushed to pick up a vacuum cleaner, which was reduced from £319.99 to £159.99. “I don’t even know how much it costs. I don’t know even know if I’m going to buy it. I just wanted something,” she said. “There are young men in there with three, four, five tellies. It’s not fair.”
One of those young men was Andy Blackett, who had two trolleys full of bargains. “I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo,” he said. “I don’t know the prices but I know they’re bargains.” But his friend Henry Fischer wasn’t as successful. “Someone snatched my telly from me – it’s because I’m the smaller one.”
More than 12 police officers attended a Tesco store in another part of London because fights started between eager and frustrated shoppers. Tesco delayed the sale of its most popular sale items – TVs – for almost an hour until police brought the situation under control. One police officer said the manager did not provide enough security and suggested the sale should be stopped completely.
Police were called to several other stores just before the doors opened at midnight. Manchester Police said they arrested at least two people at Black Friday sales events. South Wales Police also said they received calls from staff at Tesco stores because so many people came to the sales that they became worried.
One of the first people to buy a flat-screen TV, when TV sales began just before 1am, was James Alled. He bought two and was already trying to sell one of them to someone further down the queue. “I bought them for £250 each. I’ll sell it to you for £350, £300 cash,” he said. Further back in the queue, Christine Ball, 62, wasn’t impressed. “I got here at 10.15pm and I’m further back now than when I got here” she said. “These people don’t know what a queue is.”
Ball had not heard of the Black Friday sales, which come from the US, until now. She came out especially to buy her grandson a TV for Christmas. “Not one of those massive ones; just a normal one at £100 or so,” she said.
Mel Mehmet, 23, went to Black Friday sales in 2013 so she knew there would be queues. But she said the atmosphere in Tesco scared her this time. “It’s crazy to have a sale at midnight – the police have more important things to do at night than come to sales. We’re going to PC World in the morning – their sale starts at 8am.” | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
In the Arctic regions of Canada, the summer sun shines for more than 20 hours a day. For some, its a welcome change from the constant darkness of winter. But, for the small but growing Muslim community of Iqaluit, Nunavut, life in the land of the midnight sun is a real challenge during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims typically fast from sunrise to sunset.
I havent fainted once, said 29-year-old Abdul Karim, one of the few in the area who has carefully timed his Ramadan fast to the Arctic sun since moving from Ottawa in 2011. This year, that means eating at about 1.30am before the sun rises and breaking his fast at about 11pm when the sun sets. The only reason to stop would be if it hurts my health, Karim said.
It is nearly the end of Ramadan for Muslims around the world. Fasting is important but, during the holy month, in every Muslim community, there is also a focus on community work, prayer and reflection. But, in Iqaluit and the other Muslim communities in the Arctic, the long days have forced a change in how they fast.
Most Muslims in Iqaluit follow the timetable followed by Muslims in Ottawa, about 1,300 miles south this follows the advice of Muslim scholars who have said Muslims in the far north should observe Ramadan using the timetable of Mecca or the nearest Muslim city. It still means fasting for around 18 hours a day, said Atif Jilani, who moved to Iqaluit from Toronto. The days are long, but its more manageable.
Many in the community of 100 people break their fast together they gather in the citys brand new mosque for nightly suppers. As they tuck into traditional food such as dates and goat or lamb curries, the sun shines brightly through the windows.
Its a similar situation across Canadas most northern mosques during Ramadan, as Muslims deal with the countrys unique geography. In recent years, much of the community has chosen to follow the Ramadan timetable of Edmonton, in Alberta. Some follow the timings of Mecca, for example Awan, a father of two young children, including a 12-year-old who recently started fasting. He hopes to encourage his son with the more manageable timetable of about 15 hours of fasting compared with about 18 hours in Edmonton. If I fast Edmonton times, my son might say, Papa, you are really insane. What are you doing? he said.
For the 100 or so Muslims in Inuvik, a small town 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it is impossible to follow the local movements of the sun. They have also been following Edmontons timetable. We currently have 24 hours a day of sun, said Ahmad Alkhalaf. Theres no sunrise or sunset.
They were already following the Edmonton schedule in 2001 when he moved from Toronto to the small northern community of 3,500 people. My first Ramadan here was in December. Theres no sun at that time; its dark all day and night. So we used Edmonton time.
At times, it can be difficult to follow the clock rather than what is happening outside, Alkhalaf said. Youre supposed to break your fast when its dusk but we eat when the sun is up. Its not usual to have iftar [the meal that breaks the fast] when the sun is up, he said.
In Inuvik, where most of the population is Inuit, the Muslim community has tried to strike a balance between Ramadan and the local culture and traditions. The iftar meal includes dates and curries as well as local game such as reindeer. We make a soup or curry, but instead of using beef, we use reindeer.
In Iqaluit, as the Muslim community prepares to mark the end of Ramadan, some reflect that 2016s timing stretching across some of the longest days of the year has made it one of the more difficult of recent years. Its particularly true for those like Karim who have followed the local sunrise and sunset carefully. But, his efforts will be rewarded in future years, said Karim, thanks to the lunar calendar. Ramadan will eventually fall during winter and, in Iqaluit, the sun will rise and set within a few hours each day. Ill follow those hours, too, he said with a laugh. Oh yes, definitely. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
Galina Zaglumyonova was woken in her flat in central Chelyabinsk by an enormous explosion that blew in the balcony windows and shattered pots containing her houseplants. When she jumped out of bed, she could see a huge vapour trail hanging in the morning sky and hear car alarms from the street below.
I didnt understand what was going on, said Zaglumyonova. There was a big explosion and then a series of little explosions. My first thought was that it was a plane crash.
What she had actually witnessed was a ten-tonne meteorite that fell to Earth in a series of fireballs just after sunrise.
Officials said almost 1,200 people had been injured, with more than 40 taken to hospital most as a result of flying glass shattered by the sonic boom created by the meteorites fall. There were no reported deaths.
The meteorite entered the atmosphere travelling at a speed of at least 33,000mph and broke up into pieces between 18 and 32 miles above the ground, according to a statement from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The event caused panic in Chelyabinsk, a city of more than one million people to the south of Russias Ural mountains. A video showed the pieces of meteorite glowing more brightly as they approached the moment of impact. The vapour trail was visible for hundreds of miles around, including in neighbouring Kazakhstan.
Tatyana Bets was at work in the reception area of a hospital clinic in the centre of the city when the meteorite hit. First we noticed the wind, and then the room was filled with a very bright light and we could see a cloud of smoke in the sky, she said. Then, after a few minutes, the explosions came.
At least three craters were discovered, according to the Ministry of the Interior. One crater was more than six metres wide and another piece of the meteorite broke through the thick ice of a nearby lake.
In Chelyabinsk itself, schools and universities were closed and many other staff told to go home early. About 200 children were among the injured.
A steady stream of lightly injured people, most suffering cuts from flying glass, came into the clinic where Bets works. She said a nearby building for college students was particularly badly affected and many of the students were brought in. There were a lot of girls in shock. Some were very pale and many of them fainted, she said.
Early estimates suggested more than 100,000 square metres of glass had been broken and 3,000 buildings hit. The total cost of the damage in the city was being valued at more than one billion roubles (20m).
The meteorite over Chelyabinsk arrived less than a day before asteroid 2012 DA14 was expected to pass Earth very closely (about 17,510 miles). But experts said the two events were not connected.
There were lots of rumours and conspiracy theories, however, in the first few hours after the incident. Reports on Russian state television and in local media suggested that the meteorite was blown apart by local air defence units at an altitude of more than 15 miles.
The ultra-nationalist leader of Russias Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said it was not a meteorite but military action by the United States. Its not a meteorite falling its a test of new American weapons, Zhirinovsky said.
Some were quick to take advantage. Enterprising people were offering pieces of meteorite for sale through internet sites within a few hours of the impact.
President Vladimir Putin and the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, were informed about the incident, and Putin called a meeting with the head of the Emergency Situations Ministry. Its proof that not only are economies vulnerable but the whole planet, Medvedev said at an economic forum in Siberia. | 1 | Intermediate |
Swedish prisons have long had a reputation around the world for being progressive. But are the country’s prisons a soft option?
The head of Sweden’s prison and probation service, Nils Oberg, announced in November 2013 that four Swedish prisons are to be closed due to an “out of the ordinary” decline in prisoner numbers.
Although there has been no fall in crime rates, between 2011 and 2012 there was a 6% drop in Sweden’s prisoner population, now a little over 4,500. A similar decrease is expected in 2013 and 2014. Oberg admitted to being puzzled by the unexpected dip, but expressed optimism that the reason was to do with how his prisons are run. “We certainly hope that the efforts we invest in rehabilitation and preventing relapse of crime has had an impact,” he said.
“The modern prison service in Sweden is very different from when I joined as a young prison officer in 1978,” says Kenneth Gustafsson, governor of Kumla Prison, Sweden’s most secure jail, situated 130 miles west of Stockholm. However, he doesn’t think the system has gone soft. “When I joined, the focus was very much on humanity in prisons. Prisoners were treated well – maybe too well, some might say. But, after a number of high-profile escapes in 2004, we had to rebalance and place more emphasis on security.”
Despite the hardening of attitudes toward prison security following the escape scandals, the Swedes still managed to maintain a broadly humane approach to sentencing, even of the most serious offenders: jail terms rarely exceed ten years; those who receive life imprisonment can still apply to the courts after a decade to have the sentence commuted to a fixed term, usually in the region of 18 to 25 years. Sweden was the first country in Europe to introduce the electronic tagging of convicted criminals and continues to strive to minimize short-term prison sentences wherever possible by using community-based measures, which have been proven to be more effective at reducing reoffending.
The overall reoffending rate in Sweden stands at between 30 and 40% over three years – to compare that with another European country, the number is around half that of the UK. One likely reason for the relatively low reoffending rate and the low rate of incarceration in Sweden (below 70 per 100,000 head of population) is that the age of criminal responsibility is set at 15. In the UK, for example, children aged ten to 17 and young people under the age of 21 record the highest reoffending rates: almost three quarters and two thirds, respectively. A good proportion of these offenders go on to populate adult jails. In Sweden, no young person under the age of 21 can be sentenced to life – this is not the case in many other countries – and every effort is made to ensure that as few juvenile offenders as possible end up in prison.
One strong reason for the drop in prison numbers might be the amount of post-prison support available in Sweden. A confident probation service – a government agency – is tasked not only with supervising those on probation but is also guaranteed to provide treatment programmes for offenders with drug, alcohol or violence issues. The service is assisted by around 4,500 lay supervisors – members of the public who volunteer to befriend and support offenders under supervision.
Gustafsson talks about broader goals and objectives for the Swedish justice department: “In 2013 and 2014, the priority of our work will be with young offenders and men with convictions of violent behaviour. For many years, we have been running programmes to help those addicted to drugs. Now, we are also developing programmes to address behaviours such as aggression and violence. These are the important things for our society when these people are released.” I spoke to a former prisoner who now runs a social enterprise called X-Cons Sweden. Peter Soderlund served almost three years of a four-year sentence for drug and weapons offences before he was released in 1998. He was helped by a newly formed organization run by former prisoners called Kris (Criminals’ Return Into Society).
“The big difference between Kris and us is that we are happy to allow people who are still taking addiction medications to join us,” he says. Both organizations work with the same goal: helping prisoners successfully reintegrate into society after they have been released. And what is life like for the prisoner in Sweden? “When I was inside, I was lucky. In Osteraker Prison, where I served my sentence, the governor was enlightened. We were treated well. But I knew that not all Swedish prisons were like that. I met so many people in there who needed help – after I received help from Kris, I knew I wanted to help others. With X-Cons, we meet them at the gate and support them into accommodation and offer a network of support.”
“In Sweden, we believe very much in the concept of rehabilitation, without being naive of course,” says Gustafsson. “There are some people who will not or cannot change. But, in my experience, the majority of prisoners want to change, and we must do what we can to help to facilitate that. It is not always possible to achieve this in one prison sentence.
“Also, it is not just prison that can rehabilitate – it is often a combined process, involving probation and greater society. We can give education and training, but, when they leave prison, these people need housing and jobs.” | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
According to a new scientific study, temperature rises caused by uncontrolled global warming could be at the high end of current estimates. The scientist who led the research said that, unless emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced, the planet will heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100. This is twice the level the worlds governments consider to be dangerous.
The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, which means less sunlight is reflected back into space. This forces temperatures up even higher. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery in the study of future climate change.
Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who led the new work, said that the study broke new ground in two ways. First, it identified what controls the cloud changes and, second, it rejected the lowest estimates of future global warming and favoured the higher and more damaging estimates.
4C would be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous, Sherwood said. For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet, with sea levels rising by many metres as a result.
The research reduces the uncertainty about how much warming is caused by rises in carbon emissions, according to scientists commenting on the study, published in the journal Nature. Experts at Japans National Institute for Environmental Studies said the explanation of how fewer clouds form as the world warms was convincing and agreed that this indicated future climate change would be greater than expected.
Scientists measure the sensitivity of the Earths climate to greenhouse gases by estimating the temperature rise that would be caused by a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial levels which is likely to happen within 50 years. For two decades, those estimates have run from 1.5C to 5C: wide range. The new research narrowed that range down to between 3C and 5C, by closely examining the biggest cause of uncertainty: clouds.
Computer climate models are the only tool researchers have to predict future temperatures and it was important to make sure that the way clouds are formed was represented accurately in those models. When water evaporates from the oceans, the vapour can rise over nine miles to form rain clouds that reflect sunlight; or, it may rise just a few miles and drift back down without forming clouds. In reality, both processes happen and climate models that included the second possibility predicted significantly higher future temperatures than models that only included the nine-mile-high clouds.
Climate sceptics like to criticize climate models for getting things wrong and we are the first to admit they are not perfect, said Sherwood. But what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by the models that predict less warming, not those that predict more. He added: Sceptics may also point to the hiatus of temperatures since the end of the 20th century, but there is increasing evidence that this hiatus is not seen in other measures of the climate system and is almost certainly temporary.
Global average air temperatures have increased quite slowly since a high point in 1998, which was caused by the ocean phenomenon El Nin_o. But, observations show that heat is continuing to be trapped in increasing amounts by greenhouse gases, with over 90% disappearing into the oceans. Furthermore, a study in November 2013 suggested the pause may be mainly an illusion a result of the lack of temperature readings from polar regions, where warming is greatest.
Sherwood accepts his teams work on the role of clouds cannot definitely rule out that future temperature rises will be at the lower end of projections. But, for that to be the case, there would need to be some major missing ingredient for which there is currently no evidence. He added that a 4C rise in global average temperatures would have a serious impact on the world and the economies of many countries if emissions were not reduced. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
We often see our colleagues and friends smoking an e-cigarette. But has vaping started to become less popular? Statistics suggest that vaping among smokers and recent ex-smokers, who are the vast majority of vapers, may already be declining. The gures will be studied closely by the major e-cigarette companies, which have put millions of pounds into a technology that they thought was growing in popularity.
Figures released in 2014 by the health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) reveal that usage among adults in Britain of electronic cigarettes which do not contain tobacco and produce vapour, not smoke has tripled from 700,000 users in 2012 to 2.1 million in 2014.
However, gures collated by the Smoking Toolkit Study, a research organization that provides quarterly updates on smoking trends, show vapings appeal may be declining. Vaping rates among smokers and ex-smokers rose steadily until the end of 2013, when 22% of smokers and ex-smokers were vaping. But this proportion stopped rising in 2014 before dropping to 19% during the nal quarter of the year. The drop is described as statistically signi cant by Professor Robert West, who collates the gures for the Toolkit.
Smokers are the key group for e-cigarette companies because seven out of ten vapers are smokers. Only around 1% of people who have never smoked have tried an electronic cigarette. Numbers who use e-cigarettes while continuing to smoke are going down, West said. Weve only been studying vaping for just over a year, so its a short time period, but we are not seeing growth in the number of long-term ex-smokers or never smokers using e-cigarettes. Vaping rates might change but, at this stage, it looks like theyre staying the same.
The fact that vaping has stopped growing in popularity in the UK seems to be at odds with what is happening in the US, where the technology has been promoted aggressively and where reports suggest it is growing in popularity. However, West questioned the interpretation of US data, which made little distinction between people who had once tried an e-cigarette and those who regularly vaped.
Experts believe it is unlikely that vaping will become fashionable among young non-smokers. Only 1.8% of children are regular users, the ASH study found. Instead, e-cigarettes seem to be most popular among adults who want to quit. While the gures published this month by Smoking In England show that the use of electronic cigarettes by smokers has stopped rising, their data also shows the huge increase in use since May 2011, said James Dunworth, of ecigarettedirect.co.uk. Our customers are still very happy with the product, and technology and innovation in hardware is improving user experience and helping them to switch from traditional cigarettes.
E-cigarettes behave like a sort of nicotine patch, West agreed. They are more popular than nicotine patches and may or may not be more effective. One-third of quit attempts use e-cigarettes, which makes them by far the most popular method of stopping.
Hazel Cheeseman, director of policy at ASH, said it was too soon to say whether vaping had peaked. Although there are indications that the market hasnt grown in the UK for about a year, there doesnt seem to be a decline in the number of people using electronic cigarettes to help them quit smoking.
The European Commission (EC) is looking at increasing taxes on e-cigarettes, which could have an impact on their popularity. A new EC tobacco directive comes into force in 2016 that will limit the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes to below their current levels. This may mean vapers will have to increase their usage to get the same effect, again something that may make e-cigarettes more expensive.
West suggested that policymakers should see e-cigarettes as an aid to stopping smoking and not have the same regulations for them as for smoking. There is a tendency among some local authorities and organizations to treat e-cigarettes as cigarettes and ban them in public places and outdoors, he said. It just sounds like youre having a go at vapers and that undermines the public health messages were trying to get out. We have to be careful not to stigmatize e-cigarettes. | 1 | Intermediate |
The regulation eight hours in the office is over. The most important work of the day is done; whatever is left can wait until the morning. This is the point many workers would think about heading for the door.
Yet, for millions of Japanese employees, the thought of clearing away their desks and being at home in time for dinner is enough to invite accusations of disloyalty.
But, after decades of giving companies carte blanche to milk every last drop of productivity from their workforce, a challenge to Japan’s ingrained culture of overwork has come from the government, which is considering making it a legal requirement for workers to take at least five days’ paid holiday a year.
Japanese employees are currently entitled to an average 18.5 days’ paid holiday a year – only two fewer than the global average – with a minimum of ten days, as well as 15 one-day national holidays. In reality, few come even close to taking their full quota, typically using only nine of their 18.5-day average entitlement, according to the labour ministry. While many British workers regard a two-week summer holiday as an inalienable right, workers in Japan have come to see a four-night vacation in Hawaii as the height of self-indulgence.
The move, to be debated in the current parliamentary session, comes after companies started encouraging employees to nap on the job to improve their performance.
By the end of the decade, the government hopes that, if passed, the law will push Japanese employees towards following the example set by British workers, who use an average of 20 days’ paid annual leave, and those in France, who take an average of 25.
Japan’s unforgiving work culture may have helped turn it into an economic superpower, its corporate foot soldiers revered in the rest of the world for their commitment to the company, but this has often been to the exclusion of everything else.
Japan’s low birth rate and predictions of rapid population decline are partly blamed on the lack of time couples have to start families. More employees are falling ill from stress, or worse, succumbing to karoshi, death through overwork.
Despite studies suggesting that longer hours in the office or workshop or on the factory floor do not necessarily make people more productive, today’s workers are still nursing a collective hangover from the bubble years of the 1980s.
About 22% of Japanese work more than 49 hours a week, compared with 16% of US workers and 11% in France and Germany, according to data compiled by the Japanese government. At 35%, South Korea’s workaholics are even worse off.
In spending 14 hours a day at work and giving up many of her paid holidays, Erika Sekiguchi is not even an extreme example. The 36-year-old trading company employee used eight of her 20 days of paid vacation in 2014, six of which counted as sick leave. “Nobody else uses their vacation days,” Sekiguchi said.
She faces the dilemma shared by her peers in companies across Japan: never to take time off to recharge or to risk inviting criticism for appearing to leave more committed colleagues in the lurch.
Yuu Wakebe, a health ministry official overseeing policy on working hours, who admits putting in 100 hours of overtime a month, blames the irresistible pressure to match one’s colleagues, hour for hour. “It is a worker’s right to take paid vacations,” Wakebe said. “But working in Japan involves quite a lot of volunteer spirit.”
That fear of being ostracized at work is being blamed for a rise in stress-related illness, premature death and suicide. According to official data, about 200 people die every year from heart attacks, strokes and other karoshi events brought on by punishing work schedules.
The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is not known for taking long vacations. Yet even he has spoken out against the unreasonable demands companies place on their employees as they struggle to stay afloat in a more complex globalized market. Japan’s working culture, Abe said recently, “falsely beatifies long hours”. | 2 | Advance |
David Mitchell, a regular contender for the Man Booker literary prize, is used to his novels being picked over by the critics. So, it’s something of a relief, says the British author, that his latest work – completed at 1am one Tuesday morning before a car arrived to take him to the airport to catch a flight to Norway – won’t be seen by anyone until 2114.
Mitchell is the second contributor to the Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library project, for which 1,000 trees were planted in 2014 in Oslo’s Nordmarka forest. Starting with Margaret Atwood, who handed over the manuscript of a text called Scribbler Moon in 2015, each year for the next 100 years, an author will deliver a piece of writing that will only be read in 2114, when the trees are chopped down to make paper on which the 100 texts will be printed.
Each author – their names revealed year by year and chosen by a panel of experts and Paterson, while she is alive – will make the trek to the spot in the forest high above Oslo, where they will surrender their manuscripts in a short ceremony.
“It’s a little glimmer of hope in a season of highly depressing news cycles, which affirms we are in with a chance of civilization in a hundred years,” said Mitchell. “Everything is telling us that we’re doomed but the Future Library is a candidate on the ballot paper for possible futures. It brings hope that we are more resilient than we think: that we will be here, that there will be trees, that there will be books and readers, and civilization.”
Mitchell said he found writing the book “quite liberating because I won’t be around to take the consequences of this being good or bad ... But, I’m sandwiched between Margaret Atwood and no doubt some other brilliant writer. So, it better be good. What a historic fool of epochal proportions I’d look if they opened it in 2114 and it wasn’t any good.”
Usually, says Mitchell, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker for his novels number9dream and Cloud Atlas, he “polishes and polishes” his writing. “Actually, I over-polish. But, this was very different – I wrote up to the wire. So, the first two-thirds were polished and the final third I didn’t have time. And, it was a liberation.”
Future Library creator, Paterson, whose past works have involved her mapping dead stars and compiling a slide archive of the history of darkness through the ages, asked the writers to tackle “the theme of imagination and time, which they can take in so many directions”. Mitchell revealed only the name of the manuscript, From Me Flows What You Call Time, during a ceremony in the Norwegian woods next to where Paterson’s 1,000 trees are planted. The title is taken from a piece of music by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu but, other than admitting that “it’s somewhat more substantial a thing than I was expecting”, the author would say nothing.
Handing over his text in the forest, sheltered from the intermittent rain by an umbrella and amid the foot-high shoots of 1,000 pine trees, Mitchell read his damp audience of children and adults a short story and William Wordsworth’s A slumber did my spirit seal. Its ending, “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees”, felt appropriate in this small section of forest, carpeted with blueberry bushes, which will be carefully tended to for the next 98 years before it is turned into Future Library’s manuscripts.
“How vain to suppose the scribblings of little old me will be of enduring interest to future generations. Yet, how low-key and understated, to slave over a manuscript that nobody will ever pat you on the back for and say: ‘Nice one’ or ‘God, I loved the bit where she did that and he did this... ’” Mitchell wrote in a piece for the Future Library.
His manuscript, now delivered, will be sealed and placed alongside Atwood’s in a wood-lined room in Oslo’s new public library, which will open in 2019. Watched over by a trust of experts until it is finally printed, it is now, says the novelist, “as gone from me as a coin dropped in a river”. | 2 | Advance |
Sweden is the best country for older people; Afghanistan is the worst – but rich countries are not always better for people over 60 years old, says the first global study on ageing. Sweden’s top ranking – followed by Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada – is not a surprise, but the Global AgeWatch study gives some surprising results.
The US, the world’s richest country, is only in eighth place, and the UK is in 13th place. Sri Lanka is 36th, far above Pakistan at 89th, although the countries have similar economies. Bolivia and Mauritius are in higher positions than the size of their economies suggests. Brazil and China are quite high, but India and Russia are much lower.
“This study shows that history is important,” said Mark Gorman, director of HelpAge International. “The top countries are what you would expect, but Scandinavian countries were not rich when they introduced pensions for everyone. Older people in Sri Lanka today have good basic education and health care – those countries decided to help older people. No country has enough money but, when they decide how to spend their money, they should not forget older people.”
The study includes 91 countries and 89% of the world’s older people. The study comes at a time of big population changes: by 2050, there will probably be two billion people aged 60 and over, which will be more than a fifth of the world’s population.
Population ageing – when older people are a larger and larger percentage of the population – is happening fastest in developing countries. More than two-thirds of older people live in poor countries; by 2050, this proportion will probably be about four-fifths. The fastest ageing countries – Jordan, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Vietnam – are in the lower half of the ranking, which suggests that politicians there need to look at the problem of ageing so that they can give enough support to their populations. There are also differences between men and women in ageing populations – women generally live longer than men. In 2012, for every 84 men aged 60 and over, there were 100 women.
However, population ageing does not always mean more health care spending, according to the report, which shows the importance of long-term investments in education and health care for older people. Bolivia, ranked 46, is one of the poorest countries but it has introduced good policies for older people – a national plan on ageing, free health care and a pension for everyone.
Chile and Costa Rica introduced good basic health care many years ago and this has helped the ageing populations of those countries. A good education system is very useful later in life – basic literacy is very important for older people when they have to read and complete pensions documents. In the Philippines, the educational reforms introduced after independence in 1946 have helped older people – elementary and high school education became compulsory. The same is true for Armenia, which, like other countries of the ex-Soviet Union, had a strong education system. South Korea is a surprisingly low 67 in the ageing study, partly because it introduced a pension only recently.
It is clear that countries all over the world should do more to help their ageing populations. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
Race engineer A race engineer liaises between the driver and the mechanics.
Typical salary: New graduates start at 25,000 to 30,000 and quickly progress to junior engineer roles, earning more than 40,000 with just a few years experience. Senior race engineers earn 50,000 to 90,000.
What the job involves: A race engineer is the interpreter between the race-car mechanics and the driver, says race engineer Jamie Muir. The engineer takes feedback from the driver, analyses the data and makes decisions about the set-up needed for maximum performance, then passes this on to the mechanics.
Quali cations: A university degree, typically in automotive/mechanical engineering or motorsport technology. Hands-on experience is essential.
To succeed as a race engineer, you need ... to be able to deal with pressure.
Worst thing about the job: The long hours. Race engineers work 24/7, says Chris Aylett, CEO of the Motorsport Industry Association.
Ethical hacker Typical salary: A newly quali ed hacker can expect a minimum salary of 35,000 to 50,000. This rises to 60,000 to 90,000 at team-leader level.
What the job involves: A company will pay an ethical hacker to hack into its computer system to see how well it might resist a real attack.
Quali cations: You dont necessarily need a degree in computer science. The industry accepts individuals with a very wide range of academic quali cations and skills.
To succeed as an ethical hacker, you need ... a passion for technology and detail. You should also enjoy solving dif cult problems.
Worst thing about the job: When you are called in to test the security of a new customers network and you discover that they have already been hacked.
Bomb-disposal diver Typical salary: In the private sector, you can earn up to 100,000 working just two months out of every three.
What the job involves: Descending to the sea bed and searching for unexploded bombs, shells, grenades and landmines, then either safely recovering and collecting the weapons or securely disposing of them.
Quali cations: To dive offshore, you must have diving quali cations. To be able to dispose of the bombs safely, youll also need an explosive- disposal quali cation and years of experience.
To succeed as a bomb-disposal diver, you need ... to stay calm in stressful situations. You work alone under water, with zero visibility and, if you dont like living in small con ned spaces with lots of other people, forget it.
Worst thing about the job: Expect to be away from home at least six months of the year.
Social engineer Typical salary: Graduates start on 25,000 but salaries increase rapidly with quali cations and experience, rising to between 50,000 and 80,000, on average.
The job: Companies pay a social engineer to try to trick employees into giving them con dential information that allows the engineer to access sensitive company data or the companys computer network.
Quali cations: Typically, social engineers have a degree in IT, although an understanding of psychology is useful.
To succeed as a social engineer, you need ... the con dence to lie convincingly and the ability to t in almost anywhere without looking too out of place. You also need a strong sense of personal ethics and an understanding of the law.
Worst thing about the job: Other people may misunderstand your job: social engineers are not spies but most people think they are.
Power-line helicopter pilot Typical salary: 65,000
The job: To y close to high-voltage power lines in a helicopter so that the lines can be inspected with a camera and any potential faults and issues can be identi ed by the power company.
Quali cations: A private-helicopter-pilot licence, a commercial pilots licence and around 2,000 hours of experience ying at low levels.
To succeed as a power line helicopter pilot, you need ... a steady hand and a cool head. Typically, pilots must y beside the power line, sometimes as little as 20 feet away and just 30 feet off the ground.
Worst thing about the job: There are no negatives, says helicopter pilot Robin Tutcher.
Private butler Typical salary: 60,000 to 90,000
The job: A private butler can be called on by his or her employer to do anything from wardrobe management to chauffeuring and pet care. Typical duties include managing other staff, serving at every meal, running errands, looking after guests, booking restaurants, house security, housekeeping, cooking and anything else the household needs.
Quali cations: You dont need any speci c quali cations but you can do a special course.
To succeed as a butler, you need ... to enjoy looking after other people.
Worst thing about the job: Long hours and an unpredictable work schedule mean its dif cult to have a family life. Butlers also suffer from isolation, cultural differences with their employer and having to work for people who arent always nice. | 1 | Intermediate |
An octopus has made a brazen escape from the National Aquarium in New Zealand by breaking out of its tank, slithering down a 50-metre drainpipe and disappearing into the sea.
In scenes reminiscent of Finding Nemo, Inky – a common New Zealand octopus – made his dash for freedom after the lid of his tank was accidentally left slightly ajar. Staff believe that in the middle of the night, while the aquarium was deserted, Inky clambered to the top of his glass enclosure, down the side of the tank and travelled across the floor of the aquarium.
Rob Yarrell, national manager of the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier, said: “Octopuses are famous escape artists. I don’t think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, as octopuses are solitary creatures. But, he is such a curious boy. He would want to know what’s happening on the outside. That’s just his personality.”
One theory is that Inky slid across the aquarium floor – a journey of three or four metres – and then, sensing freedom was at hand, into a drainpipe that led directly to the sea. The drainpipe was 50 metres long and opened onto the waters of Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
Another possible escape route could have involved Inky squeezing into an open pipe at the top of his tank, which led under the floor to the drain. “When we came in the next morning and his tank was empty, I was really surprised,” said Yarrell, who has not launched a search for Inky. “The staff and I have been pretty sad. But then, this is Inky and he’s always been a bit of a surprise octopus.”
Reiss Jenkinson, exhibits keeper at the National Aquarium, said he was absolutely certain Inky had not been taken. “I understand the nature of octopus behaviour very well,” he said. “I have seen octopuses on boats slip through bilge pumps. And, the security here is too tight for anyone to take Inky and why would they?”
Because octopuses have no bones, they are able to fit into extremely small spaces and have been filmed squeezing through gaps the size of coins. They are also understood to be extremely intelligent and capable of using tools. At the Island Bay Marine Education Centre in Wellington, an octopus was found to be in the habit of visiting another tank overnight to steal crabs, then returning to its own. Another at the centre, Ozymandias, was thought to have broken a world record for opening a jar before it was released into the ocean.
Inky was brought to the National Aquarium a number of years ago by a local fisherman who found him caught in a crayfish pot. He was scarred and “rough looking”, with shortened limbs, said Yarrell. “He had been living on the reef and fighting with fish so he wasn’t in the best shape.” According to Yarrell, Inky – who is about the size of a rugby ball – was an “unusually intelligent” octopus. “He was very friendly, very inquisitive and a popular attraction here. We have another octopus, Blotchy, but he is smaller than Inky and Inky had the personality.”
The aquarium has no plans to step up security as a result of the escape as Inky was a “one- off” but the staff are “increasingly aware of what octopuses can actually do”. Although the aquarium is not actively searching for a replacement for Inky, if a fisherman brought in another octopus, it might be willing to take it on. “You never know,” said Yarrell. “There’s always a chance Inky could come home to us.” | 2 | Advance |
There are bird droppings in one of Britain’s most expensive houses. Pigeon skeletons lie among broken mirrors and water is coming through the walls. This is The Tower, a £30m palace in “Billionaires’ Row” in north London.
It is one of ten mansions in the middle of The Bishops Avenue that have been empty for many years. The Saudi Arabian royal family bought it. Their Grecian columns are cracking into pieces and mosaic-tiled swimming pools are filled with broken stones. Nature has taken control and owls have moved in.
You see the same thing again and again on the avenue. Lloyds Bank says The Bishops Avenue is the second most expensive street in Britain. House prices in London are rising at 11.2% a year. More and more people find it difficult to buy a house, but 16 mansions on the most expensive part of The Bishops Avenue are empty. Their gates are locked and there are guard dogs in their overgrown gardens.
Across the street stands another empty mansion worth £18m. It has broken windows and its walls are painted with anti-climb paint. Metal bars block the windows of another mansion, which has sold for £20m.
For people who find it very difficult to keep a roof above their heads in one of the world’s most expensive cities, seeing the empty houses can be painful. One security guard who works on the avenue said it was annoying to see so many mansions – enough for many people to live in – falling apart.
Rich royals from Nigeria and Saudi Arabia came to this road near Hampstead Heath first. Iranians came here after the fall of the shah. Now, Chinese house hunters are following Russians and Kazakhs who have spent millions to get an address that estate agents tell them is as world famous as the Champs Elysées and Rodeo Drive. Recently, two mansions have been on sale for £65m and £38m.
But in the grounds of the empty mansions, stone fountains crumble. Inside one mansion, the ceiling has collapsed and water drips through a huge crystal chandelier onto a thick carpet, which is rotting. Moss grows through bricks and mirrored tiles are lying on a bathroom floor. The swimming pool is filled with dirty water and has flowers growing through its tiles. The wood in the sauna is coming off the walls.
But it is the ruin of The Towers, a grand mansion, that is most dramatic. There are pigeons in its huge, high-ceiling halls and its walls are bright green with algae.
Today, very few people live on The Bishops Avenue all the time. A security guard outside one mansion said that the owners were not there. Another guard outside Royal Mansion would not say if anyone was home and a member of staff at another mansion warned the Guardian about the guard dogs.
Magdy Adib Ishak-Hannah, who has £45m, said he is one of the few residents who lives there all the time.
“I have never seen what my neighbours look like. Next door, a Saudi princess spent £35m on a new house and I’ve never seen her. There are about three houses that are lived in 24/7 and half of the houses are lived in three to six months a year. The other half, who knows if they come or not?” he said.
The reason for the multimillion-pound ruins is that some of the world’s richest people see British houses as an investment.
Anil Varma, who develops homes and then sells them, wants to build £5m apartments, instead of £50m mansions, to try to bring people back.
He has decided to rebuild one of the most expensive sites on the avenue as a collection of 20 apartments with a concierge, maid service, 25-metre pool, spa and cinema. | 0 | Elementary |
Why do it? Talking to the men earmarked to be the elite referees of the future, the question elicits a knowing smile. This season, criticism of referees has increased to the point where some former referees have felt compelled to complain about standards. That is quite striking because, the more you talk to referees, the more obvious it is that supporting each other through thick and thin is fundamental.
So why do it? Why spend countless hours driving up and down the country to dole out rules, some of which are inevitably going to upset people, trying to climb the ladder until you get the chance to make decisions on television in front of millions who scrutinize you and your ability with the aid of umpteen different angles and slow-motion replays?
A glimpse of an answer appears on the face of Lee Swabey moments after he blows the final whistle of a 2 –1 win for Grimsby over Woking, a match at level 5 of the English league system. He gets what all referees hope for every time they referee a match. “Twenty-two handshakes,” he explains afterwards, proudly. Symbolically, a full set of handshakes, plus a “well done” from both managers, represents maximum satisfaction. “The buzz,” as he calls it, of a game that passes smoothly, is something he loves. “I wouldn’t spend so much time away from my family if this didn’t mean the world to me.”
As one of the group that is highly regarded by the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) for his potential, Swabey knew he was being watched at that match. PGMOL’s chief, Mike Riley, was in attendance, along with Steve Dunn, who is the coach for this level, armed with notes and stopwatch to catalogue every significant move the officials make.
A few weeks earlier, Riley, Dunn and another former referee, Peter Jones, made their way to another level-5 match to monitor another referee tipped to progress – John Brooks. “I hope to have the opportunity to get promoted to the Premier League and officiate some of the top games in this country,” Brooks says.
The most the PGMOL delegation got to observe, however, was the way Brooks handled the somewhat tricky situation of calling off the match because of a frozen pitch. It is all part of the experience Brooks needs to acquire before he is trusted with more high-profile games, the different problems that need dealing with – often, clubs are very reluctant to have a late postponement, particularly when they have to pay all the staff who have turned up but will not receive any gate money.
Brooks phoned his coach for advice and made the difficult but correct decision. A little later, the football club secretary arrived with envelopes to pay the officials for their time – the match fee at level 5 is £95 so it is safe to assume these men do not do it for the cash.
Brooks, like Swabey, has clear ambitions to progress. He is under no illusions that developing a thick skin and perfecting strategies to deal with disappointments is a big part of that. How does he feel watching football on TV when a referee gets vilified? “Erm … not great,” he admits. “I’ve been in that situation once where I have made an incorrect decision and it was a deciding goal that was just offside. Your heart sinks. You can’t stop thinking about it.
“I do sometimes wish people understood the time and effort we put in. It is very easy to criticize a decision but we do everything to try to get these decisions right. In certain situations, you are going to be unpopular but, if you are uncomfortable with that, you are probably in the wrong job.”
The former referees agree that the backup, education and tools that today’s referees have is a world away from what they experienced in their own days. Riley, as a young referee, went out and bought himself books on psychology and nutrition as there was no information on offer to him at all.
Contrast this with Brooks, who has a coach at the end of the phone. They consult weekly, discuss how his games have gone, study footage of key decisions and work out how to improve. He also has the support of a sports psychologist, Liam Slack, for regular guidance and an exercise regime to help him handle the 11km he runs during a game.
Brooks says psychology is vital in his development. “One of the things we have talked about is forgetting decisions and moving on,” he explains. “There may be a big decision to make in the first 30 seconds of the game. Once you have made that, you need to stay focused for the next 89 minutes and not be wondering whether that was correct or worrying about that decision. Liam has taught us some techniques for releasing that decision. Working with the sports psychologist is really important for mental toughness.”
Jones believes the whole approach can only help. “I refereed in professional football but, looking back, I was an amateur,” he says. “I was going to work – I worked for British Telecom – and I might referee at Newcastle on a Wednesday evening and, 9am the next morning, I was in Leicester trying to speak to customers. I perhaps hadn’t slept. Training was ad hoc. We were amateurs in a professional environment compared to now.”
When the subject of technology comes up, the three former refs are unanimous in their support of it. “We are all in favour of anything that makes the referee’s job better and makes them more effective on the field of play,” says Riley. Minimizing mistakes is the aim. After all, a bad decision can stick with you for a while. “The rest of your life,” notes Jones with a chuckle. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Unless we win, it doesnt mean a damn thing, said billionaire Donald Trump, the man who wants to be the Republican presidential nominee, at a campaign rally in South Carolina. He said this despite nishing his fourth month in a row at the top of the opinion polls. I want to pick my date for the election. I want it next Tuesday, he con ded to the crowd of 11,000 people. He has a lot of grassroots support, which he needs to continue until March 2016 for him to win the nomination to be the presidential candidate in Novembers general election.
Trump is not the only one beginning to think it possible that his surprising campaign can go the distance, particularly because recent controversy only seems to have con rmed his lead over his rivals. Usually, any one of these outbursts would have destroyed a politician by now.
First, he outraged prisoners of war by doubting the heroism of Vietnam veteran John McCain because he allowed himself to be captured. Then, there was the rst television debate, where he insulted Fox News moderator, Megyn Kelly, because she asked him dif cult questions.
It seems that making prisoners of war, Fox News and women angry was not enough. Trump has also insulted Mexican immigrants to the US, claimed that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently thrown out of a rally deserved to be roughed up, appeared to laugh at a New York Times journalist for his disability and falsely accused Muslim Americans of supporting the 9/11 attackers.
Trump has complained that many of these incidents were exaggerated by the political media, 70% of whom, he says, are scum. But, he has refused to retract any of the comments.
Some rivals still hope that, eventually, even Trumps supporters will get tired of his attacks on minorities. One poll shows his support among Republicans has reduced by 12 points although, at 31%, he is still in the lead.
He is an egomaniac; hes a narcissist. Hes not a conservative, hes not a liberal he believes in himself, former presidential rival, Bobby Jindal, told the Guardian, before he left the race.
But, there is more to Trump than attention- grabbing outrage. As he is happy to tell supporters, the three things that he is most against immigration reform, free-trade deals and Barack Obamas national security policy have become perhaps the most important issues of the election.
His policies for deporting every undocumented immigrant in the US and demanding that Mexico pays for a border wall A real wall. A very tall wall, taller than that ceiling. might sound unrealistic but they have destroyed the campaign hopes of Jeb Bush, who favours immigration reform.
So what can stop Trump? One reason for hope among opponents is the strong evidence that polls this far away from election day can be incorrect, simply because most people have not made up their minds how to vote yet. Among Americans who say they are Republicans, current polls suggest he has 25-30% of the vote.
In the political battle for hearts and minds, converting Trumps passionate supporters will be hard. It is hard to imagine anyone being a better Trump than Trump.
This scenario can be best understood by looking at responses to the question: Which candidates would you de nitely not support for the Republican nomination for president? While 20-30% of voters say they would support Trump, another 20-30% say they de nitely would not.
Steve Deace, an Iowa conservative, said that Trumps behaviour is both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it produces loyal fans that are attracted to his personality. On the other hand, it limits his ability to grow beyond that.
Top Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, believes Trump speaks for voters who, for the rst time, feel as if they have a mouthpiece and like the fact that they feel like they are heard. He says, Trump says what theyre thinking and, the more outrageous he is, the more they agree with him. Hes saying what no politician would say and thats another reason they like him.
That is certainly the feeling among ordinary supporters who have attended his increasingly packed campaign events recently.
I like the way he speaks, says Sandra Murray of Dubuque, Iowa. This country is a big mess and, honestly, he could be the man to help us.
Other supporters offer a simpler explanation. Hes not afraid of anybody or anything. Thats pretty cool. | 1 | Intermediate |
There are eyes on you, behind the bright lights and mirrored panels. Pick up a boot and a camera will make sure you don’t slip it into your bag. Enter a department store and you will be watched. But new technology is leading retailers to grow a different set of eyes – less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, sex, size, head, shoulders, knees and toes.
A few months ago, IT firm Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) produced a report that claimed around 30% of retailers use facial recognition technology to track customers in-store. Facial recognition is a technology that can identify people by analysing and comparing facial features from a database, using devices such as Intel RealSense cameras, which are able to analyse everything from particular expressions to the clothing brands someone is wearing.
Joe Jensen, of Intel’s Retail Solutions Division, says that the aim of bringing RealSense technology into shops is not to create databases of specific people’s lives but rather to build generalized models of people’s lifestyles and shopping habits. “It’s not so much that you need to know a particular customer. It’s that you need to know that this shopper has these characteristics and, in the past, that when those characteristics are present, this is what a person tends to do.”
If you combine recognition technology with databases of previous customer patterns, you can start to predict a lot about what a person may or may not do in a shop. If, say, there’s a size-10 woman wearing a gold necklace walking quickly towards the sock aisle, you can use that data to predict she wants to, well, buy socks. That could allow a retailer to automatically put targeted ads on screens aimed specifically at that person. If she looks like the type of person who wants to buy socks, they will show her adverts for socks.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because the online world has been using techniques like these for years.
If you search for something on Amazon, you’ll be hounded by targeted banners for similar products on other sites. Express a vague interest in canoeing and you’ll get ads for canoes wherever you go. Yet bringing these systems into the physical world isn’t a simple case of copy and paste. It turns out that people do not react to cameras in the same way as they do to browser cookies.
Hoxton Analytics, a London-based team of data scientists, has developed a technology that makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to categorize people based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of people’s footwear as they walk past the sensor, the system can identify a customer’s gender with between 75 and 80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, says that the focus of the system came about in part as a reaction to facial recognition. “My idea was, why don’t we simply consider the clothes someone’s wearing to understand demographics?” he said. “If I just showed you a shot of someone’s body you could probably tell me what gender they are. However, it turns out pointing a camera at someone’s chest or hips feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was – what about people’s shoes?”
The word “creepy” comes up a lot during discussions of in-store tracking. For retailers and data scientists, the aim is to find a way of obtaining information without coming across as intrusive.
For Hoxton Analytics and the retailers using the technology, the answer is to look downwards. This tactic of avoiding the face and staring at shoes says a lot about how we, as physical beings, react to being watched. It suggests there are boundaries that do not exist on the internet. Set sights on our torsos and we feel invaded. But is making calculated judgments about a person based on their footwear actually any less invasive?
For McCormack, the argument hinges on the fact that personally identifiable information isn’t being collected. “Right now, shops are doing lots of incredibly invasive things but we just don’t know about it. The angle Hoxton Analytics is taking on that whole thing is, well, if you know someone’s a male or a female, then your advertising will be much more efficient. If you know that everyone in your shop right now is a male, you’ll be advertising PlayStations not hairdryers.”
Keep it hidden and invisible monitoring lets shops optimize their output while keeping the customer unaware. Put adaptable monitors and targeted advertising into the mix, however, and it becomes harder to hide the fact that a machine is watching you. The argument from the retailers is that they do this to provide a personal shopping experience but it remains a grey area. It still feels creepy.
From the perspective of retailers, it’s understandable that physical shops want some of the information online outlets collect. We allow this to happen online so why not offline? The thresholds of a shopping centre are different from those between websites and, when you can wander freely from one place to another without a pop-up asking you to accept cookies, the rules of consent change.
Then again, for a generation growing up with online first, physical shop second, the modes of online play may not be quite so invasive. In the CSC report, a survey indicated that while 72% of respondents aged 55 and over said they were very uncomfortable with these types of technologies being used in physical shops, only 51% of 16-24 year olds said the same.
Does this relative openness stem from a greater familiarity with digital technology or a blind belief in the goodwill of omnipresent organizations offering free services? Is the creepiness of a technology an unvarying, instinctive certainty or does it ebb and flow with degrees of social acceptance? Whatever the case, there are a growing number of eyes between the shelves and they care a lot about what you’re wearing. | 2 | Advance |
I got a degree in Spanish and this helped me get my first job as a journalist, with an international press agency in Mexico City. But, the degree didn’t stop me from making mistakes.
I arrived in the Mexican capital after a bus journey all the way from New York. In my new job, I spent my days on the streets in political rallies and my nights alone in the office, where I coordinated the news from areas of fighting in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and the rest of Central America. But, I also had to report on disasters: fires, floods and explosions at fi rework factories.
While I was working as a reporter, I found out that I was bad at understanding numbers in Spanish. Once, when I wanted to phone the police, I got a Mexican grandmother out of bed at 2am because I had misunderstood a phone number. Even worse, there were too many victims in my stories – 83 dead in a fi re at 6pm become 38 dead by 7pm; 12 people injured in a coach crash soon became two and so it went on. Finally, I got a call from the main office in Washington. “I don’t know what training you have had,” an editor shouted, “but has no one ever told you a death toll can’t go down?!”
Why are numbers in another language such a problem? Perhaps it is because of different numbering systems. In German, for example, 2.30pm is halb drei (half of three) and 21 is einundzwanzig (one and twenty). Different number systems can clearly cause confusion.
Some experts believe there is a link between dyscalculia – the difficulty in understanding arithmetic – and problems learning foreign languages, particularly if you learn languages by rote. But, some students who find it hard to learn languages with a grammar textbook may learn more easily in a foreign country, where learning is more natural. In my case, I have always found languages quite easy, apart from the numbers.
But, perhaps it’s also because we often hear numbers in a non-native language out of context. You may stop listening to the foreign language and suddenly be unable to understand. I talked to multilingual friends and they said that they are fluent in French or Italian when ordering from a restaurant menu, for example, but freeze if they have to say numbers, especially over the phone. Numbers seem to be difficult, but no one could say why.
In my case, my problems with numbers in a foreign language followed me from Mexico to other countries and from Spanish to German and Portuguese. But, in that first journalism job, getting the numbers wrong didn’t always mean failure.
One night, a Mexican colleague told me that a gunman was holding the American consul hostage in his office in the port city of Veracruz. There was no senior English-speaking reporter in the office, so they asked me to try to call the consulate. I got the phone number wrong and I was put through to another phone somewhere else in the building. I knew straight away who the person was: I talked for 15 minutes to the gunman. He didn’t put away his gun as a result of his conversation with me – but my reputation as a reporter rose instantly. | 0 | Elementary |
Crunchy, full of protein and to be found under a rock near you. Insects have long been overlooked as food in all but a handful of places around the world – but now they are crawling closer and closer to our plates. Spring 2013 will see a drive towards removing the yuck factor and putting insects not just on experimental gastronomic menus but also on supermarket shelves.
In April, there will be a festival in London, Pestival 2013 – a Wellcome Trust-backed insect appreciation event where the consumption of creepy-crawlies comes high on the agenda. It will feature a two-day “pop-up ” restaurant by the Nordic Food Lab, the Scandinavian team behind the Danish restaurant Noma, which brought ants to the table for a sellout ten-day run at Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair in 2012.
Noma has been named the world’s best restaurant by Restaurant magazine for three years running. Its chef, René Redzepi, says that ants taste like lemon, and a purée of fermented grasshoppers and moth larvae tastes like a strong fish sauce. Bee larvae make a sweet mayonnaise used in place of eggs and scientists are constantly coming up with new ways to use little creatures.
In March, a BBC documentary will feature food writer Stefan Gates searching out and eating deep-fried locusts and barbecued tarantulas. But, behind all the gimmicks and jokes about flies in the soup there is a deeply serious message. Many experts believe there is a clear environmental benefit to humans eating creepy-crawlies.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been funding projects since 2011 aimed at promoting the eating and farming of insects in south-east Asia and Africa, where an estimated two billion people already eat insects and caterpillar larvae as a regular part of their diet. In 2012, the FAO published a list of 1,909 edible species of insect and, with sponsorship from the Dutch government plans a major international conference on “this valuable food source” in 2013.
Insects are plentiful – globally, for every human there are 40 tonnes of insects – so there is not too much chance of them being endangered, and they are unlikely to have been dosed with chemicals. “I know it’s taboo to eat bugs in the western world, but why not?”, Redzepi has said. “You go to south-east Asia and this is a common thing. You read about it from all over the world, that people are eating bugs. If you like mushrooms, you’ve eaten so many worms you cannot imagine. But also we eat honey, and honey is the vomit of a bee. Think of that next time you pour it into your tea.”
He said that the basic premise behind Nordic Food Lab was: “Nothing is not edible.” Insects are critical to life on Earth and, with more than a million species, are the most diverse group of creatures on the planet, yet they are misunderstood, hated and often put to death by humans just because they are there.
Over the next 30 years, the planet’s human population will increase to nine billion. Already one billion people do not get enough food. The increase will mean more pressure on agricultural land, water, forests, fisheries and biodiversity resources, as well as nutrients and energy supplies.
The cost of meat is rising, not just in terms of hard cash but also in terms of the amount of rainforest that is destroyed for grazing or to grow feedstuff for cattle. There is also the issue of methane excreted by cows. The livestock farming contribution, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, is enormous – 35% of the planet’s methane, 65% of its nitrous oxide and 9% of the carbon dioxide.
Edible insects emit fewer gases, contain high-quality protein, vitamins and amino acids, and have a high food-conversion rate, needing a quarter of the food intake of sheep, and half of pigs and chickens, to produce the same amount of protein. They emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cows and can be grown on organic waste. China is already successfully setting up huge maggot farms. Zimbabwe has a thriving mapone caterpillar industry and Laos was given nearly $500,000 by the FAO to develop an insect-harvesting project. It’s already big business in the UK, though not always official: a man was recently detained by Gatwick customs as he stepped off a flight from Burkina Faso with 94 kilos of mapone, worth nearly £40,000, in his luggage.
A study by FoodServiceWarehouse.com suggested that swapping pork and beef for crickets and locusts could help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 95%. But perhaps the fairest thing about eating worms and insects comes when we are dead – then they get a chance to nibble their own back. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Do you want your child to be good at sport, play for the school team and, maybe one day, even compete in international competitions? Well, try to make sure that your future Olympian or World Cup winner is born in November or October. A study by one of the UKs leading experts on childrens physical activity has found that school pupils born in those months are tter than everyone else in their class.
November- and October-born children were tter, stronger and more powerful than those born in the other ten months of the year, especially those whose birthdays were in April or June. Dr Gavin Sandercock of Essex University and colleagues found that autumn-born children had a clear physical advantage over their classmates.
The research involved 8,550 boys and girls aged between ten and 16 from 26 state schools in Essex. All were tested between 2007 and 2010 on three different measures of tness: stamina, handgrip strength and lower-body power. The results revealed that a childs month of birth could make signi cant differences to their levels of cardiovascular tness, muscle strength and ability to accelerate, all of which predict how good someone is at sport.
November-born children were the ttest overall as they had the most stamina and power and were the second strongest. Those born in October were almost as t, scoring highest for strength and coming third for power, with December children close behind.
The gap in physical ability between children in the same class but born in different months was sometimes very wide. For example, we found that a boy born in November can run at least 10% faster, jump 12% higher and is 15% more powerful than a child of the same age born in April. This is, potentially, a huge physical advantage, said Sandercock. Such gaps could decide who became a top-level athlete because, as the paper says, selection into elite sports may often depend on very small margins or differences in an individuals physical performance.
The study, which has been published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, found that, when scores for the three kinds of tness were combined, those born in April were the least t, then those in June. That could see those children excluded from school teams and becoming sporting underachievers, Sandercock said.
The ndings seem to show that children born in the early months of the school year enjoy a double autumn advantage they are already known to have an academic advantage and, now, they also appear to be better equipped for sport, too. The results show that something other than the relative-age effect the greater maturity of those born early in the school year is the cause, especially as the ttest children were not the tallest or heaviest, he added.
The authors believe that autumn-born childrens greater exposure over the summer months, towards the end of pregnancy, to vitamin D is the most likely explanation. Seasonal differences in vitamin D concentrations in the womb seem most plausible, they say. John Steele, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust, said the quality of a young persons introduction to sport at school can be a major factor in their sporting development. Children that get a high-quality rst experience are those that will have greater agility, balance and coordination, and are more likely to develop an enjoyment of physical activity and excel in sport as they grow up, he said.
UK Sport could not say if a disproportionate majority of the 1,300 athletes across 47 sports it funds were born in November and October. Natalie Dunman, its head of performance, said that while the differences highlighted in the new ndings were borne out by teenagers competing in junior-level competitions, they had disappeared by the time sportspeople were taking part in adult competitions. She said: With elite, senior athletes, there are many factors that make a champion and our work hasnt uncovered anything to suggest that month of birth is one of the key ingredients. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
Some cities have pigeons. Lima has black vultures. They fly in groups overhead and sit on the citys buildings. 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 poverty and filth.
But these birds taste for dead and decaying things has become a virtue. Environmental authorities are kitting the birds out with GoPro video cameras and GPS trackers the birds have a new mission in the fight against fly-tipping and illegal dumping.
Samuel is one of the projects ten disease-free black vultures that are looking for rubbish. Fitted with his tracker, he is set free above the city, where he identifies secret or hidden dumps and records the GPS coordinates on a live map.
His trainer at Limas Huachipa Zoo, Alfredo Correa, is full of admiration. They can eat dead animals because their bodies protect them from viruses and bacteria, he says. Theyve got some of the strongest gut flora in the natural world.
USAID and the Peruvian Environment Ministry are working together on this project to tackle Limas rubbish problem. A tongue-in-cheek video adds a melodramatic voiceover, in which the noble vultures are fighting disease, while humans ignore the danger.
The project makes a serious point. With just four landfills in a city of nearly ten million inhabitants, there are many illegal dumps. A fifth of the rubbish goes into these dumps, according to the Environment Ministry. The waste contaminates Limas 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 have only 12% of Limas population but have by far the most fly-tipped rubbish: Villa Maria del Triunfo (39.4%), Villa El Salvador (25.3%) and El Agustino (18.3%).
Part of the problem is unpaid taxes. Many residents just dont pay. That means some of the 43 district municipalities dont have enough money for basic services such as rubbish collection.
It also means nobody is necessarily going to clean up where the vultures identify illegal trash. We share the vultures GPS coordinates with the municipalities, says Javier Hernandez, the project director. Its their job to collect the rubbish and to try and change the habits of their residents.
The project aims to encourage residents 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 illegal dumps on the Twitter feed and Facebook page. | 1 | Intermediate |
The researchers were surprised by what people would do to avoid the task. What was the task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
Some people found it so unbearable that they gave themselves mild electric shocks to stop the boredom.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button that gave them a painful shock during a 15-minute period of solitude. A quarter of women also pressed the shock button.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities looks at the question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that all kinds of people hated being left alone to think – it doesn’t matter what their age, education or income is, or how often they use smartphones or social media.
Researcher Timothy Wilson said that the results were probably not because of the speed of modern life or because of mobile phones and social media. Instead, he said those things might be popular because we feel we need to do something and hate doing nothing.
During the first experiments, students were taken into a room and told to think. They were alone, without their phones, books or anything to write with. The only rules were that they had to stay sitting and not fall asleep. They were told that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned at the end of the experiment. Most of them did not enjoy the experience. They found it difficult to concentrate and their minds wandered.
The researchers did the experiment again with people at home. They got similar results. Surprisingly, people found it even more difficult and they cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
The researchers did the study again with more than 100 people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers’ market. They also disliked just sitting and thinking.
But, there was an even more surprising result. To check if people might prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students had the possibility of giving themselves a mild electric shock.
Before the experiment, all the students said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks.
But 12 of 18 men gave themselves electric shocks and six of 24 women gave themselves electric shocks.
The scientists were surprised. They said that being alone with their thoughts was so hard for many participants that they gave themselves an electric shock, something the participants had said they would pay not to get.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably give themselves an electric shock to make a boring lecture more exciting. But, she says we need to know more about Wilson’s study.
“Imagine – a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will give them a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there with their thoughts,” she said.
“As they sit there, their mind starts to wander and naturally they think about that shock – was it really that bad?” | 0 | Elementary |
Coal is likely to rival oil as the world’s biggest source of energy in the next five years, with potentially disastrous consequences for the climate, according to the world’s leading authority on energy economics.
One of the biggest factors behind the rise in coal use has been the massive increase in the use of shale gas in the US.
New research from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that coal consumption is increasing all over the world – even in countries and regions with carbon-cutting targets – except in the US, where shale gas has displaced coal. The decline of coal consumption in the US has helped to cut prices for coal globally. This has made it more attractive, even in Europe where coal use was supposed to be discouraged by the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of the IEA, said: “Coal’s share of the global energy mix continues to grow each year and, if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade.”
Coal is abundant and found in most regions of the world, unlike conventional oil and gas, and can be cheaply extracted. As a result, coal was used to meet nearly half of the rise in demand for energy globally in the past decade. According to the IEA, demand from China and India will drive world coal use in the coming five years, with India likely to overtake the US as the world’s second biggest consumer. China is the biggest coal importer, and Indonesia the biggest exporter, having temporarily overtaken Australia.
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 – the equivalent of the current coal consumption of Russia and the US combined. Global coal consumption is forecast to reach 4.3bn tonnes of oil equivalent by 2017, while oil consumption is forecast to reach 4.4bn tonnes by the same date.
With the highest carbon emissions of any major fossil fuel, coal is a huge contributor to climate change, particularly when burned in old-fashioned, inefficient power stations. When these are not equipped with special “scrubbing” equipment to remove chemicals, coal can also produce sulphur emissions – the leading cause of acid rain – and other pollutants such as mercury and soot particles.
Van der Hoeven said that, without a high carbon price to discourage the growth in coal use and encourage cleaner technologies such as renewable power generation, only competition from lower-priced gas could realistically cut demand for coal. This has happened in the US, owing to the extraordinary increase in the production of shale gas in that market in the past five years.
She said: “The US experience suggests that a more efficient gas market, marked by flexible pricing and fuelled by indigenous unconventional resources that are produced sustainably, can reduce coal use, carbon dioxide emissions and consumers’ electricity bills. Europe, China and other regions should take note.”
That would mean producing much more shale gas, as conventional gas resources are running down in their easily accessible locations.
In Europe, the Emissions Trading Scheme was supposed to discourage high-carbon power generation by imposing a price on carbon dioxide emissions. This was done through issuing generators and energy-intensive companies with a set quota of emissions permits, requiring them to buy extra permits if they needed to emit more than their allowance. But an over-allocation, coupled with the effects of the financial crisis and recession, has led to a large surplus of permits on the market, which has in turn led to a plunge in permit prices. At current levels – a few euros per tonne of carbon – there is little incentive to seek out lower carbon fuels, and coal is enjoying a renaissance in Europe.
That means one of the world’s only regulatory market mechanisms aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions is failing in its key goals. The world faces the likelihood of an increased risk of climate change as a result of this runaway consumption of the highest carbon fossil fuel. | 2 | Advance |
Lots of us know we are sleep-deprived but imagine if we could fix it with a fairly simple solution: getting up later. In a speech at the British Science Festival, Dr Paul Kelley, clinical research associate at the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University, called for schools to stagger their starting times to work with the natural biological rhythms of their students. It would improve cognitive performance, exam results and students’ health (sleep deprivation has been linked with diabetes, depression, obesity and an impaired immune system).
It follows a paper, published in 2014, in which he noted that, when children are around ten, their biological wake-up time is about 6.30am; at 16, this rises to 8am; and, at 18, someone you may think of as a lazy teenager actually has a natural waking hour of 9am. The conventional school starting time works for 10-year-olds but not 16- to 18-year-olds. For the older teenagers, it might be more sensible to start the school day at 11am or even later. “A 7am alarm call for older adolescents,” Kelley and his colleagues pointed out in the paper, “is the equivalent of a 4.30am start for a teacher in their 50s.”
He says it’s not as simple as persuading teenagers to go to bed earlier. “The body’s natural rhythm is controlled by a particular kind of light,” says Kelley. “The eye doesn’t just contain rods and cones; it contains cells that then report to the suprachiasmatic nuclei in the hypothalamus.” This part of the brain controls our circadian rhythms over a 24-hour cycle. “It’s the light that controls it. It’s like saying: 'Why can’t you control your heartbeat?'”
But it isn’t just students who would benefit from a later start. Kelley says the working day should be more forgiving of our natural rhythms. Describing the average sleep loss per night for different age groups, he says: “Between 14 and 24, it’s more than two hours. For people aged between 24 and about 30 or 35, it’s about an hour and a half. That can continue up until you’re about 55 when it’s in balance again. The 10-year-old and 55-year-old wake and sleep naturally at the same time.”
This might be why, he adds, the traditional nine to five is so ingrained; it is maintained by bosses, many of them in their mid-50s and upwards because “it is best for them”. So, should workplaces have staggered starting times, too? Should those in their 50s and above come in at 8am, while those in their 30s start at 10am and the teenage intern or apprentice be encouraged to turn up at 11am? Kelley says that synchronized hours could have “many positive consequences. The positive side of this is people’s performance, mood and health will improve. It’s very uplifting in a way because it’s a solution that will make people less ill, and happier and better at what they do.”
There would probably be fewer accidents as drivers would be more alert, he says. It could spell the end of rush hour as people stagger their work and school-run times. A later start to the day for many, says Kelley, “is something that would benefit everyone, particularly families. Parents go and try to wake up teenagers who are waking up three hours too early. It creates tensions for everybody.”
So, what time does Kelley start work? “I am 67 so that means I’m back to being ten years old and I get up just after six. I wake naturally.” And, yes, he says he finds the start of his working day much easier now than he did when he was younger. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Noise from ships may disturb animals such as killer whales and dolphins much more than people previously thought. New research shows that underwater noise could disturb the animals communication and ability to nd prey. The low rumble of passing ships has, for a long time, been connected to the disturbance of large whales. But, US researchers have also found noise at medium and higher frequencies, including at 20,000Hz where killer whales, also known as orcas, hear best.
These noises could be disturbing the ability of killer whales to communicate and use echo to nd their prey. Dolphins and porpoises, which also hear at higher frequencies, may have the same problems. The ndings suggest that the noise could affect the endangered population of killer whales that are found near the shipping lanes up the west coast of the USA.
The main concern of this is that even a slight increase in sound may make echolocation more dif cult for whales, said Scott Veirs, who led the research. Echolocation is the process of using sound to bounce off objects such as prey and identify where they are. Thats worrying because their prey, chinook salmon, is already quite scarce. Hearing a salmons click is probably one of the most challenging things a killer whale does. Hearing that subtle click is harder if theres a lot of noise around you.
The researchers used underwater microphones to measure the noise created by about 1,600 ships as they passed through Haro Strait, in Washington State, USA. The two-year study recorded the sound made by 12 different types of vessel, including cruise ships, container ships and military vehicles, that passed through the strait about 20 times a day.
Some ships are quieter than others but the average intensity of noise next to all the ships was 173 underwater decibels, equivalent to 111 decibels through the air about the sound of a loud rock concert. Whales are not usually right next to ships and so would hear noise of about 60 to 90 decibels around the level of a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner.
Veirs said scientists already knew about the impact of underwater noise on large whales. But, the new research shows the threat to smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises. Ships have been thought of as low-frequency sources of noise, like the rumbling of lorries or trains, he said. Most noise is at that low frequency but the background noise of the ocean is raised even in the high frequencies. This could be causing a signi cant problem that we need to look into more
There are several further consequences of a noisy underwater environment. Whales may have to group together more closely in order to hear each other. And, if they fail to nd prey as effectively, they will need to use up their stores of extra blubber. This is a problem because this blubber often contains manmade pollutants that are toxic to whales if they are released fully into their systems.
Veirs said more work needs to be done to identify how badly the noise is affecting whales and also to quieten the ships that pass near them. It should be easy to reduce noise pollution, he said. Military ships are quite a bit quieter and there could be simple ways of transferring that technology to commercial ships. Another way to reduce noise is to slow down. Decreasing speed by six knots could decrease noise by half.
While some whale species, such as blue whales, the largest mammal on Earth, are safer now because whaling has declined, others are still under threat from a range of factors. The US federal government has recently protected nearly 40,000 square miles of the Atlantic to try to avoid losing a species of whale with just 500 individuals left.
In Europe, killer whales are carrying dangerously high levels of banned chemicals in their blubber. Scientists are still trying to nd out whether pollutants caused the deaths of ve whales that were found on beaches on the east coast of Britain in January 2016. Meanwhile, around the coast of Australia, whales face an increased threat from ship strikes and oil and gas drilling, as well as Japans recent decision to start whaling again in Antarctic waters. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
In Iceland, you can be called Aagot, Arney or sfrur; Baldey, Bebba or Br. Dgg, Dimmbl, Etna and Eybjrt are fine and so are Frigg, Glds, Hrn and Ingunn. Jrlaug is OK, as are Obba, Sigurflj, rana and Vagna. But you cannot, as a girl in Iceland, be called Harriet.
The whole situation, said Tristan Cardew, is really rather silly. With his Icelandic wife, Kristin, Cardew is appealing against a decision by the National Registry in the capital Reykjavik not to renew their ten-year-old daughter Harriets passport because it does not recognize her first name.
Since the registry does not recognize the name of Harriets 12-year-old brother Duncan either, the two children have, until now, travelled on passports identifying them as Stlka and Drengur Cardew: Girl and Boy Cardew. But, this time, the authorities have decided to apply the letter of the law, Cardew, a British-born cook who moved to Iceland in 2000, said. And that says no official document will be issued to people who do not bear an approved Icelandic name.
The situation meant the family, from Kpavogur, risked missing their holiday in France until they applied to the British embassy for an emergency UK passport, which should now allow them to leave.
Names are important in Iceland, a country of only 320,000 people, whose phone book lists subscribers by their first name for the very sensible reason that most Icelandic surnames simply record the fact that you are your fathers (or mothers) son or daughter. Jn Einarssons children, for example, might be lafur Jnsson and Sigrur Jnsdttir.
The law says that the names of children born in Iceland must unless both parents are foreign be submitted to the National Registry within six months of birth. If they are not on a recognized list of 1,853 female and 1,712 male names, the parents must seek the approval of a body called the Icelandic Naming Committee.
For the 5,000 or so children born in Iceland each year, the committee reportedly receives about 100 applications and rejects about half under a 1996 law aimed mainly at preserving the Icelandic language. Among its requirements are that given names must be capable of having Icelandic grammatical endings, may not conflict with the linguistic structure of Iceland and should be written in accordance with the ordinary rules of Icelandic spelling.
What this means in practice is that names containing letters that do not officially exist in Icelands 32-letter alphabet, such as c, are out. Similarly, names unable to accommodate the endings required by the different cases used in Icelandic are also routinely turned down. That was the problem with Harriet, said Cardew.
The countrys naming laws have been criticized in recent years: in 2013, Blr Light Breeze Bjarkardttir Rnarsdottir won the right to be officially known by her given name, as opposed to Girl, when a court ruled that denying her was a violation of the Icelandic constitution. The former mayor of Reykjavik, Jn Gnarr, has also called Icelands naming law unfair, stupid and against creativity.
The Cardews could get round Harriets problem by giving her an Icelandic middle name. But its a bit late for that and way too silly, said Cardew. Are they saying they dont want us here? | 1 | Intermediate |
Standing at the edge of space above the deserts of New Mexico, Felix Baumgartner paused slightly. 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 the man known as Fearless Felix jumped.
Ten heart-stopping minutes later the Austrian landed back on Earth, after reaching speeds of up to 725mph, and breaking three world records, including becoming the world’s first supersonic skydiver by breaking the sound barrier at Mach 1.24. “We love you Felix,” cheered the control room as his mother, Ava Baumgartner, wept. Baumgartner, who claimed the records for the highest altitude manned balloon flight and the highest altitude skydive, raised his arms in a victory salute to thank his team.
He was wearing a specially designed survival suit that kept his body intact against the hugely varying pressures that marked his drop back to Earth. Without it, his blood would have boiled and his lungs might have exploded. Baumgartner later told a press conference: “When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you don’t think about breaking records.” He admitted all he could think about was getting back alive, but added: “Sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are.”
After two aborted attempts the week before, the mission was given the go-ahead on Sunday morning with the cooperation of the weather. Baumgartner was carried up into crystal clear skies by a gigantic balloon, which measured 30 million square cubic feet and whose skin was one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag. At the bottom of the balloon was a capsule, in which Baumgartner sat in his suit.
As he reached the desired height, Baumgartner went through a checklist of 40 items with his mentor Joe Kittinger, the previous holder of the highest altitude manned balloon flight.
There was some concern that a heater for his visor was not working, causing his visor to fog. “This is very serious, Joe,” he told Kitttinger. “Sometimes it’s getting foggy when I exhale. ... I do not feel heat.” But they decided to go ahead, watched by a record 8 million people as the jump was streamed live on YouTube.
The two-and-a-half-hour journey upwards, during which the curvature of the Earth became visible and the skies gradually turned black, was matched with a rather more rapid descent.
Three cameras attached to Baumgartner’s suit recorded his free-fall of just over four minutes – which failed to break the existing free-fall record for duration – and then the parachute opening.
The success of the mission, and of the suit, raises the prospect that astronauts might be able to survive a high altitude disaster of the type that struck the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 by actually bailing out of their craft. Baumgartner’s top medical man in the stunt was Dr Jonathan Clark, whose wife Laurel Clark died in the Columbia accident. Clark is now dedicated to improving astronauts’ chances of survival in a high-altitude disaster.
Baumgartner has made a name for himself with acts of daring. The former paratrooper has parachuted off buildings and mountains and once into a 600 foot deep cave. He had already done two practice free-falls in preparation for this attempt – one from 71,000 feet in March and a second from 97,000 feet in July 2012. But no feat can possibly have matched his jump above the town of Roswell, a suitably chosen place famed for its connections to UFO sightings.
He was chasing 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 believed to be the largest manned balloon in history. The stunt, which was seven years in the planning and sponsored by Red Bull drinks, beat two of Kittinger’s records: the retired US air force colonel previously held the high altitude and speed records for parachuting. Kittinger jumped from a balloon 19 miles above the planet in 1960. Suitably, the only voice in Baumgartner’s radio earpiece guiding his ascent was that of Kittinger, now 84.
Asked after the jump what he wanted to do next, Baumgartner said: “I want to inspire a generation. I’d like to be sitting in the same spot in the next four years as Joe Kittinger. There is a young guy asking me for advice because he wants to break my record.” He said the most exciting moment for him had been when he was standing outside the capsule “on top of the world”. To laughter, he added: “The most beautiful moment was when I was standing on the landing area and Mike Todd [the life support engineer who dressed Baumgartner in his suit] showed up and he had a smile on his face like a little kid.”
Baumgartner said that he had come to feel like Todd’s son, adding: “He was so happy that I was alive.” Earlier, Todd had told the press conference: “The world needs a hero right now, and they got one in Felix Baumgartner.” To further laughter at the press conference, Kittinger said: “I would like to give a special one-fingered salute to all the folk who said that he [Baumgartner] was going to come apart when he went supersonic.”
This will be the last jump, Baumgartner said. He has promised to settle down and enjoy his post-jump years with his girlfriend, Nicole Oetl, flying helicopters on rescue missions in the US and Austria. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Scientists have connected the brains of two animals and allowed them to share sensory information. It is a major step towards what the researchers call the worlds first organic computer.
The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water. In one important demonstration of the technology, the scientists used the internet to connect the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles one in North Carolina, USA, and the other in Natal, Brazil.
The researchers were led by Miguel Nicolelis, a pioneer of devices that allow paralyzed people to control computers and robotic arms with their thoughts. They say their latest work could make it possible for multiple brains to be connected to share information. These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated, direct communication connection between brains, Nicolelis said. Basically, we are creating what I call an organic computer.
The scientists first demonstrated that rats can share, and act on, each others sensory information by electrically connecting their brains via tiny grids of electrodes that reach the part of the brain that processes movement.
The rats were taught to press a lever when a light went on above it. When they did the task correctly, they got a drink of water. To test the animals ability to share brain information, they put the rats in two separate compartments. Only one compartment had a light above the lever. When the rat pressed the lever, an electronic version of its brain activity was sent directly to the other rats brain. In tests, the second rat responded correctly to the imported brain signals and pressed the lever 70% of the time.
Incredibly, the communication between the rats was two-way. If the receiving rat failed at the task, the first rat did not get the reward of a drink, and appeared to change its behaviour to make the task easier for its partner. In further experiments, the rats collaborated on a task that required them to tell the difference between narrow and wide openings using their whiskers.
In the final test, the scientists connected rats on different continents and used the internet to send their brain activity back and forth. Even though the animals were on different continents, they could still communicate, said Miguel Pais-Vieira, the first author of the study. This tells us that we could create a workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.
Nicolelis said the team is now working on ways to connect several animals brains at once to solve more complex tasks. We cannot even predict what might happen when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net, he said. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could find solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
Anders Sandberg, who studies the ethics of neurotechnologies at Oxford University, said the work was very important in helping to understand how brains encode information. But the potential future uses of the technology are much wider, said Sandberg. The main reason we are running the planet is that we are amazingly good at communicating and coordinating. Without that, although we are very smart animals, we would not dominate the planet.
I dont think theres any risk of supersmart rats from this, he added. Theres a big difference between sharing sensory information and being able to plan. Im not worried about an invasion by smart rats.
Very little is known about how people encode thoughts and how they might be sent to another persons brain so that will not happen any time soon. And much of what is in our minds is a draft, as Sandberg calls it, of what we might do. Often, we dont want to reveal those drafts, because that would be embarrassing and confusing. And we change a lot of those drafts before we act. Most of the time I think wed be very thankful not to be in someone elses head. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
The small space is set up to look like a classroom. On its corrugated iron walls are educational charts letters of the alphabet and a map of Bangladesh.
But, it is hard to concentrate there is the constant sound of hammering and chemicals in the air that stick in the back of the throat and irritate the eyes. However, the children who learn in this three-square-metre room are the lucky ones. They have escaped working in the factories opposite.
For 14 years, SOHAY, a grassroots nongovernmental organization (NGO) funded by the Global Fund for Children and Comic Relief, has been working in slum areas of Dhaka to get child labourers into school. It focuses on children working in hazardous conditions.
The classroom is one of 23 urban development centres that SOHAY has set up in the capital. The centres prepare children for primary school with classes that help them catch up on their education. Once they are in primary school, the children get help with their homework at the centres.
Alamin, ten, who used to work in a plastic factory, attends one of the centres. His father is a street seller and his mother a part-time domestic worker. They are all happy that hes now in school and away from hazardous work. His friend Rabi says he wants to forget his past in the factory. I like school, he says.
The urban development centres aim to make the communities more positive about education and change their cultural mindset towards the children, says SOHAYs programme manager, Mohammed Abdullah al-Mamun. SOHAY also has sessions for parents and employers to discourage child labour and offers skills training to increase family income.
Getting working children into formal education is really very difficult, says Mamun. They are not like other children. After they leave work, they sometimes find it difficult to make friends and adapt to school. It is also very difficult to make sure they stay in school lots of these children dont finish school.
Seven-year-old Zhorna Akter Sumayya has two older brothers they are both in work (one at a restaurant, one at a local club). But, after her introduction to education at one of SOHAYs centres, she now goes to a state primary school. Her family live in the slum and her parents cant survive without the money their sons earn. Her father works in a rickshaw garage and her mother is a domestic worker, but they wanted their daughter to go to school.
In 2015, SOHAY helped 1,540 children to leave hazardous work and 2,125 more children those in danger of starting work into school. About 780 more children are preparing to enter school in 2017. The organization is also helping 635 children who are working in hazardous conditions to know their rights.
The Labour Law of Bangladesh 2006 does not allow children under the age of 14 to work but, according to the UN childrens agency, UNICEF, 4.7 million children under that age are employed and 1.3 million aged five to 17 work in hazardous industries.
It was difficult to get them into school without any compensation for their time, says Sadia Nasrin, who runs Sonjag, another Dhaka grassroots NGO. To solve this problem, Sonjag started working closely with the community in the slums where the children live.
The organization talked to the community about why it was important for children to go to school. They chose community volunteers who wanted to change childrens lives and formed groups with social workers, community leaders, mothers, young volunteers and the local government.
The groups play a very important role they motivate employers to let children leave for two to three hours a day to attend school and to make sure the workplace is safe for the children, says Nasrin.
When the children have missed starting school at five years old, it is a race against time to prevent them from growing up without an education. When they are older, it is really very difficult to get them to go to school, says Mamun. Children are just passing their time without education and waiting to do hazardous work. We are working to stop child labour. | 1 | Intermediate |
Nelson Mandela, the most important person in Africa’s fight for freedom and a hero to millions of people around the world, has died at the age of 95.
South Africa’s first black president died with his family with him at home in Johannesburg after years of illness.
The news was told to the country by the current president, Jacob Zuma, who said Mandela died around 8.50pm local time and was at peace.
“This is the moment of our deepest sorrow,” Zuma said. “Our nation has lost its greatest son.
“South Africans, Nelson Mandela brought us together and it is together that we will say goodbye to him.”
Zuma said that Mandela would receive a state funeral.
Barack Obama called Mandela by his clan name – Madiba. The US president said: “Madiba transformed South Africa – and moved all of us.”
UK prime minister David Cameron said: “A great light has gone out in the world” and he described Mandela as “a hero of our time”.
FW de Klerk – the South African president who freed Mandela from prison and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993 – said the news was very sad for South Africa and the world.
“He was a great unifier,” De Klerk said.
In Soweto, people came together to sing and dance near the house where Mandela once lived. They sang songs from the anti-apartheid struggle. Some people were wearing South African flags and the green, yellow and black colours of Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC).
Mandela’s death sends South Africa deep into mourning nearly 20 years after he led the country from racial apartheid to democracy.
But his death will also be felt by people around the world who thought Mandela was one of history’s last great political leaders, similar to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. After spending 27 years in prison, including 18 years on Robben Island, Mandela won the country’s first multiracial election in 1994, with his party, the ANC.
Born with the name Rolihlahla Dalibhunga in a small village in the Eastern Cape on 18 July, 1918, a teacher at Mandela’s school gave him his English name, Nelson.
He joined the ANC in 1943. In 1952, he started South Africa’s first black law firm with his partner, Oliver Tambo.
When the ANC was banned in 1960, Mandela went underground. After the Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 black protesters were shot dead by police, he took the difficult decision to begin an armed struggle. He was arrested and sent to prison for life.
Finally, in 1990, FW de Klerk ended the ban on the ANC and Mandela was released from prison.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said: “He made people believe in Africa and Africans again.” Mandela’s 91st birthday was celebrated by the first annual “Mandela Day” in his honour. He was married three times and he had six children, 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. | 0 | Elementary |
The senior editor of The Atlantic magazine, James Hamblin, recently did an experiment. As part of his series, ‘If Our Bodies Could Talk’, Hamblin reduced the number of showers he had and did not use shampoo and soap when he had a shower.
He discovered what thousands of others have also discovered: the more we try to clean ourselves with soaps and body washes, the more our skin works to get back its balance. This means we have to begin the whole process again. Showering removes oil and bacteria from the skin. Many would say “That is the reason I shower!” But, it seems that this sometimes works too well, especially when you add hot water and soap products.
Our skin has millions of good bacteria. Showering destroys these bacteria. And when the bacteria return, they produce an odour – yes, showering too often may make you smell more. But, when you stop showering and using soap, your skin goes through a (probably gross) period of change. After this, the skin normally gets its balance back, it produces less oil and healthy bacteria flourish.
Hamblin realized that the human body, working on its own, is lovely. We will smell and look better – skin experts say that using less soap can improve skin problems. But, that’s not the only advantage – reducing the number of showers we have (and the number of cleansing products we use) can help the environment. The average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water. That’s 65 litres of clean, drinkable water that we fill with soap and wash down the drain each and every day – sometimes more than once.
The importance of clean water is becoming harder and harder to ignore – for example, there is another summer of drought in California. It’s becoming clear that clean water is one of the most valuable things in the world and we soon won’t have enough. There is also the environmental effect of all those body wash bottles. So, there are many very good reasons to shower less.
Perhaps you remember the last time you were close to people who already don’t shower enough but you can relax. Many people who shower less still use deodorant and hand-washing with soap is still a vital way to reduce the spread of many diseases.
You don’t need to give up showering completely, as James Hamblin did, but if you shower a lot, we have some simple advice: reduce. Shower less, put down the soap and let those lovely little bacteria flourish. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
Insects are not usually seen as food except in a few regions of the world but now they are crawling closer and closer to our plates. In spring 2013 there will be an effort to show people that eating insects is not disgusting and also an attempt to put insects on supermarket shelves.
In April, there will be a festival in London, Pestival 2013, where the consumption of creepy-crawlies will be discussed. The festival will include a restaurant by the Nordic Food Lab, the Scandinavian team behind the Danish restaurant Noma, which brought dishes that included ants to Claridges hotel in Mayfair in 2012, an event that was mostly sold out.
Noma has been named the worlds best restaurant by Restaurant magazine for three years. Its chef, Ren Redzepi, says that ants taste like lemon, and a pure of fermented grasshoppers and moth larvae tastes like a strong fish sauce. Bee larvae make a sweet mayonnaise used instead of eggs and scientists are constantly finding new ways to use insects.
In March, a BBC documentary will show food writer Stefan Gates looking for and eating deep-fried locusts and barbecued spiders. But, behind all the jokes there is a very serious message. Many experts believe there is a clear environmental benefit to humans eating insects.
The UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been funding projects since 2011 that aim to promote the eating and farming of insects in south-east Asia and Africa, where an estimated two billion people already eat insects and larvae as a regular part of their diet. In 2012, the FAO published a list of 1,909 edible species of insect and plans a major international conference on this valuable food source in 2013.
there are 40 tonnes of insects so there is not too much chance that they will become endangered. I know its taboo to eat bugs in the western world, but why not?, Redzepi has said. You go to south-east Asia and this is a common thing. You read about it from all over the world, that people are eating insects. If you like mushrooms, youve eaten so many worms you cannot imagine. But also we eat honey, and honey is the vomit of a bee. Think of that next time you put it into your tea.
He said that the basic idea behind Nordic Food Lab was: Nothing is not edible.
Insects are critical to life on Earth and, with more than a million species, are the most diverse group of creatures on the planet, but they are misunderstood, hated and often killed by humans just because they are there.
Over the next 30 years, the planets human population will increase to nine billion. Already one billion people do not get enough food. The increase will put more pressure on agricultural land, water, forests, fisheries and resources, as well as nutrients and energy supplies.
The cost of meat is rising, not just in terms of money but also in terms of the amount of rainforest that is destroyed for fields or to grow food for cattle. There is also the issue of methane produced by cows. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the contribution by livestock farming is enormous 35% of the planets methane, 65% of its nitrous oxide and 9% of the carbon dioxide.
Edible insects produce fewer gases, contain high-quality protein, vitamins and amino acids, and need only a quarter of the food that sheep need, and half that of pigs and chickens, to produce the same amount of protein. They produce fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cows and can be grown on organic waste. China is already successfully setting up huge maggot farms. Zimbabwe has a thriving caterpillar industry and Laos was given nearly $500,000 by the FAO to develop an insect-harvesting project.
A study by FoodServiceWarehouse.com suggested that giving up pork and beef and eating crickets and locusts instead could help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95%. But perhaps the fairest thing about eating worms and insects comes when we are dead then they get a chance to eat us. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
The tranquil sounds of the natural world might be lost to todays generation as people screen out the noises that surround them, a senior US researcher warns.
Rising levels of background noise in some areas threaten to make people oblivious to the uplifting sounds of birdsong, trickling water and trees rustling in the wind. These sounds can often be heard even in urban centres, said Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service.
The problem was made worse by people listening to music through their earphones instead of tuning in to the birds and other sounds of nature that can easily be drowned out by traf c, music and others noises, he said.
This learned deafness is a real problem, Fristrup told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose. We are training ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears.
This gift that we are born with to hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds might be lost, he said.
The danger is that we are exposed to noise for so long that we stop listening. We are also losing the ability to engage with the environment in the way we were built to, he added.
For the past ten years, the US National Park Service has recorded sound levels at more than 600 places across the US, including Yosemite in California, Yellowstone and Denali in Alaska. All the places were affected by some form of noise from human activity aircraft, motorbikes, motorboats or tour buses.
Fristrups team combined the sound levels recorded from national parks with similar data from urban settings to create a model of noise levels across the US. They say that noise pollution more than doubles every 30 years.
Its not surprising people are putting on earphones or even noise cancelling headphones to try and create a quieter environment, he said.
As you raise background sound levels, it has the same effect on your hearing as fog would have on your vision. Instead of having this expansive experience of all the sounds around you, you are aware of only a small area around you, he said. Even in our cities, there are birds and things to appreciate in the environment but the ability to hear them is being lost.
People quickly become used to changes in their environments, including rising noise levels, and, over time, Fristrup fears that we will accept far worse environmental conditions than we should and forget how much quieter the world could be. If nding peace and quiet becomes too dif cult, many, many children will grow up without the experience and I think its a very real problem, he said.
The warning came as other scientists reported health bene ts from listening to natural sounds. Speaking at the same meeting, Derrick Taff, a social scientist at Pennsylvania State University, described preliminary experiments which suggest that listening to recordings from national parks, of waterfalls, birdsong and wind, helped people recover from stressful events.
In one experiment, Taff told people who visited his lab to give an unplanned talk that would be judged by researchers standing behind a one-way mirror. Measurements of their heart rate and the stress hormone, cortisol, before and after the speech found that people calmed down faster when they listened to nature recordings than when the same soundtracks also contained noises from road traf c, aeroplanes and even normal conversation.
We know that natural sounds are very important to people. They are some of the main reasons people visit protected areas. They want to hear the natural quiet, the birdsong, and the wind and water, Taff said. We may be losing this as people are listening to their iPods all the time. My advice is to go to your protected areas and experience what you are missing.
Why natural sounds might be calming to people is unclear but Fristrup thinks that, over millions of years of evolution, we may have come to associate the more tranquil sounds of the natural world with safety. I suspect theres something about these sounds that reminds our brains of a place thats safe, he said. | 1 | Intermediate |
The US Senate Intelligence Committee recently agreed a bill to allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to continue to collect US phone records. But it would also make the NSA’s activities more transparent.
The committee Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, introduced the bill. It allows the NSA to continue to collect the telephone metadata of millions of Americans. It also allows the government to keep the data. Eleven people voted for the bill and four people voted against it. The full Senate will now vote on the bill.
The bill allows analysts to search through the data if they believe that someone may be involved in international terrorism. The bill also allows the NSA to continue to watch foreigners who come to the US if they enter the country for less than 72 hours.
Senator Patrick Leahy introduced another bill (the USA Freedom Act). This bill would stop the collection of phone records in the US. Feinstein defended the NSA phone data collection programme, but said that people didn’t trust the NSA anymore. “The NSA programme is legal and I believe it makes us safer,” she said. “But we can, and should, do more to increase transparency and build public support for privacy protections.”
Feinstein said the bill would also make a number of improvements to transparency and checks on the NSA – for example, if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gets some data and then somebody looks at that data without permission, they could spend up to ten years in prison.
Feinstein says she strongly supports the NSA’s main US programme. “I think many people don’t understand this NSA database programme. It is very important and helps to protect this country,” she said. Independent legal experts said they were worried about the Intelligence Committee’s bill.
Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice said: “The Intelligence Committee bill and the USA Freedom Act are two opposing visions of the relationship between Americans who do not break the law and the national security state. The most important question is: should the government have some reason to suspect wrongdoing before collecting Americans’ most personal information? Leahy says yes; Feinstein says no.”
Democratic committee member Ron Wyden said that recent worries about NSA spying on foreign leaders took attention away from the more important problem of the NSA checking the data of people in the US. “My top priority is ending the collection of data on millions and millions of innocent Americans.”
Feinstein said that she completely disagreed with the foreign leader spying that the NSA does, for example on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But Feinstein agrees with the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records.
“Americans are making it clear, that they never – repeat, never – agreed to give up their freedom so that the country could appear to be safer,” Wyden said. “We’re just going to continue to fight this battle. It’s going to be a long battle.” | 0 | Elementary |
Barack Obama flew back to Washington and his desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday, hours after delivering an election victory speech in Chicago in which he called for the country to unite behind him.
“You voted for action, not politics as usual,” Obama said in his address, but there was little sign that his call would be answered, with the President facing the prospect of doing business with a hostile Republican-led House of Representatives for at least another two years and a looming showdown over spending and debt – the so-called “fiscal cliff”.
Unlike after his election in 2008, the President is unlikely to be given a honeymoon period.
Both the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, and the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, spoke about a need to work together to resolve the crisis, but it could turn into one of the biggest clashes yet between the White House and Congress under Obama’s presidency.
While Obama easily beat off the challenge from his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, holding swing state after swing state, the election provided yet another reminder of just how divided America remains.
While the inauguration is not until January, in effect Obama embarked on his second term on Wednesday. Having disappointed many supporters in his first term, he is looking now to establish a legacy that will transform him from a middling president into a great one.
As well as overseeing what he hopes will be continued economic recovery, he hopes to address issues ranging from immigration reform to investment in education and climate change, and, in foreign policy, from Iran to Israel-Palestine.
As well as comfortably winning more than the required 270 electoral college votes, he also secured a higher share of the popular vote.
Boehner, in a statement, sounded conciliatory. He cited “the need for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt”. Obama is reported to have phoned Boehner to begin negotiation.
Reid, so often at odds with Boehner, also sounded conciliatory, saying: “I look at the challenges that we have ahead of us and I reach out to my Republican colleagues in the Senate and the House. Let’s come together. We know what the issues are; let’s solve them.”
Obama, in an initially off-the-record interview during the campaign, expressed optimism of a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, one that eluded him in 2011. The trouble will come when talks move to detail, with the Republicans wanting to protect military spending while the Democrats seek cuts. Obama has called for tax increases on households earning more than $250,000; Boehner has rejected any tax increases.
Shares dropped on the Dow in anticipation of continued gridlock. By lunchtime, all the major US markets were down over 300 points.
The new House, which will be formed in January, will look much like the existing one, which has a huge Republican majority. The Senate too remained little changed, with the Democrats retaining their slim majority, gaining three and losing one.
In the presidential race, Romney won only one of the swing states, North Carolina, while Obama held New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Colorado.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama referred to the long queues to vote and said there was a need for electoral reform.
He returned to the soaring rhetoric that was his trademark during the 2008 election but which he dispensed with in 2012. Amid the disillusionment with his presidency and the tough economic conditions, his campaign team decided it was inappropriate.
But having won, he returned to famous lines from earlier speeches, reprising once again his 2008 slogan about “hope”.
Stepping up to the lectern to the upbeat sounds of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” Obama told the ecstatic crowd of supporters: “Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.” In a speech that lasted more than 25 minutes, after paying emotional tribute to his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha – as well as to his Vice-President, Joe Biden – Obama returned to the message that first brought him to national attention.
“We are not as divided as our politics suggests,” he said. “We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.”
Obama made clear he had an agenda in mind for his second term, citing changes in the tax code, immigration reform and, as he put it, an America “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet”.
Shortly beforehand, Romney had phoned the President to concede. In a gracious concession speech in Boston, Romney told his supporters: “The nation, as you know, is at a critical point. At a time like this, we can’t risk partisan bickering and political posturing. Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people’s work.”
He continued: “This is a time for great challenges for America and I pray the President will be successful in guiding our nation.”
The campaign almost throughout has been a referendum on Obama. Although there was widespread disillusionment with the slow pace of economy recovery and a high unemployment level, Americans decided to stick with him.
Historically, it would have been a disappointment for African Americans and many white liberals if the first black presidency had ended in failure, halted prematurely. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Pope Benedict XVI arrived in 2005 as a simple, humble worker in Gods vineyard. And on a grey, cold, windy Monday in February, he resigned in the same way: like an elderly labourer who can no longer ignore the pains in his back; who can no longer rely on the strength of his arms. A traditional Pope, he made his excuses in Latin. The first German Pope in modern times gave an exact departure time. From 28 February 2013, at 20.00 hours, he told a group of cardinals in the Vatican, the see of Rome, the see of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a new pope will have to be elected.
Among those present was a Mexican cardinal, Monsignor Oscar Sanchz Barba, from Guadalajara. He was in Rome for an official meeting. We were all in the Sala del Concistoro of the Apostolic Palace, he said. The pope took a sheet of paper and read from it.
We were all left Sanchz Barba looked around him in St Peters Square, looking for the word; he was as speechless as the princes of the church who had just heard the man they believe to be Gods representative on earth give up the job. The cardinals were just looking at one another, Sanchz Barba said.
Angelo Sodano, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who must have known beforehand, gave a brief speech. Before going on to assure the Pope of the cardinals loyalty and devotion, he said he and the others present had listened to you with a sense of confusion, almost completely incredulous. At the end of his speech, the Pope blessed the people present, and left. It was so simple; the simplest thing imaginable, said Sanchz Barba. Then we all left in silence. There was absolute silence and sadness.
John Thavis, who spent 30 years reporting on the Vatican and whose book, The Vatican Diaries, is soon to be published, said he had had a feeling the Pope might be about to resign and timed his return to Rome from the US accordingly. Thavis noted that in the long interview Benedict gave to a German journalist in 2010, he had made it clear he considered it would be right to go if he felt he could no longer do the job. I asked myself: if I were Pope and wanted to resign, when would I choose? He has completed his series of books and most of his projects. What is more, there were no dates in his calendar of events he personally had to attend. I thought the most likely date was 22 February but I got it wrong.
Within hours of the announcement, Vatican officials were saying that the Popes decision was a brave one. Thavis agreed: What I find particularly courageous is that he is prepared to say now, when he is not sick, that he is going; and that hes doing it because hes tired and not because hes particularly ill. But is that the whole story? Does he know more about his state of health than the Vatican has so far made public?
Benedicts own reasons make it clear that he took into account not only his physical, but also his psychological condition. He said that the position of pope required both strength of mind and strength of body, and in the last few months he felt that strength was gradually decreasing. There will no doubt be other theories in the days and weeks ahead, just as there were following the death of Pope John Paul I in 1978, 33 days after his election. Already there is speculation that some information was about to come out about Benedicts past. The Vatican will no doubt dismiss any such stories. But they are understandable, for the transcendental importance of what Benedict has done cannot be overstated.
Coming out of St Peters Basilica, Julia Rochester, from London, who described herself as a lapsed Catholic, was still considering the implications of the Popes resignation. If youre Gods chosen one, how do you choose not be chosen? she asked. It is a question many Catholics will be asking their priests in the weeks ahead. | 1 | Intermediate |
It was a beautiful summer evening and I decided to go for a swim from Doolin Pier in County Clare, Ireland, where I moved in 2012. There was a woman in the water with Dusty, a dolphin who has a great relationship with a group of people she regularly swims with. Dusty arrived in Doolin in about 2008. Hundreds of people have swum with her, so everyone thinks that she’s totally tame.
That evening, the woman was tickling Dusty’s tummy and it looked so nice in the water. There were about 20 tourists and locals on the pier. They were looking at this lovely sight. Just after I got into the water, Dusty left the woman she was with and went crazy – I found out afterwards that she’s very territorial when she is with somebody. Her tail was flapping wildly and, at first, I thought it was a display but, then, I realized she was angry. I knew I had to get out of the water so I swam towards the pier. But, within seconds, Dusty crashed into me with her nose. It was very powerful and painful, and the speed was amazing.
All the people on the pier were staring at me with their mouths open. Dusty was still in the water beside me, her tail flapping crazily. That was the most frightening thing: I thought, if she hits me with her tail, I could go under the water and drown.
I was at the pier but I couldn’t get out because of my injuries. I was terrified. I shouted for help and a man put his arm in and pulled me out of the water. Then, another man appeared and said he was a doctor. I was so cold and very worried – I didn’t know how bad my injuries were and my biggest fear was internal bleeding. The doctor said he didn’t think I had internal bleeding but he thought I probably had broken bones. I found out later that I had six spinal fractures, three broken ribs and a damaged lung.
I was in hospital for five days and I couldn’t work for five months. I couldn’t move normally and I was in pain. Then, doctors told me I had post- traumatic stress. My near-death experience made me anxious about everything. I felt that people were looking at me in the wrong way, I began to have problems with loud noises and I suffered from memory loss. I could no longer work.
It was the hardest year ever but, now, things are better. I had therapy, osteopathy and massage. I work as an osteopath now. I understand how the patients feel because I have been a patient myself.
I am grateful that I am healthy. I really want to prevent other people being injured. We think dolphins are lovely and we have faith in them – who would think a dolphin would ever attack a person? If you see a dangerous animal coming towards you with big teeth, it’s scary, but dolphins have this lovely, wide smile.
I don’t have any anger towards Dusty. I respect her. But I was in her territory and she’s a wild, unpredictable animal. People need to know that. So many people come here to swim with her and they don’t understand how dangerous it can be. Several other people were injured that summer.
After the man pulled me out of the water, Dusty swam away but, then, she came back and looked at me. Our eyes met and I felt she was sorry for what she did to me. She was a totally different dolphin; the anger was gone. The people on the pier were amazed. When she had that little moment with me, that was the end of the terror. I forgave her. | 0 | Elementary |
Sweden is the best country for older people, Afghanistan the worst – but general affluence does not necessarily mean better conditions for the over-60s, according to the first global index on ageing. While Sweden’s top ranking – followed by Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada – may be predictable, the Global AgeWatch index throws up some surprising results.
The US, the world’s richest country, is down in eighth place, while the UK fails to make the top ten at number 13. Sri Lanka ranks 36, well above Pakistan at 89, despite similar levels of gross domestic product (GDP). Bolivia and Mauritius score higher than the size of their economies may suggest, while the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China are a mixed bag. Brazil and China rank relatively high on the index; India and Russia are much lower.
“This survey shows that history counts,” said Mark Gorman, director of the HelpAge International advocacy group. “The top-ranked countries are what you would expect, but Scandinavian countries were not wealthy when they introduced universal pensions. The older population in Sri Lanka today is benefiting from good basic education and health care – those countries made certain policy choices. Everybody faces scarce resources, but they should not forget that, when they make investment decisions, they should also address issues of old age.”
The index, developed with the UN Fund for Population and Development, spans 91 countries and 89% of the world’s older people. The survey comes amid a major demographic shift: by 2050, there are expected to be two billion people aged 60 and over, who will comprise more than a fifth of the world’s population.
Population ageing – when older people account for an increasingly large proportion of people – is happening fastest in developing countries.
More than two-thirds of older people live in poor countries; by 2050, this proportion is expected to be about four-fifths. While it took 115 years for the older population of France to double from 7% to 14% between 1865 and 1980, Brazil is likely to make the same shift between 2011 and 2032 – in just 21 years.
The index shows that the fastest ageing countries – Jordan, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Vietnam, where the number of older people is predicted to more than triple by 2050 – fall into the lower half of the ranking, suggesting that policymakers need to tackle ageing head-on if they are to adequately support their populations.
There are gender differences among ageing populations, with women generally outliving men. In 2012, for every 84 men aged 60 and over, there were 100 women. Lack of paid work (hence savings), less decision-making power in the family and vulnerability to violence contribute towards the disadvantage many women face in old age.
However, if appropriate measures are implemented, population ageing does not inevitably lead to significantly higher health care spending, according to the report, which highlights the importance of long-term investments in education and health care for older people. Bolivia, ranked 46, despite being one of the poorest countries, has introduced progressive policies for older people, with a national plan on ageing, free health care and a non-contributory universal pension. Nepal, ranked 77, introduced a basic pension in 1995 for people over the age of 70 without other pension income. Though limited in value and eligibility and with uneven coverage, it is an example of how a poor country has chosen to make a start in addressing poverty in old age.
Good basic health care introduced decades ago in Chile and Costa Rica has served the ageing populations of those countries. A good education system – basic literacy is crucial for older people as they deal with the pensions bureaucracy – is of great benefit later in life. In the Philippines, older people have benefited from the educational reforms introduced after independence in 1946, which made elementary and high school education compulsory. The same is true for Armenia, which, like other countries of the former Soviet Union, benefited from a robust education system. South Korea, a surprisingly low 67 on the ageing index, performed worse than similar countries on a GDP-per-head basis, partly because it introduced a pension only recently.
The ageing index is calculated using 13 indicators under four headings: income security, health care, employment and education, and an enabling environment. All indicators have equal weight, except for pension income coverage, life expectancy at 60, healthy life expectancy at 60 and psychological well-being. These categories were given increased weighting because of better data quality and countries were included only if there was sufficient data.
Professor Sir Richard Jolly, creator of the human development index, said: “This groundbreaking index broadens the way we understand the needs and opportunities of older people through its pioneering application of human development methodology. It challenges countries in every part of the world to raise their sights as to what is possible.” | 2 | Advance |
All six numbers match, so now you can buy that Audi, book the holiday in the US and look for a new house. That’s what most lottery millionaires do, says a study of what jackpot winners do with their money.
Since it started in 1994, the UK national lottery has created 3,000 millionaires. The 3,000 winners have won an average of £2.8 million each. That’s more than £8.5 billion in total. Together, they have created 3,780 more millionaires among their children, family and friends, according to the writers of the study, Oxford Economics.
Most winners (59%) give up work straight away, but 19% carry on working and 31% do unpaid voluntary work. The good news for the British economy is that 98% of the money that the winners spent stayed in the UK. Through their spending on property, vehicles and holidays, it is estimated that each winner keeps six people in a full-time job for a year.
Winners have contributed almost £750 million to the economy. Most of their money was spent on property, with £2.72 billion spent on winners’ main properties, and £170 million in paying off existing debt and mortgages.
£2.125 billion was spent on investments. £1.17 billion was given to family and friends, and £680 million was spent on cars and holidays.
It found that in total the 3,000 winners have bought 7,958 houses or flats in the UK, or 2.7 each, spending £3.3 billion. Most winners (82%) bought a new house, spending an average £900,000.
The new home is likely to have a hot tub, with almost a third (29%) putting that on their shopping list. 28% bought a walk-in wardrobe, almost a quarter (24%) bought a property behind electric gates, and 22% had a games room, with 7% installing a snooker table.
30% of winners employed a cleaner and 24% a gardener for their new houses. A small proportion (5%) employed a beautician.
Audis were the favourite cars of 16% of winners, with Range Rovers and BMWs also popular (11% each), as well as Mercedes (10%) and Land Rovers (5%). Winners spent £463 million on 17,190 cars.
Holidays were also important. Most (68%) choose five-star hotels overseas. The US was the preferred destination for 27%, followed by the Caribbean (9%). Over the past 18 years, 10% of millionaires have bought a caravan.
Some winners (15%) have started their own businesses, 9% have helped others to start a business, and 6% have invested in or bought other people’s businesses. Businesses started or supported by lottery winners employ 3,195 people, according to the study. | 0 | Elementary |
An international agreement to improve safety in Bangladesh’s clothes factories could face legal action. This is because factory owners are asking for compensation for the cost of closures and repair work. Some repairs may take months and factory owners say they cannot pay workers while factories are closed. Also, they cannot pay for big works to make buildings safe. The building repairs are happening after the Rana Plaza building in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, collapsed in 2013 and 1,138 people died.
The problems come as hundreds of Bangladeshi clothes factories are inspected every month for fire-safety and structural problems under the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. The Accord is supported by over 170 international companies, including Primark and Marks & Spencer, and international trade unions, including IndustriALL.
The owner of one Dhaka factory, Softex Cotton, said he will take legal action against the Accord because his factory was closed down as a result of structural problems. He wants around $100 million in compensation.
Another factory owner said that, when a factory closed, even for a few months, it would lose orders and close permanently: “There is no such thing as temporary closure,” he said. The factory owner said it was not clear in the Accord agreement who would pay for factory closures.
Jenny Holdcroft, policy director for IndustriALL, which has been closely involved in the Accord, said that the agreement made sure that factories would not lose orders during closure because companies agreed to continue orders with suppliers for two years.
The Accord has found12 factories that need a lot of work, but Holdcroft said many of those only needed partial closure and production could continue on other floors. The Accord also asks companies to make sure that workers receive pay during factory closures. She said that factory owners who could afford to pay for repairs and compensation for workers should make the payments.
“Companies don’t want to pay so that rich factory owners can continue to just take the profits and not spend on their factories for years. It is not surprising that there is disruption. If there was no disruption, there would be no change,” she said. A spokesman for the Accord said negotiations over payments and even legal action would not delay its work to improve safety in factories.
But there is now more pressure on the Accord to help pay workers when their factories close. A rival factory-safety group, supported by US retailers including Walmart and Gap, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, has given $5 million to help pay factory workers for up to two months while buildings are improved.
“The Alliance is sharing the workers’ salary with factory owners so now there is a big confusion. We had a big meeting with the Accord to make them understand they have to help or how will we help our workers?” said Shaidullah Azim, a director of the Bangladeshi Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
The Chief Medical Officer for England has compared the problem of antibiotic resistance to the risks of international terrorism. But, in fact, each year the global number of deaths caused by bacterial resistance is far more than the number of deaths caused by terrorist attacks.
The World Health Organization estimates that, just for tuberculosis, multi-drug resistance kills more than 150,000 people each year. Antibiotic resistance is now a real risk: this is now a war.
In the past hundred years, our expectations of life and survival have changed beyond all recognition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, life expectancy in the UK was around 47 years of age for a man and 50 for a woman, a number heavily affected by the very high rate of infant mortality in those days. Around a third of all deaths were in children under the age of five, mostly because of infectious disease.
However, a child born in Britain today has more than a one in four chance of reaching their 100th birthday. For this we have public health systems, vaccination and antibiotics to thank. It is thanks to this the prevention and treatment of illnesses caused by microorganisms that the real war against disease is mainly won.
It is in intensive care, my specialist area, that antibiotic resistant organisms are most common. Here, powerful antibiotics, essential in the treatment of life-threatening illness, are used routinely. These drugs kill ordinary bacteria. But they leave behind strong bacteria that have begun to learn how to survive antibiotic drugs.
As a newly qualified doctor in the late 1990s, I learnt about Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus the infamous MRSA a bacterial species resistant to methicillin and all other penicillins. In the fight against it, there were a small number of drugs, like vancomycin and teicoplanin. These were supposed to be our defence, but antibiotic resistant bacteria became more and more common; bacteria with new kinds of resistance became more common too. Drugs we had previously hardly heard of became common. We got used to this; a slow increase in the arms race between us and the bacteria.
But the balance has been slowly moving. In our hospitals and our GP surgeries, we have abused the drugs that gave us such a huge advantage over infectious disease we use them too often. And some of the worst abuses have happened outside of healthcare, with antibiotics introduced into the food chain, through agriculture and by putting antibacterial drugs into food for farm animals. We thought that antibiotic therapy was an advantage we could enjoy forever. We became complacent that the pharmaceutical industry would continue to stay ahead of the game.
But this is no longer the case. New, more resistant species have been found. The vancomycin that we used to treat MRSA infection no longer worked. Vancomycin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (VRSA) appeared in our hospitals. And other bacteria were learning resistance. Enterobacteria also became resistant to vancomycin. Today, infections with highly resistant organisms are common and the pharmaceutical industry is not keeping up. Fewer and fewer new antimicrobial drugs are produced. It is becoming more and more difficult to develop new drugs that work against resistant bacteria. For every method of attack the pharmaceutical companies invent, bacteria quickly form a defence. We have tried all of the simple approaches to the problem. Antibiotics have become drugs that are expensive to develop, that are only used in short courses and that quickly become ineffective due to the changes in bacterial resistance. As a result, the pharmaceutical industrys incentive to create new drugs that can fight them is low.
Antibiotics became common in the 1940s, and almost straight away we saw the first evidence of bacteria resistance. Today, this has become a normal part of medical life. Less than a century after the discovery of penicillin, we are beginning to lose the fight.
Since the first MRSA deaths in healthy children in the US in 1998, the number of deaths from MRSA infection in the US each year has increased to tens of thousands far more than the number of deaths caused by AIDS. Bacterial resistance in hospitals is everywhere. This is a war different from any other. There needs to be change in the way doctors prescribe antibiotics and fewer antibiotics used in farming and agriculture. And we have to find a way to convince the pharmaceutical companies to develop these less profitable drugs.
If we are going to avoid a return to the pre-antibiotic time with all its excess mortality, we must make some big changes. To lose the advantage we have against microorganisms in the fight for life would be unthinkable. | 1 | Intermediate |
Why do people want to be a football referee? The top referees of the future smile when you ask them this question. This season, more people are criticizing referees. For this reason, some former referees have started to complain about standards. That is quite significant because, when you talk to referees, it is obvious that they always support each other.
So why do they do want to be referees? Why do referees spend hundreds of hours driving around the country? Why do they work so hard to get the chance to make decisions on television in front of millions of people who criticize them and their ability with the help of many cameras and slow-motion replays?
You might get an answer from Lee Swabey’s face. He looks really happy after he blows the final whistle of a 2–1 win for Grimsby against Woking, a match at level 5 of the English league system. He gets what all referees want every time they referee a match. “Twenty-two handshakes, ” he explains afterwards, proudly. “The buzz,” as he calls it, of a game that goes well, is something he loves. “I wouldn’t spend so much time away from my family if this wasn’t so important to me.”
Swabey is one of a group of new referees that the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) thinks is really good. So Swabey knew they were watching him at that match. PGMOL’s chief, Mike Riley, was there, and also his colleague Steve Dunn, watching every move the officials made.
A few weeks earlier, Riley, Dunn and another former referee, Peter Jones, went to another level-5 match to check another young referee – John Brooks. “I hope to have the opportunity to work in the Premier League and referee at some of the top games in this country,” Brooks says.
Unfortunately, the PGMOL only saw Brooks cancelling the match because of a frozen pitch. It is all part of the experience Brooks needs to have before he can referee at more important games. Brooks phoned his coach for advice and made the difficult but correct decision. A little later, the football club secretary arrived to pay the officials for their time – the match fee at level 5 is £95 so it is clear that these men do not do it for the money.
Brooks, like Swabey, has clear ambitions to progress. He knows lots of people will criticize him. How does he feel when he watches football on TV and a referee is attacked? “Erm … I don’t feel great,” he admits. “I do sometimes wish people understood the time and effort we put in. It is very easy to criticize a decision but we do everything to try to get these decisions right. In certain situations, you are going to be unpopular but, if you are uncomfortable with that, you are probably in the wrong job.”
The former referees agree that the backup, education and tools that today’s referees have is very different from what they experienced in the past. Riley, as a young referee, bought himself books on psychology and nutrition because there was no information on offer to him at all.
Things are very different for Brooks – he has his own coach. They talk every week, discuss how his games have gone, study film of key decisions and discuss how to improve. He also has the support of a sports psychologist and an exercise regime to help him run 11km during a game.
The three former referees all agree that new technology in the sport is great. “It makes the referee’s job better and makes them more effective on the field of play,” says Riley. A bad decision can stay with you for a while. “The rest of your life,” says Jones with a laugh. | 0 | Elementary |
Clay Cockrell is sitting in his office at Columbus Circle, across the street from 1 Central Park West, which houses 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 turned therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a confidant and counsellor to some of New York’s wealthiest people.
“I shifted towards it naturally,” he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. “Many of the extremely wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”
So, what issues are America’s 1% struggling with? “There is guilt over being rich in the first place,” 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%, it turns out, can be lonely.” It seems F Scott Fitzgerald was right: the very rich “are different from you and me”.
Counsellors argue things have become worse since the financial crisis and the debate over income inequality that has been spurred on by movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 fair wage campaign.
“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% and painted them globally 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”.
“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 wealth holders.”
“It’s really isolating to have a lot of money. People’s reactions to you can be scary,” said Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. “We are all taught not to talk about money. It’s not polite to talk about money. Ironically, it’s harder to talk about having money than it is to talk about not having money. It’s much more socially acceptable to say 'I am broke. Things are hard.' You can’t say 'I have a ton of money.' You have to keep a lot of your life private.”
As a result, Cockrell points out, the rich tend to hang out with other rich Americans, not out of snobbery but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems.
The growing gap between the rich and poor is a global phenomenon. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014 and are on track to own more than the other 99% by 2016.
In the US, over the last three decades, the wealth owned by the top 0.1% households increased from 7% to 22% even as the wealth of the bottom 90% of households declined.
The number of extremely wealthy people has also been climbing. According to research from Spectrem Group, in 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more in assets – excluding the value of their primary home – increased by 500,000 to 10.1m. In 2007, that number was 9.2m. Households worth $5m or more reached 1.3m and 142,000 households are now worth $25m or more.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the income gap has expanded and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money.
“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell. “As the gap has widened, the rich have become more and more isolated.”
These are real fears faced by the richest of the rich. In 2007, the Gates Foundation teamed up with Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy to document what it felt like to be in America’s 1%. For the next four years, researchers surveyed 165 of America’s richest households – 120 of those households have at least $25m in assets. The average net worth of those surveyed was $78m. The resulting study, The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth, was 500 pages long and seemed to prove the old adage that money can’t buy happiness.
“Wealth can be a barrier to connecting with other people,” confessed a spouse of a tech entrepreneur who made about $80m. Some Americans have taken to keeping their wealth secret. “We talk about it as stealth wealth. There are a lot of people that are hiding their wealth because they are concerned about negative judgment,” said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about the unique challenges that come with their wealth, people often dismiss their experience.
“People say 'Oh, poor you.' There is not a lot of sympathy there,” she said. “Wealth is still one of our last taboos.”
Speaking in his soft, soothing voice that makes you want to spill all your worries, Cockrell said that a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make is letting their money define them.
“I don’t think it’s healthy to discount your problems. If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems and they are legitimate to you. Even when you say, 'I don’t have to struggle for money', there are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing that defines you,” he said. “Your problems are legitimate.” | 2 | Advance |
The problem with Google Glasses, says Takahito Iguchi, is that they’re not cool. He has a point. There’s already a website dedicated to people wearing them looking either ridiculous or smug or, more often, both. It possibly wasn’t Google’s smartest move to release the first 10,000 pairs to software developers rather than, say, supermodels or Scarlett Johansson. Search Google Images and one of the first hits is a picture of a large, naked man wearing them in the shower. And it’s this that Iguchi, a Japanese entrepreneur, hopes may be Google’s Achilles’ heel. He is launching a competitor that is a bit more stylized. A bit more Blade Runner. A bit more Japanese.
Iguchi’s augmented reality glasses, which aren’t really glasses so much as a single piece of metal with a camera and a micro-projector, are called Telepathy One, and, after unveiling them at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, they have attracted $5m of venture capital. Like Glass, Telepathy One is due to launch in 2014.
It’s a stripped-down, simplified version of Google Glass. Whereas Glass is, he says, “an egotistical device” with a range of uses – you can surf the net, read emails, take photographs, do unspecified things with as yet unspecified apps – Telepathy will be “more of a communication device”. Connected via Bluetooth to your phone, it will focus on real- time visual and audio sharing. You’ll be able to post photos and videos from your line of vision on Facebook or send them as an email. Or see and speak to a floating video image of a friend.
“It will help bring you close to your friends and family. We are very focused on the communication and sharing possibilities,” says Iguchi, who has worked in the Japanese tech industry for 20 years, most recently developing a location-based phone app called Sekai Camera.
Of course, not everyone wants to get closer to the man in the futuristic headset, I point out. Iguchi shakes his head. “I’m a visionary. I have a dream that people will understand other people. When I go to London, I am a stranger. Sometimes I feel fear. But I believe that everyone wants to be understood and to understand each other. And, with this device, you can know more information about people before you even speak to them.”
Compared to the likes of Google, of course, Telepathy is a minnow. Not that this seems to daunt Takahito Iguchi. In his shared office space in San Francisco – a cool, converted warehouse in the heart of startup land, filled with twentysomethings – he quotes Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and points out that even tiny armies can sometimes beat mighty forces. When he was growing up, Japanese technology ruled the world: the Sony Walkman was the iPhone of its day. Now, to compete, he’s had to quit Tokyo for Silicon Valley.
“Tokyo is very rich in fashion and culture but it’s still an island. It’s isolated. There is not any way to expand. Whereas, in Silicon Valley, everyone is from everywhere. It’s where you come to connect globally.” The hardware will be made in Japan, while he is putting together a team of software engineers in the US to develop its applications. On the day I meet him, he’s being shadowed by a news crew from Japan who are interested in the new wave of Japanese entrepreneurs being forced to leave their homeland.
“We are losing our confidence,” the correspondent, Takashi Yanagisawa, tells me. “And we need to find a way to regain our power. Iguchi is kind of like the new frontier. We hope he might be a new solution.” Building the prototype of Telepathy One was easy, Iguchi says. “We have every sort of technology in Tokyo. It is presenting it to the world that is the challenge.” The leading manufacturers are lining up to work with him, he says, because they have the technology, they just struggle to sell it. “There needs to be a story to the product. Like Apple did with the iPod – 1,000 songs in your pocket. And the way they positioned themselves against Microsoft and IBM, it was like the story of David and Goliath. And Steve Jobs was inspired by Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, and he inspired me, so maybe it will come in a circle.”
Maybe. He certainly has the confidence of Jobs, although, with a thick Japanese accent, he sometimes struggles to make himself understood, a fact that may have contributed to Telepathy One’s conception. When he went to London to present the headset at the prestigious Founders Forum, he stayed in an Airbnb. “The house owner was not my friend but I talked with him for three hours, and now he is my friend. That is how long it takes to understand each other, to share our feelings, and background, and career. Maybe Telepathy makes that shorter. If you are getting info from the cloud and social networks, that will happen more easily. And this man is involved in getting investment from UK to Africa, and he was very excited about Telepathy, that it would be a way of educating people about Africa, of showing them other people’s point of view.”
This is Iguchi’s fondest hope – that seeing somebody else’s literal point of view will help you to see their metaphorical point of view. As a student, he explains, he studied philosophy by day and taught himself how to code by night. “And, one day, I opened the door of my apartment and I suddenly realized that everything is code. That was my enlightenment. Everything is coded and is shareable between humans. And everything can be encoded and decoded. And, if code is exchangeable between humans, that will end all war against each other.” | 2 | Advance |
SeaWorld’s profits fell by 84% and customers are staying away from the water theme park company because a film claimed that it mistreated orca whales.
The company teaches dolphins and killer whales to do tricks in front of large crowds of people.
It says fewer people are going to its parks and profits have reduced.
SeaWorld has been in the news since the 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which said that SeaWorld mistreated orca whales – this made the whales act violently and caused the deaths of three people.
Animal rights organizations say that orcas kept in tanks die at a younger age than wild whales. SeaWorld started a national marketing campaign to show this isn’t true.
SeaWorld has reduced ticket prices and spent $10m on a marketing campaign. But SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby said that the company still finds it difficult to convince people that it treats its whales well.
“We realize we have much work to do,” Manby said. Talking about the company’s reputation, he said, “Early feedback on our marketing campaign has been positive.”
“We will continue to fight with the facts because the facts are on our side,” he said.
Manby joined the company as CEO in 2015 to help the company recover. He will give a presentation about his ideas for the future of the company on 6 November.
There are already plans for a new shark exhibition in Orlando and an attraction in San Antonio that will allow customers to swim with dolphins.
The company’s financial report from 6 August showed that their profit in the second quarter dropped from $37.4 million in 2014 to $5.8 million in 2015. This is an 84% decrease. At the same time, the number of visitors dropped by more than 100,000 from 6.58 million to 6.48 million.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that is against SeaWorld. Jared Goodman from PETA said: “SeaWorld has lots of problems. Animals are dying in its tanks and tens of thousands of people do not want it to build a new orca prison. Families don’t want to buy tickets to see orcas going insane inside tiny tanks and SeaWorld’s profits won’t increase until it closes its parks and builds sanctuaries by the coast.”
SeaWorld’s shares, which were worth $39 in 2013, fell to just under $18 in August 2015.” | 0 | Elementary |
Piles of digitized material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned. Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
Cerf called for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are. “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he said. “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added.
What is 'bit rot' and is Vint Cerf right to be worried? Being able to access digital content in the coming decades could be less of an issue than one of the 'fathers of the internet' has implied. The warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitized in the hope of ensuring their long-term survival. But, while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.
“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them but what we don’t understand is that, unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitized,” Cerf says. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets or rolled papyrus scrolls needed only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware, too.
The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks, upload Jet Set Willy from cassette to the ZX spectrum, slaughter aliens with a Quickfire II joystick and have Atari games cartridges in the attic. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is now mostly found only in museums.
The rise of gaming has its own place in the story of digital culture but Cerf warns that important political and historical documents will also be lost to bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, describing how Lincoln hired those who ran against him for presidency. She went to libraries around the US, found the physical letters of the people involved and reconstructed their conversations. “In today’s world, those letters would be emails and the chances of finding them will be vanishingly small one hundred years from now,” said Cerf.
He concedes that historians will take steps to preserve material considered important by today’s standards but argues that the significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later. Historians have learned how the greatest mathematician of antiquity considered the concept of infinity and anticipated calculus in 3BC after the Archimedes palimpsest was found hidden under the words of a Byzantine prayer book from the thirteenth century. “We’ve been surprised by what we’ve learned from objects that have been preserved purely by chance that give us insights into an earlier civilization,” he said.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have made headway towards a solution to bit rot, or at least a partial one. There, Mahadev Satyanarayanan takes digital snapshots of computer hard drives while they run different software programs. These can then be uploaded to a computer that mimics the one the software ran on. The result is a computer that can read otherwise defunct files. Under a project called Olive, the researchers have archived Mystery House, the original 1982 graphic adventure game for the Apple II, an early version of WordPerfect, and Doom, the original 1993 first person shooter game.
Inventing new technology is only half the battle, though. More difficult still could be navigating the legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies. When IT companies go out of business, or stop supporting their products, they may sell the rights on, making it a nightmarish task to get approval. “To do this properly, the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing. We’re talking about preserving them for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Cerf. | 2 | Advance |
Scientists have taken DNA from the tooth of a European hunter-gatherer and have found out what modern humans looked like before they started farming. The Mesolithic man, who lived in Spain about 7,000 years ago, had an unusual mix of blue eyes, black or brown hair and dark skin.
He was probably lactose intolerant and could not digest starchy foods easily.
The invention of farming brought humans and animals much closer and humans probably developed stronger immune systems to fight infections from the animals. But the change to humans’ immue systems may not be as big as scientists thought – tests on the hunter-gatherer ’s DNA found that he already had genes that made his immune system strong. Some of these genes still exist in modern Europeans today. “Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to find,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, who led the study at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. “Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong.”
The Spanish team started their work after a group of cave explorers found two skeletons in a deep cave high up in the Cantabrian Mountains of northwest Spain in 2006. The skeletons, which belonged to two men in their early 30s, had been very well preserved in the cool cave.
Carbon dating showed the skeletons are around 7,000 years old, from the time before farming arrived in Europe from the Middle East. Other things were found in the cave, including reindeer teeth that were hung from the people’s clothing.
The DNA brought some surprises. When Lalueza-Fox looked at it, he found that the man had genes for dark skin. “This guy was darker than any modern European, but we don’t know how dark,” the scientist said. Another surprise was that the man had blue eyes. The results suggest that blue eyes came first in Europe and that the change to lighter skin happened later in Mesolithic times.
This discovery is important for science. It is also important to artists who will have to draw Mesolithic people in a new way. “You see a lot of pictures of these people hunting and gathering and they look like modern Europeans with light skin. You never see a picture of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer with dark skin and blue eyes,” Lalueza-Fox said.
The Spanish team compared the hunter-gatherer to modern Europeans from different regions to see how they might be related. They found that the ancient DNA was most closely related to the DNA of people living in northern Europe, in particular Sweden and Finland. | 0 | Elementary |
A day that began with a fresh round of dawn raids on the Baur Au Lac hotel in Zurich ended with 16 football officials being indicted on corruption charges in the US, including five current or former members of FIFA’s executive committee. They included the notorious former Brazilian federation chief Ricardo Teixeira and his successor, Marco Polo Del Nero, who has recently stepped down from the FIFA executive committee.
They were among 16 individuals accused of fraud and other offences by the US Department of Justice as it set out a series of kickback schemes in a new 240-page indictment that superseded the previous one in May 2015. It takes to 27 the number of defendants charged by the US with a further 24 unnamed 'co-conspirators' including former FIFA executive committee members. “The betrayal of trust set forth here is outrageous,” the US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, said. “The scale of corruption alleged herein is completely unacceptable.”
On a day when FIFA’s executive committee had hoped to present new reforms in the midst of an ongoing corruption crisis, Swiss police led away the president of the South American football confederation, the Paraguayan Juan Ángel Napout, and Alfredo Hawit, the head of the North and Central American and Caribbean governing body. Hawit only succeeded Jeffrey Webb in May 2015, after Webb was arrested as part of the US operation that threw FIFA into crisis and precipitated the downfall of Sepp Blatter. Webb’s predecessor, the controversial Jack Warner, was also seized in May.
The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said of the latest arrests: “They are being held in custody pending their extradition. According to the US arrest requests, they are suspected of accepting bribes of millions of dollars”. Webb and the Colombian former executive committee member Luis Bedoya were among those whose guilty pleas were entered in the US. Lynch said that eight individuals, five of them unnamed in the original indictment, had come forward with guilty pleas since May.
Eleven current and former members of FIFA’s executive committee have now been charged in the investigation, which alleges $200m in bribes, mainly as kickbacks from TV and marketing contracts but also FIFA’s development programmes. The last three presidents of the regional bodies CONCACAF and Conmebol have all been indicted.
“The message from this announcement should be clear to every culpable individual who remains in the shadows, hoping to evade our investigation: you will not escape our focus,” said Lynch. Teixeira, the former son-in-law of the longstanding FIFA president João Havelange, was charged alongside Del Nero and his predecessor, José Maria Marin, who was charged in May.
Fourteen men had been charged in May 2015, when four additional guilty pleas were entered. Days later, Blatter won a fifth term as president but later agreed to step down as the crisis grew. He was then provisionally suspended alongside the UEFA President, Michel Platini, over an alleged £1.3m “disloyal payment” to the Frenchman. Both men face possible life bans when their case is heard by the FIFA ethics committee in December if they are found guilty of the charges.
Among those also charged on Thursday were Rafael Salguero, a Guatemalan who left the executive committee in May; the former South American Confederation Secretary General, Eduardo Deluca; Peru’s former football federation president, Manuel Burga; and Bolivia’s football president, Carlos Chaves, already jailed in his own country.
Lynch said: “The Department of Justice is committed to ending the rampant corruption we have described amidst the leadership of international football – not only because of the scale of the schemes alleged earlier and today, or the breadth of the operation required to sustain such corruption, but also because of the affront to international principles that this behaviour represents.”
The acting FIFA President, Issa Hayatou, refused to comment on the detail of the latest arrests. But he maintained neither he nor the organization was corrupt. Appearing for the first time before the media since taking the role in September 2015, when Blatter was suspended, Hayatou responded in a similar way to his predecessors in improbably claiming the current crisis was down to a handful of errant individuals.
“FIFA is not corrupt. We have individuals that have shown negative behaviour. Do not generalize the situation,” said Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football for more than 25 years. “There are lots of people who have been in FIFA for more than 20 or 30 years that have not been accused of anything.” | 2 | Advance |
Not sleeping very much used to be a sign that you were busy and important. Sleep was for wimps. But now, Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution, a book that says we need to sleep more and promises to change your life, is a New York Times best-seller.
Businesses have realized that they can make money from the sleep revolution. A whole range of businesses are interested in where, when and how we sleep and, also, how much we will pay for it. Luxury hotels give people “sleep retreats”; more than $1,000 gets you dinner and a movie about sleep. And, if you’re staying home, you can improve your bedroom with a mattress cover with a sensor that monitors your sleep ($249) or a sleeping mask that monitors your brainwaves and lets you sleep more efficiently ($299).
Sleep has not only become big business – it has also changed companies. Many companies already have sleeping areas and Huffington says that nap rooms in offices will become “as common as conference rooms” in the next two years. So, how did this happen? How did sleep suddenly become so fashionable?
Many people these days find it normal to pay $10 for green juice and $34 for an indoor cycle class. And these people have made getting enough sleep a part of their lifestyle. Our bodies have become machines that we monitor for better efficiency and sleep is now another set of data for us to follow.
Huffington does not say that sleep rests you; she says it restores you. Sleep is now an important status symbol for some people. But, it is not always easy to get enough sleep; you have to go to bed in the right neighbourhood and in the right body. Many studies show that you’re more likely to sleep badly if you’re poor. It’s hard to sleep if you’re worried about your safety or haven’t had enough to eat. It’s hard to sleep if you’re one of the 15 million Americans who work irregular hours. Research has also found that there’s a black/white sleep gap. One study shows that white people sleep an average of 6.85 hours but African Americans only sleep an average of 6.05 hours. They also have a lower quality of sleep.
Do you know who gets the most sleep and the best quality of sleep in America? Rich white women. And, they are probably the people Huffington wrote her book for. Huffington describes her ideas about sleep as a “revolution” but, in fact, it’s a rebranding. The real problem with sleep isn’t that a few rich people think it’s a waste of time; the problem is that 99% can’t afford to spend time sleeping.
Sleep may make you perform better but it’s an inefficient way to improve your performance. The real prize is finding a way that humans can work on less sleep. It is no surprise that the US military is researching this. In 2008, the Pentagon published a report called “Human Performance” which examined the possibility of a future in which soldiers could perform at their best with only a couple of hours’ sleep. “Imagine that you could make a human who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per night). This would reduce the number of deaths and injuries. An enemy would need 40% more soldiers to be able to fight us.”
One day, humans will find a way to remove the need to sleep completely. Spending a third of your life asleep won’t be a luxury anymore; it will be something only the poor will have to do. Then, we may need a whole new sort of sleep revolution. | 0 | Elementary |
Tea, baked beans on toast and fish and chips have always been popular in Britain. But, things are changing, according to data published recently in the National Food Survey.
Everyone knows that the British love tea but they drink more than 50% less tea than in the 1970s – 68g of tea per person per week compared to only 25g. Britons are now drinking on average only eight cups of tea a week – they drank 23 cups in 1974. Tea is still the most popular hot drink in the UK but people now spend more money on coffee.
The data comes from 150,000 families who took part in the survey between 1974 and 2000, combined with information from 2000 to 2014. It shows a move towards healthier food in recent years – people have changed to low-calorie soft drinks, from whole to skimmed milk and they eat more fresh fruit. But, the amount of chips, pizza, crisps and ready meals they eat each week has increased a lot.
There has also been an enormous change from white to brown bread. The survey also shows the amount of bread people eat has fallen from 25 to 15 slices a week over the past forty years. The amount of baked beans people eat has reduced by 20%. But, there has been an increase in other types of convenience food, particularly Italian dishes. Adults in the UK now eat an average of 75g of pizza every week compared with none in 1974. The amount of pasta they eat has almost tripled over the same period.
Fresh potatoes are also becoming less popular with a 67% decrease from 1974, when adults ate around 188g every day. People eat more of other vegetables such as cucumbers, courgettes, aubergines and mushrooms. The amount of takeaway food they eat has almost doubled since 1974, from 80g per person per week to 150g. Around 33g of this amount is chips and 56g is meat, with kebabs (10g), chicken (7g), burgers (5g) and “meat-based meals” (32g) particularly popular.
It seems that British people are now more careful about what they eat – the amount of fruit has increased by 50% since 1974. In 2014, UK adults ate an average of 157g of fruit per day. Bananas have been the most popular fruit in the UK since 1996 – adults ate 221g per adult per week in 2014, much more than apples (131g) and oranges (48g). Half of all soft drinks British people drink are now low-calorie soft drinks. Britons also spend a smaller percentage of their salaries on food today – 11%, compared with 24% in 1974.
The UK Environment Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, said: “Food is the heart of our society. This data shows what we were eating 40 years ago but, also, how a change in culture has led to a food revolution. People care more about where their food comes from than before, we can order quality food on the internet, fashionable restaurants give us the latest trends and exciting global cuisines are now as common as fish and chips.”
She added that this data can show us more than what, where or how older generations ate. It can also show us when our habits changed. The National Food Survey can tell us a lot and help us to predict new food trends. “I look forward to seeing how we can use this data to learn more about our past and grow our world-leading food and farming industry in the future,” she said. | 0 | Elementary |
How long can you hold your breath? I’m trying it right now. The first 30 seconds are easy. I’m ready to give up at 45 seconds but I push on through and it seems to get easier for a while. But, as the second hand ticks past a minute, I know I’m on borrowed time. My heart is pounding. I let out a tiny breath and this helps. Eventually, I give in, expelling the spent air in my lungs and taking a huge gasp. (And continue to gasp for a few more breaths, prompting my husband to ask what on earth I’m doing.) I manage one minute and 12 seconds. I’m quite impressed with myself.
Breath-holding ability becomes extremely important in some sports, particularly freediving. In 2006, I was filming a programme about the anatomy and physiology of the lungs for a BBC series called, slightly oddly, Don’t Die Young. I was lucky enough to meet Sam Amps, who was captain of the UK freedive team. At a pool in Bristol, she taught me some simple exercises to help me hold my breath for longer while swimming underwater. By the end of the session, I think I’d managed a prodigious 90 seconds of breath-holding, enough to let me swim a width. Sam swam three widths with ease. She could hold her breath for five minutes, while swimming. Five!
I asked how she did it: very slow breathing for several minutes prior to each dive, then a big, deep breath before diving in. She also said training helped her resist the urge to breathe for far longer than most people.
Some have suggested that the ability to voluntarily hold your breath is evidence of a watery episode in human evolution. It’s even been said that humans have an ability to lower heart rate and metabolic rate in order to breath-hold for even longer. Other anatomical and physiological bits and bobs – our hairlessness, the distribution of our subcutaneous fat and even our tendency to walk on two legs – have been linked to an aquatic phase of evolutionary development. Unfortunately, the cobbled-together “aquatic ape hypothesis” fails to hold water. It’s a romantic notion that may appeal to us but, with the cold light of day falling on the scientific evidence, it’s revealed to be nothing more than a fiction.
Looking at voluntary breath-holding, it turns out that we’re certainly not unique among non-aquatic mammals in being able to hold our breath. (Having said that, it’s a difficult thing to investigate in other mammals as, unlike humans, they tend not to comply when you ask them to breath-hold.) And experimental evidence shows that heart rate doesn’t drop during breath-holding. At least, it doesn’t if you’re breath-holding on land. When you’re submerged in cold water it’s a different story: cooling the face does lead to a slower heart rate in most people. But, once again, this isn’t evidence of an aquatic ape ancestry, as it turns out to be a very general characteristic of air-breathing vertebrates. This reduction in heart rate is just one of the physiological responses that are sometimes described together as the “mammalian diving reflex”. But physiological responses that could be useful in diving are also – and, perhaps, even more importantly – useful for not drowning.
While our ability to breath-hold may not be all that special, when we compare ourselves with other animals, it’s now proving very useful in one particular area of medicine. Radiotherapy for breast cancer involves directing radiation, very precisely, at the tumour. This may require several minutes’ worth of radiation and, so, it’s usually done in short bursts, between breaths. But, if the patient can keep her chest perfectly still for several minutes, it means that the entire dose can be delivered, in the right place, in one go. The problem, of course, is that most people, just like me, struggle to hold their breath for much longer than a minute. But doctors at University Hospital Birmingham have recently performed careful experiments that show that, if patients are ventilated with oxygen-rich air before attempting a breath- hold, they can manage to hold their breath for an impressive five-and-a-half minutes.
Surprisingly, the trick seems to lie not in fooling the body’s usual sensors for low oxygen or high carbon dioxide levels in the blood but in fooling the diaphragm. When you breathe in, you’re contracting the muscle of your diaphragm, pulling it flat so that the volume of your chest increases – and air is drawn into your lungs. When you hold your breath, you keep your diaphragm in this contracted state. Artificially raising oxygen levels and reducing carbon dioxide levels before a breath-hold, as in the Birmingham radiotherapy experiments, may work by delaying fatigue in the diaphragm. And – not so useful if you’re trying to keep your chest perfectly still – breathing out a little air lets the diaphragm relax a little, and helps you to prolong a breath-hold, exactly as I found when attempting my breath-hold.
And, so, it’s your diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing, that is also in charge when it comes to reaching the breakpoint of your breath-hold. Eventually, even if you’ve fooled it for a while, the signals from the diaphragm are just too strong and you have to give in – and take a breath. | 2 | Advance |
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge won the first round in their battle for privacy on Tuesday when a French magazine was banned from selling or reusing images taken of the couple at a private chateau in Provence.
But the war is far from over as French prosecutors must now decide if criminal proceedings are to be brought against the magazine editor and the photographer or photographers responsible for taking pictures of the duchess sunbathing topless while on holiday in the south of France.
The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Nanterre, Paris granted an injunction ordering the gossip magazine Closer to hand over digital files of the pictures within 24 hours and preventing it disseminating them any further, including on its website and tablet app.
The four-page ruling, which only affects Mondadori Magazines France, Closer’s publisher, also ordered it to pay €2,000 in legal costs. The magazine faces a €10,000 fine for every day it fails to comply with the order. No damages were sought by the couple.
“These snapshots, which showed the intimacy of a couple, partially naked on the terrace of a private home, surrounded by a park several hundred metres from a public road, and being able to legitimately assume that they are protected from passersby, are by nature particularly intrusive,” it said.
The magistrates ruled that every photograph published in France by Mondadori, the publishing company owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in future would carry a fine, also of €10,000 per breach.
But the ruling refers only to the 14 pictures that have already been published. Closer’s editor has hinted she has other, more intimate pictures.
St James’s Palace said the couple “welcome the judge’s ruling”. A source said: “They always believed the law was broken and that they were entitled to their privacy.” Maud Sobel, a lawyer for the royal couple in Paris, described it as “a wonderful decision,” adding: “We’ve been vindicated.”
Though pleased their civil action has succeeded, the couple have taken the rare step of seeking to have a much more public criminal prosecution for breach of privacy brought against the magazine and photographer or photographers responsible.
The prosecutor will have to decide the targets for any criminal proceedings and the complaint cites “persons unknown”. But it is understood the couple want proceedings brought against the editor of Closer, which published the photos on Friday, and whoever took the images of the couple sunbathing at the chateau, which belongs to Lord Linley, son of the late Princess Margaret.
A preliminary investigation was launched on Tuesday by the Paris police. Under French law breach of privacy carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a fine of €45,000.
This is the legal action that will truly lay down a marker, and by pursuing it the couple indicate a determination to convey a wider message to the world and, they hope, deter paparazzi in the future.
Their lawyers had not asked for copies of Closer magazine to be removed from shelves.
On Saturday the Irish Daily Star published the photos, leading to the editor being suspended on Monday night pending the outcome of an internal investigation. Also on Monday, the Mondadori-owned Italian celebrity magazine Chi rushed out a special edition with 26 pages devoted to the candid photos of the future queen.
The couple’s lawyer, Aurélien Hamelle, had told the Paris court it was necessary to block the “highly intimate” images of the duchess without her bikini top as she was a “young woman, not an object”.
But Delphine Pando, defending Closer, said the action was a “disproportionate response” to publication of the photographs. She added that the magazine could not control their resale as it did not own the original images.
Copies of Closer magazine were doing brisk business on online auction site eBay, with one selling for £31.01, until the site removed all listings following “strong feedback” from its community. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
As soon as the children at one primary school in Stirling, Scotland, hear the words daily mile, they put down their pencils and leave the classroom to start running around the school eld. For three-and-a-half years, all the pupils at St Ninians Primary School have walked or run a mile each day. They do it at different times during the day and, despite the rise in childhood obesity across the UK, none of the children at the school are overweight.
The daily mile has done so much to improve these childrens tness, behaviour and concentration in lessons that many other British schools are doing the same. They are getting pupils to get up from their desks and take 15 minutes to walk or run round the school or local park.
Elaine Wyllie, headteacher of St Ninians, said: I get at least two emails a day from other schools and local authorities asking how we do it. The thought of children across the country running every day because of something weve done is phenomenal.
One in ten children are obese when they start school at the age of four or ve, according to the Health & Social Care Information Centre, and, in the summer of 2015, a study found that schoolchildren in England are the least t they have ever been. Primary schools therefore accept the bene ts of the daily mile. It has been introduced in schools in various parts of the UK and other schools are planning to launch the initiative during the 2015-16 academic year. In Stirling alone, 30 schools have already started or will soon start the daily mile.
Its a common-sense approach to childrens tness, which is free and easy. The most important thing is that the children really enjoy it; otherwise, you couldnt sustain it. They come back inside bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, how children used to look, said Wyllie. At St Ninians, teachers take their pupils out of lessons to a specially built circuit around the schools playing eld for their daily mile whenever it best suits that days timetable. Only ice or very heavy rain stop them.
The extent of the bene ts isnt known yet but researchers from Stirling University have launched a comparative study to look for evidence of the physical, cognitive and emotional bene ts of the daily mile. Dr Colin Moran, who is leading the study, said: The children dont seem to have problems with obesity; they seem happier and staff say they settle into lessons faster so we designed a study that would test all of these things. St Ninians pupils will be compared with children from another school in Stirling that hasnt yet started the scheme.
Kevin Clelland, a primary school teacher from Leeds, visited St Ninians and, then, convinced his colleagues it was a great idea. He said: Its such a simple thing to do but seems to have such an amazing impact. Were really committed to improving the tness of our pupils. His school is now building a track.
Active Cheshire, a sports and tness organization in Cheshire, is taking a group of senior people from the local authority up to Scotland to assess the results of the daily mile. The hope is to introduce it across the 450 schools in their region if a pilot programme is successful.
Paralympian, Tanni Grey-Thompson, chair of ukactive, a health organization for physical activity, said: All children need to achieve 60 active minutes every day, whether in a lesson, on the walk to school or in the playground. Its fantastic to see initiatives like the daily mile, showing real leadership from the education sector to improve childrens tness levels and their cognitive behaviour, and make a real difference to schools, teachers, parents and young peoples lives. We know sitting still kills; not sitting still helps children build skills that will stay with them for life.
The Scottish government also supports the initiative. A spokesperson said: Learning in PE is enhanced by initiatives like the daily mile, which can encourage and support parents in fostering healthy habits with their children from a young age. We are pleased to see so many Scottish schools are taking part or planning to do so. | 1 | Intermediate |
More than one million British workers might be employed on zero-hours contracts. This number comes from a poll of more than 1,000 employers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
Recently, some UK organizations – from shops to Buckingham Palace – have been criticized for employing staff without a guarantee of work and pay each week. Employees on zero-hours contracts often get no holiday or sick pay and have to ask permission before looking for extra work with another company.
The CIPD found that 38% of zero-hours contract workers describe themselves as employed full-time. They say they typically work 30 hours or more a week. One-third of voluntary sector employers use the contracts and one in four public sector organizations.
The retail company Sports Direct employs around 20,000 of its 23,000 staff on zero-hours contracts. Other companies using the contracts include cinema chain Cineworld and Buckingham Palace, which uses the contracts for its 350 summer workers. Pub group J D Wetherspoon has 24,000 of its staff – 80% of its workforce – on zero-hours contracts.
Vidhya Alakeson, from the Resolution Foundation, said: “If it’s true that there are around one million people on zero-hours contracts, then that would be a big part of the workforce.”
Unions say that employers put pressure on staff to sign the contracts. In this way, the employers can avoid their responsibilities to employees and reduce staff benefits.
Dave Prentis, of the trade union Unison, said: “The majority of workers are only on these contracts because they have no choice.”
Workers on zero-hours contracts are often only told how many hours they will work when weekly or monthly rotas are created. But they have to be available for extra work at short notice. They may get holiday pay, but they do not get sick pay.
The charity National Trust, which employs many of its seasonal workers on zero-hours contracts, said it gives the same pay and benefits to workers on zero-hours contracts as to full-time staff.
“We believe zero-hours contracts are essential in our organization, because we are very weather-dependent,” the National Trust said. “It’s important to be able to reorganize staff rotas quickly to respond to the weather and zero-hours contracts allow us to do this.”
Politician Chuka Umunna said, “While some employees welcome the flexibility of zero-hours contracts, for many, zero-hours contracts leave them insecure and unsure of when work will come,” he said.
The poll shows that 17% of employers in the private sector use zero-hours contracts, lower than the 34% of organizations in the voluntary sector and 24% in the public sector.
Industries where employers were most likely to have at least one person on a zero-hours contract were hotels, catering and leisure (48%), education (35%) and healthcare (27%). | 0 | Elementary |
Mountain climber, Kenton Cool, has just flown down from Everest base camp to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. Cool is talking about the three amazing climbs he completed the previous weekend. Early on Saturday morning, he reached the summit of Nuptse, the first of the three main summits in the Everest “horseshoe”. Later that day, he climbed to the summit of Everest, and reached the top in complete darkness early on Sunday. He then continued to the summit of Lhotse, the third of the three peaks, on Monday morning.
He says he took advantage of a rare opportunity. “For the first time since the late 1990s, there were fixed ropes on all three mountains. What I did was still a great physical achievement. But the person who does it next will do it without ropes or bottled oxygen.”
Everest was first climbed 60 years ago. I asked Cool to look forward and imagine what top climbers might do 60 years from now. “I hate to think,” he says, but he mentions the Swiss climber, Ueli Steck, who fled the mountain in April after an argument with a group of Sherpas. Steck was planning to climb Everest’s west ridge and then immediately climb Lhotse via a new route without fixed ropes. “Ueli trained like a machine,” Cool says. “He’s a fantastic climber. It would have been amazing.”
What will tourism look like in the Everest region in the future? One clue is in the amazing helicopter rescue by Simone Moro, Steck’s climbing partner. Moro flew back to Everest on Tuesday in a powerful helicopter to rescue a climber at 7,800 metres.
It was the highest rescue ever on Everest and highlights the increase in helicopter flights in recent years. By 2073, there might be a helipad on the mountain that would bring tourists. At the moment, they use helicopters to rescue both climbers and trekkers who walk to Everest base camp.
Mountain geographer and environmentalist, Alton Byers, thinks it is not certain that Everest can take more tourists. The combination of climate change and tourism, he says, is putting new pressure on the area. Glaciers in the Everest region are getting smaller, and even disappearing, and this is having a big effect already. “Everywhere you go, people are talking about how there’s less water. There’s less water for agriculture and less water for all the new lodges that they are building.”
In the Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar they are building a new pipeline to bring water for the tourists. The local stream is contaminated with human waste and does not provide enough water for a place that is full of tourists. “Every village is digging a pit for garbage. Khumbu has the highest landfill sites in the world,” he says. Human waste is now taken away in plastic barrels but then, according to Byers, these barrels are emptied into a huge pit down the valley – it could contaminate the region’s streams and rivers.
“We can solve these problems, but we need to be serious about it,” he says. “One climber can spend $85,000 to climb Everest. And that’s fine. But we’re going to have to look at these other problems. For half a million dollars a year, you could solve most of them.”
Climate change is another problem. Weather patterns are changing and this is also having an effect on tourism. Cloudy weather is closing Lukla Airport, the entrance to the Everest region, more often. They are building a new road for 4x4s to Lukla, to make sure tourists and their money can reach Everest. But Byers is worried that these new roads, which they are building very quickly, could cause soil erosion and landslides. He says that Everest is the perfect place to study some of these problems, like the effects of climate change and tourism. | 0 | Elementary |
The Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, will retire at the end of the season after 27 years. He will become a director of the club. He is the most successful manager in British football. He has won 13 Premier League titles, two Champions Leagues, the Cup Winners’ Cup, five FA Cups and four League Cups.
“The decision to retire is one that I have thought a lot about,” Ferguson said. “It is the right time. It was important to me to leave an organization in the strongest possible condition and I believe I have done so.” He said that he thinks the quality of the team will bring continued success at the highest level. They also have lots of good young players, so Ferguson thinks the club has a very good future.
“Our training facilities are some of the best in world sport,” he added. “Our stadium, Old Trafford, is one of the most important venues in the world. I am delighted to become both director and ambassador for the club. I am looking forward to the future.” He also thanked his family for their love and support.
“I would like to thank all my players and staff, past and present, for an incredible level of professionalism and hard work that has helped to bring so many memorable triumphs. Without them, the history of this great club would not be as rich. In my early years, the support of the board of directors gave me the confidence and time to build a football club, not just a football team.
“Over the past ten years, the owners of the club have made it possible for me to manage Manchester United to the best of my ability. I have been very lucky to work with David Gill, a talented and trustworthy chief executive. I am grateful to all of them.” He also thanked the fans for their support and said he had really enjoyed his time as manager of Manchester United.
Joel Glazer, one of the owners of Manchester United, said: “Alex has shown us so often what a fantastic manager he is, but he’s also a wonderful person. His determination to succeed and his hard work for the club have been remarkable. I will never forget the wonderful memories he has given us, like that magical night in Moscow.”
Avie Glazer, his brother, said: “I am very happy to tell you that Alex has agreed to stay with the club as a director. His contributions to Manchester United over the last 27 years have been extraordinary and, like all United fans, I want him to be a part of its future.”
David Gill added: “I’ve had the great pleasure of working very closely with Alex for 16 unforgettable years. We knew that his retirement would come one day and we both have been planning for it. Alex’s vision, energy and ability have built teams that are some of the best and most loyal in world sport. The way he cares for this club, his staff and for the football family in general is something that I admire. We will never forget what he has done for this club and for the game in general. Working with Alex has been the greatest experience of my working life and it is a great honour to be able to call him a friend.”
First-team coach René Meulensteen told everyone how Ferguson told his staff the news. “I found out this morning when I came to the club,” he said. “He asked us to go into his office and told us his decision. I’m sure he thought hard about it. I wish him well for the future. He’s been fantastic for this club and I hope all the fans give the new manager the same support.” | 0 | Elementary |
The view from the visitors’ centre in the Doñana National Park in southern Spain is a bird- watcher ’s dream: 200,000 hectares of wetlands vital for the birds of western Europe. Many of Britain’s most loved migratory birds rest here every year on their migrations from Africa. Doñana is also home to some of Europe’s rarest birds, including the Spanish imperial eagle.
It is a beautiful landscape but it is under threat. In 1998, almost two billion gallons of toxic water, full of acid and waste metals, poured into the park from the Los Frailes mine 45km away. They collected more than 25,000 kilos of dead fish afterwards and nearly 2,000 adult birds, chicks, eggs and nests were killed or destroyed.
It was Spain’s worst environmental disaster and the clean-up cost €90 million. Spain realized that Doñana is the nation’s most important natural site, so the country decided to spend an extra €360 million on restoring the landscape to its original wetland state.
It has been an expensive process. And Doñana is still under threat from the pressures of modern life. There are plans to build an oil pipeline through Doñana and there is also an idea to build new hotels and golf courses, which would use a lot of local water. Sand and soil washed from nearby farms is also blocking the channels that cross the park.
But, the biggest shock has been the recent decision of the Andalucían government to reopen the Frailes mine that nearly destroyed Doñana in 1998. “This is Europe’s most important bird sanctuary, ” says Laurence Rose of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). “Doñana already faces a lot of threats but now they want to bring back the cause of the disaster 16 years ago. It is extremely worrying.”
If you look at the state of the local economy, you quickly see why the government has made this decision. The crash of Spain’s banks in 2008 had a very bad effect on the region. Unemployment in some parts of Andalucía is now more than 30%. If they reopen the mine, it would create more than 1,000 jobs.
“There are riches here, riches that the local inhabitants badly need,” said energy spokesman Vicente Fernández Guerrero. “We think mining is a good way to make it possible to allow local people to continue to live in the area. This is a mining area. People have mined metals here since Roman times.”
Fernández said that the mine licence would only allow modern mining techniques, which do not create poisonous wet waste. “They will use the best technology in the world here,” Fernández said. “They will not use liquid. We will not allow that.”
Some people agree with the idea, but a lot of people disagree with it. Carlos Dávila, who works for the Spanish Ornithological Society in Doñana, was also alarmed at the idea. “This is a very, very bad idea,” he said. “They say the new mine will be safe, but they said it was safe in 1998 and look what happened. We got the worst ecological disaster in the history of Spain.”
Almost every visitor at a local restaurant had a camera and telescopic lens or a pair of binoculars. Lots of tourists come to Doñana because of the birdlife. This is not surprising for this is a truly special place. A big sky hangs over this flat but dramatic landscape. Birds of every shape and size fill the air and sometimes the road. At one point on my visit, a stork calmly stood in front of our car until it felt ready to fly off.
“The trouble is that Spain does not have the public resources it had 16 years ago. A repeat of the disaster today would have a much, much more damaging impact,” said Rose. Dávila agrees. “After the disaster, Spain realized that it had a place of real ecological importance and did a lot to clean it up and protect it,” he added. “Now, it seems we have forgotten that lesson. It is very depressing.” | 0 | Elementary |
From all across Rwanda, and even from Burundi, people are coming to the southern town of Butare to a little shop called Inzozi Nziza (Sweet Dreams). They come for a taste of something new, something most of them have never tasted before – sweet, cold ice cream.
Here, at the central African country’s first ice-cream shop, customers can buy ice cream in sweet cream, passion fruit, strawberry and pineapple flavours. Toppings include fresh fruit, honey, chocolate chips and granola. They can also buy black tea and coffee.
The shop, which has “ice cream, coffee, dreams” written on its signs, is taking advantage of local people’s curiosity about ice cream – and the shop is also “changing lives”, says Inzozi Nziza’s manager, Louise Ingabire.
“Ice cream is important,” she says between mouthfuls of honey-flavoured ice cream. “Some Rwandans like ice cream, but it’s a new thing. We still have some work to do, to tell others that they’ll enjoy it.”
The shop can certainly make dreams come true. “I didn’t have a job before: I just stayed at home. Now, I have a vision for the future. I am making money and I can give some of it to my family,” says the 27-year-old.
Butare has 89,600 residents and is 135km south of the capital, Kigali. It is the home of the National University of Rwanda. Inzozi Nziza has become a meeting place for students who want to treat themselves to something cool and different.
“The shop is uniting people here,” Kalisa Migendo, a 24-year-old student, says. “If you need to go out and talk to a friend, a girl or a boy, you come to Inzozi Nziza for an ice cream.”
Inzozi Nziza was opened by Odile Gakire Katese. She met Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas, co- founders of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, New York. The three women formed a partnership to open the shop in 2010.
At the start, Miesen and Dundas owned the shop in partnership with its employees and had shares in the business, which is a cooperative. After 18 months, they gave their shares to the women employees, who by then could control the business by themselves.
Ice cream is new to Rwanda. Selling and eating ice cream is not part of the Rwandan culture.
The Butare shop employs nine women. They spend their free time practising with Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda’s first and only female drumming group.
The musicians are Hutu and Tutsi women. Some are survivors of the 1994 genocide, when almost a million Tutsis and Hutus were killed. Some members of Ingoma Nshya are widows, some orphans.
Ingabire’s father, two siblings and many cousins were killed in the genocide. “When I’m drumming, it gives me power because we’re still alive and survivors,” she says.
The ice-cream shop is in a documentary by film-makers Rob and Lisa Fruchtman. Sweet Dreams, which tells the story of how the women have made a positive future after the genocide, also includes the female drummers.
The film has been shown in many countries, including the US, UK and several African states. “We feel the film is about hope, bravery and the ability to change your life,” says Lisa Fruchtman. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
What is it like to look at the last of something? Sudan is the last male northern white rhino on the planet. If he does not mate successfully soon with one of two female northern white rhinos at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, there will be no more rhinos like them, male or female, born anywhere. And theres not much chance because Sudan is getting old at 42 and breeding efforts have so far failed. Apart from these three animals, there are only two other northern white rhinos in the world, both in zoos, both female.
It seems an image of human tenderness that Sudan is lovingly guarded by armed men who stand with him. But, of course, it is an image of brutality. Sudan is under threat from poachers who kill rhinos and cut off their horns to sell them for medicine in Asia. Sudan is still in danger even though he has had his horn cut off to deter the poachers.
Sudan doesnt know how precious he is. His eye is a sad black dot in his massive wrinkled face as he wanders the reserve with his guards. His head is a marvellous thing. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone and leathery esh, a head of pure strength. How terrible that such a powerful head can, in reality, be so vulnerable.
Sudan does not look so different from the rhinoceros that Albrecht Durer portrayed in 1515. Durer was a Renaissance artist picturing an exotic beast from exotic lands. In 1515, a live Indian rhinoceros was sent by the ruler of Gujarat in India to the king of Portugal. The king sent it to the Pope but, on the way, the ship sank and it died.
Human beings we always kill the things we love. We have been doing so since the Ice Age. There are beautiful pictures of European woolly rhinos in caves in France that were painted up to 30,000 years ago. These ancient relatives of Sudan share his power and his gentle appearance. A woolly rhino in Chauvet Cave seems agile and young, a creature full of life. But the same people who painted such sensitive portraits of Ice Age rhinos helped to kill them off.
Today, many people really love rhinos but they are being killed in greater and greater numbers. The northern white rhino is the rarest species of African rhino. There are more southern white rhinos and black rhinos. But the demand in some countries for rhino horn as a traditional medicine is increasing the poaching. Many people believe that rhino horn can cure everything from u to cancer. In 2007, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. In 2014, 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa.
The vulnerable northern white rhino has been hunted very nearly to extinction in spite of every precaution, in spite of the guards and their guns. Other varieties of African rhino are being hunted by poachers the situation is totally out of control. The Javan rhinoceros is also on the verge of extinction. India has successfully protected the Indian rhinoceros but here, too, poaching is a problem. What a majestic creature Sudan is. Have we learned nothing since the Ice Age? | 1 | Intermediate |
Galina Zaglumyonova was woken in her flat in central Chelyabinsk by an enormous explosion that blew in the balcony windows and shattered clay pots containing her few houseplants. When she jumped out of bed she could see a huge vapour trail hanging in the morning sky and hear the wail of car alarms from the street below. “I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Zaglumyonova. “There was a big explosion and then a series of little explosions. My first thought was that it was a plane crash.”
What she had actually witnessed were the death throes of a ten-tonne meteorite that plunged to Earth in a series of fireballs just after sunrise. Officials put the number of people injured at almost 1,200, with more than 40 taken to hospital – most as a result of flying glass shattered by the sonic boom created by the meteorite’s descent. There were no reported deaths.
The meteorite entered the atmosphere travelling at a speed of at least 33,000mph and broke up into chunks between 18 and 32 miles above the ground, according to a statement from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The event caused panic in Chelyabinsk, a city of more than one million people to the south of Russia’s Ural mountains, as mobile phone networks swiftly became jammed by the volume of calls. Amateur video footage from the area, often peppered with the obscene language of frightened observers, showed the chunks of meteorite glowing more brightly as they approached the moment of impact.
The vapour trail was visible for hundreds of miles around, including in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Tatyana Bets was at work in the reception area of a hospital clinic in the centre of the city when the meteorite struck. “First we noticed the wind, and then the room was filled with a very bright light and we could see a cloud of some unspecified smoke in the sky,” she said. Then, after a few minutes, came the explosions. At least three craters were subsequently discovered, according to the Ministry of the Interior, and were being monitored by the military. One crater was more than six metres wide, while another lump of meteorite was reported to have slammed through the thick ice of a nearby lake. Radiation levels at the impact sites were normal, according to local military officials.
In Chelyabinsk itself, schools and universities were closed and many other staff told to go home early. About 200 children were among the injured.
A steady stream of lightly injured people, most suffering cuts from flying glass, came into the clinic where Bets works. She said a nearby dormitory building for college students was particularly badly affected and many of the students were brought in suffering from fright. “There were a lot of girls in shock. Some were very pale and many of them fainted,” she said.
Early estimates suggested more than 100,000 square metres of glass had been broken and 3,000 buildings hit. The total cost of the damage in the city was being valued at in excess of one billion roubles (£20m).
The meteorite over Chelyabinsk arrived less than a day before asteroid 2012 DA14 was expected to make the closest pass to Earth (about 17,510 miles) of any recorded cosmic body. But experts said the two events were linked by nothing more than coincidence.
Rumours and conspiracy theories, however, swirled in the first few hours after the incident. Reports on Russian state television and in local media suggested that the meteorite was engaged by local air defence units and blown apart at an altitude of more than 15 miles.
The ultranationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said it was not a meteorite but military action by the United States, echoing much of the speculation voiced on amateur film footage. “It’s not a meteorite falling – it’s a test of new American weapons,” Zhirinovsky said.
Some were quick to take advantage of the confusion. Enterprising people were offering lumps of meteorite for sale through internet sites within a few hours of the impact.
President Vladimir Putin and the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, were informed about the incident, and Putin convened a meeting with the head of the Emergency Situations Ministry. “It’s proof that not only are economies vulnerable but the whole planet,” Medvedev said at an economic forum in Siberia.
Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister and former Ambassador to NATO, took to Twitter to call for an international push to create a warning system for all “objects of an alien origin”. Neither the US nor Russia had the capability to bring down such objects, he added. | 2 | Advance |
Intermediate
Kenton Cool can hardly speak. All the physical effort at high altitude has affected his voice. He is now in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal he flew down from Everest base camp that morning. Cool is talking about a startling sequence of climbs completed the previous weekend. Early on Saturday morning, he reached the summit of Nuptse, the first and lowest of the three main summits in the Everest horseshoe that surrounds the glaciated valley called the Western Cwm.
That same day, he climbed up to the summit of Everest itself, reaching the top in complete darkness early on Sunday. He and his climbing partner then continued on to the summit of Lhotse, the third of this spectacular three-peaks challenge, on Monday morning.
He says he took advantage of a rare opportunity. For the first time since the late 1990s, there were fixed ropes on all three mountains, he says. That doesnt take away the physical achievement of what I did. Ive set the bar at a certain level. But whoever comes along next will move the bar further and do it without ropes or bottled oxygen.
Sixty years after Everest was first climbed, many of the media reports are looking back to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and their age of innocence from the modern era of commercialism and environmental damage. Ive asked Cool to look forward and imagine what top climbers might be doing 60 years from now.
I hate to think, he says, but mentions the Swiss climber, Ueli Steck, who fled the mountain in April after an argument with a crowd of Sherpas at Camp 2. Steck, he says, was planning to climb Everests west ridge, first done in 1963, descend to the South Col and then immediately climb Lhotse via a new route, all without fixed ropes. Ueli had been training like a machine, Cool says. Hes a fantastic climber. Hes technically brilliant but he had also taken his physical condition to the highest possible level. It would have been amazing to see what he could have done.
What will tourism look like in the Everest region in the future? One clue is in the stunning helicopter rescue by Simone Moro, Stecks climbing partner, whose rude language caused the argument at Camp 2. Moro flew back to Everest on Tuesday at the controls of a high-powered helicopter to rescue a climber at an altitude of 7,800 metres.
It was the highest rescue ever performed on Everest and highlights the huge rise in helicopter flights in recent years. By 2073, the infrastructure on the mountain might include a helipad on the South Col that would bring tourists. In the meantime, helicopters are making it easier to rescue both climbers and the far more numerous trekkers who go as far as base camp.
It is not certain that the Everest region can continue to cope with a booming tourism sector, according to mountain geographer and environmentalist, Alton Byers. The combination of climate change and tourism, he says, is creating new stresses on the Sherpa homeland. The retreat, and in some cases disappearance, of glaciers in the Everest region is having a major impact already. Everywhere you go, people are talking about how theres less water. Theres less water for agriculture and less water for all the new lodges that are getting built.
In the Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar, he says, a new five-mile pipeline is being laid to bring water to service the growing tourist demand for showers and flush toilets. The local stream has become contaminated with human waste and does not provide enough water for a place that, in high season, is bursting at the seams. Every village is digging a pit just beyond the houses for garbage. Khumbu has the highest landfill sites in the world, he says. Human waste at base camp is now managed well and removed in plastic barrels. But, according to Byers, these barrels are emptied into a huge pit a few hours down the valley that could leak into the regions watercourses.
These problems can be solved, but we need to get serious about it, he says. One climber can spend $85,000 climbing Everest. And thats fine. But at some point were going to have to look at these other priorities. For half a million dollars a year, you could solve most of them.
Climate change is another issue. Byers works with local conservation committees to identify and plan for the impacts of climate change, most usually finding new water sources or introducing rainwater harvesting. The rapid build-up of glacial lakes is a constant threat they threaten to burst and flood the Sherpa homeland. At some point in the future, people are going to have to get out of their way.
Changing weather patterns are also having an impact on tourism. Increased cloud cover in periods of normally clear weather is closing Lukla Airport, the gateway to the Everest region, more often. A new road for 4x4s is being built to Lukla to guarantee the flow of tourists and their money, but Byers is worried that the rapid spread of the road network in Nepal is being done too cheaply, with disastrous consequences in terms of soil erosion and landslides.
Everest is the icon everyone knows, he says. Its the perfect laboratory for figuring out how to solve some of these problems, like the impacts of climate change and tourism. | 1 | Intermediate |
Intermediate
SeaWorld has suffered an 84% collapse in pro ts customers have deserted the controversial aquatic theme park company because of claims that it mistreated orca whales.
The company trains dolphins and killer whales to perform tricks in front of stadiums full of people. They have suffered declines in attendance, sales and pro ts because people think they dont treat their animals well.
SeaWorld has been in the news since the 2013 documentary Black sh said that its treatment of orca whales made the whales act violently and that this caused the deaths of three people. After the documentary was shown, attendance collapsed and the company lost more than half of its market value on Wall Street. Its former CEO also had to leave the company.
Animal rights activists say that orcas kept in tanks die at a younger age than wild whales. SeaWorld started a marketing campaign to show that this isnt true.
It cut ticket prices and spent $10m on marketing but SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby had to admit that the company is still struggling to convince the public that it treats its whales well.
We realize we have much work ahead of us, Manby said. Talking about the companys reputation, he said, Early feedback on our campaign has been positive. However, we recognize that solving our image problems in California will be challenging.
We will continue to ght with the facts because the facts are on our side, he said.
Manby, who joined the company as CEO in 2015 to help the company recover, said he would give a presentation on his vision for the future of the company at a special event on 6 November.
There are already plans for a new shark exhibition in Orlando and an attraction in San Antonio that will allow customers to swim with dolphins in a naturalistic setting.
The companys nancial report, released on 6 August, showed pro ts in the second quarter dropped from $37.4m in 2014 to $5.8m in 2015. This is an 84% decrease. Revenue fell from $405m to $392m. Attendance dropped by more than 100,000 from 6.58 million to 6.48 million.
Analysts will now be closely watching SeaWorlds sales and attendance numbers in the third quarter, which is traditionally the companys most pro table and covers the summer holiday season. Attendance may suffer from a fresh scandal in July 2015 it was alleged that a SeaWorld employee had in ltrated animal rights protest groups against the company.
Jared Goodman, director of animal law for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said: SeaWorld has a spying scandal, animals are dying in its tanks and tens of thousands of people are against its plan to build a new orca prison. Families just dont want to buy tickets to see orcas going insane inside tiny tanks. SeaWorlds orcas wont recover and SeaWorlds pro ts wont recover either until it empties its tanks and builds sanctuaries by the coast.
SeaWorlds shares, which were worth $39 in 2013, fell to just under $18 in August 2015. | 1 | Intermediate |
Glastonbury Festival is to combat the scourge of the plastic water bottle as part of a long- term strategy to become the world’s most environmentally friendly outdoor music event.
Festival organizers are targeting the disposable bottle, one of the most conspicuous symbols of the throwaway culture, that each year leaves the 900-acre Somerset site wreathed in plastic, with an estimated one million plastic bottles being used during the festival.
Stainless-steel reusable bottles will be given to 2,000 road crew and band members, with thousands more on sale to festival-goers, to stop them relying on plastic bottles. The 140,000 ticket-holders are also being urged to bring reusable bottles that they can fill at 400 drinking- water taps dotted across the site.
Lucy Smith, Glastonbury’s green issues organizer, said: “We have amazing water quality in the UK but everyone is obsessed with drinking bottled water.”
She said the initiative precedes a plan for Glastonbury 2015 to replace all plastic beer glasses and cutlery with reusable items in an attempt to eradicate the legacy of plastic waste from the huge rural site.
Environmentalists estimate that 150 million tonnes of plastic waste currently litters the planet and oceans, poisoning ecosystems and killing wildlife.
Ultimately, festival organizers hope to make Glastonbury the world’s greenest greenfield festival, emulating America’s Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, which is a “leave-no-trace” event, where people have to take away all that they bring.
Glastonbury revellers are also being urged to travel to the site on public transport or try car-sharing with friends. “We want to be as sustainable as we can. We do everything we can, but coping with the litter of 140,000 people is a challenge. We can’t put bins everywhere,” added Smith.
Campaigners say that plastic water bottles can take hundreds or even thousands of years to completely biodegrade, with their manufacture exacerbating their negative ecological impact. Millions of barrels of oil are used in the manufacture of plastic bottles and the transportation of mineral water across the planet produces even more carbon emissions.
Overall, an estimated 13 billion plastic water bottles are sold in the UK every year, yet just one in five is said to be recycled.
Smith said that, instead of buying bottled water, festival-goers should take advantage of the water on tap, which is being drawn from huge underground reservoirs, instead of old-fashioned water tanks that provided heavily chlorinated drinking water. The charity WaterAid will also set up water kiosks around the site, stocking reusable bottles and cups, and offering free refills. In 2015, the kiosks – modelled on those found in Africa – will double as DJ booths at night.
Organizers say that almost half of all the rubbish left on site was recycled in 2013 and add that there will be 15,000 bins for recycling across the festival grounds in 2014.
Despite its growing eco-credentials, critics continue to snipe at Glastonbury, accusing it of becoming increasingly corporate in tone. The latest critic, Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, has vowed never to bring his band to Glastonbury Festival after dismissing it as “the most bourgeois thing on the planet”.
The weather forecast for Glastonbury was positive, with the festival due to be sunny and dry, experts ruling out a repeat of 1985, the festival’s windiest year; 1997, its muddiest; and 2005, known as the “year of thunder”. | 2 | Advance |
Nobody knows which came first: the economic crisis in Greece or shisha, the drug that is called the “cocaine of the poor”. But everyone agrees that shisha is a killer. And it costs only €2 or less.
“It is the worst drug. It burns your insides, it makes you aggressive and makes you go mad,” said Maria, an ex-heroin addict. “But it is cheap and it is easy to get, and everyone is taking it.”
This drug crisis is making problems for Athens’s health authorities, who already have the problem of large financial cuts.
Thousands of homeless Greeks, who live on the streets because of poverty and a loss of hope, are taking shisha. The drug is related to crystal meth. It is often mixed with battery acid, engine oil and even shampoo. It can make users become aggressive. And, even worse, it is easy to buy and 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. A lot of users have died.”
Charalampos Poulopoulos, the director of Kethea, Greece’s anti-drug centre, said shisha is an “austerity drug” – it is made by dealers who have become clever at making drugs for addicts who can no longer afford heroin and cocaine.
“The crisis has given dealers the possibility to sell a new, cheap drug, a cocaine for the poor,” said Poulopoulos. “You can sniff or inject shisha and you can make it at home – you don’t need any special knowledge. It is extremely dangerous.”
In all parts of Greece, there is a lot of depression, and drug and alcohol abuse. Crime has increased because austerity measures have cut the income of ordinary Greeks by 40%. Prostitution – the easiest way to pay for drugs – has also increased.
There are more suicides and HIV infections, and drug addicts (around 25,000 people) have become more and more self- destructive. Sixty-four per cent of young people in Greece are unemployed – this is the highest youth unemployment in the EU.
At the time when organizations such as Kethea need extra help, the Greek state has cut by a third the money it gives them. The European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund asked them to do this to help save the Greek economy.
Since the economic crisis began in 2009, Kethea has lost 70 of its 500 staff. They get less money, but studies show that for every euro the Greek state spends on anti-drug programmes such as Kethea, it saves about €6 because there is less crime and fewer health problems. “The cuts are a huge mistake,” said Poulopoulos.
On the streets of Athens, there is a fear that austerity not only doesn’t work – it kills. | 0 | Elementary |
Moses King, 48, is HIV positive. HIV is common in Liberia. King gets medicine for the disease from the Liberian government. But King and his family of six children cannot get the right food to eat. A poor farmer, he grew vegetables and bought rice. But he could not afford meat and fish – expensive, luxury products in Liberian markets but essential sources of protein.
Pate K Chon, who works with HIV sufferers in Liberia, has found a solution. She watched a film about a fish farm in Thailand several years ago and had the idea of starting a similar project in Liberia, so that HIV sufferers could have work and also get a source of protein.
“I saw this film about fish in a cement pool and I thought it was a good idea,” said Chon, who is also HIV positive. “So many of the people I work with don’t have the money to have a balanced protein diet and fish is such a clean source of protein – it doesn’t cause health problems like other sources and it is something we can farm.”
Chon began building a pool in which to farm fish. In June 2012, she met John Sheehy. He raised money for the non-profit fish farm in the northeast of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, and started learning about fish farming, doing an online course and speaking to other fish farmers in Africa.
“I raised the money and built the farm, learned how to build the tanks and water flow system,” said Sheehy. “I learnt a lot on my own and now I would love to be able to write a book and share my knowledge with other people,” he said.
The project is now a fish farm with 12 tanks, each with 5,000 fish – and will give up to 200,000 fish per year to a community of 1,200 mainly HIV-positive people, including King and his family. In addition to the fish, waste from the tanks is collected and used to water crops, also giving food and money to the community.
“Many people in the community work on the farm,” said Sheehy, “and what they get in return is fish. They can use those fish to feed themselves and to sell in the market so that they get money to buy other food. The fish farm gives these people with HIV a way of getting back into society – now they are buying and selling with people in the market every week.”
1.5% of Liberia’s 3.5 million people are HIV positive. Good nutrition is particularly important for people with HIV. They need much more protein to stop their health getting worse and to allow healthy growth. “Nutrition is one of the key things if you are taking drugs to treat HIV,” said Chon. “The drugs are toxic and if you don’t have food to eat, they can make you very ill. But food in Liberia is very expensive. We buy expensive rice from other countries and fish is difficult for most people to afford.”
“Fish farming is absolutely possible in Africa,” said Paul White, owner of a fish farm in Ivory Coast, which produces 3,000 tonnes of fish each year. But some people criticize farmed fish – they say the fish can be inbred and have high levels of toxins. Sheehy says they do not have those problems. “A lot of farmed fish is inbred, which causes problems, but we are using a process with local fish from Liberia, not fish from another region. And we test the water and watch it all the time.”
Sheehy hopes to open more fish farms throughout Liberia and the region. “A rice-growing co-operative in Sierra Leone asked us if we could do this on our property so that they can feed their workers and we have had interest from Nigeria and Central America,” said Sheehy. | 0 | Elementary |
Barack Obama has told young people to reject pessimism and meet people who have different political beliefs if they want to change the world.
On the last day of his last visit to Britain as US president, Obama told 500 youth leaders at a meeting in London: “Reject the idea that there are things we can’t control. As JFK said, our problems are manmade and can be solved by man.”
“You’ve never had better tools to make a difference,” he told the students at the question-and-answer session. “Reject pessimism and know that progress is possible.”
But Obama said he knew that young people had many challenges. He said it was a time of great change, with 9/11, 7/7, and with so much information and bad news, for example on Twitter.
The president told the audience to meet and talk with people who have different political beliefs: “Look for people who don’t agree with you and it will also help you to compromise.”
Obama said he was proud of his healthcare reforms and talked about the 2008 financial crisis: “I saved the world from depression – that was quite good.”
He also said that his talks with Iran and the response to the Ebola crisis were some of the best things about his presidency.
Tanya Williams, a community officer, said: “I like Barack Obama and it’s exciting to hear someone who has changed so much.”
Oliver Sidorczuk, 26, said: “Everyone is extremely excited to listen to what he has to say.”
Furqan Naeem, from Manchester, said: “I recently visited the United States and I saw some really important work the president did – the work brought different people together.”
Later, Obama met Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who said they had an “excellent” 90-minute discussion. They also talked about Britain’s membership of the EU.
After the meeting, Obama played golf with British Prime Minister, David Cameron. Obama had dinner with Cameron and the US ambassador, Matthew Barzun, and, then, travelled to Germany. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
At Addis Ababa airport, visitors are greeted by pictures of golden grains, tiny red seeds and a group of men around a giant pancake. The words say: Teff: the ultimate gluten-free crop!
Ethiopia is one of the worlds poorest countries, well known for its difficult food situation. But it is also the home of teff, a highly nutritious ancient grain that is now being sold in health-food shops and supermarkets in Europe and America.
Teffs tiny seeds the size of poppy seeds are high in calcium, iron and protein, and also amino acids. Naturally gluten free, the grain can be used instead of wheat flour in anything from bread and pasta to waffles and pizza bases. Like quinoa, the Andean grain, teffs superb nutritional profile offers the promise of new and lucrative markets in the west.
In Ethiopia, teff is a national obsession. Grown by around 6.3 million farmers, fields of the crop cover more than 20% of all farmland. It is ground into flour and used to make injera, the flatbread that is basic to Ethiopian cooking. The grain is also central to many religious and cultural ceremonies. Across the country, and in neighbouring Eritrea, people gather around large pieces of injera, which is also used as cutlery, scooping up stews and feeding one another as a sign of loyalty or friendship a tradition known as gursha.
The growing appetite for traditional crops and the booming health-food and gluten-free markets are breathing new life into the grain, which is increasingly being called Ethiopias second gift to the world, after coffee.
Sophie Kebede, a London-based businesswoman who owns a UK company specializing in the grain, says she was flabbergasted when she discovered its nutritional value. I didnt know it was so sought after. I am of Ethiopian origin; Ive been eating injera all my life.
Growing demand for so-called ancient grains has not always been a simple positive for poor communities. In Bolivia and Peru, there are reports of rising incomes from the now-global quinoa trade, but also malnutrition and conflicts over land, as farmers sell their entire crop to meet western demand.
Ethiopias growing middle class is also increasing demand for teff and rising prices have made the grain too expensive for the poorest people. Today, most small farmers sell most of what they grow to people in the city.
This may have helped boost incomes in some rural areas but it has had nutritional consequences, says the government, as teff is the most nutritionally valuable grain in the country. In urban areas, people eat up to 61kg of teff a year. In rural areas, the figure is 20kg. The type of teff people eat is different, too: the rich eat the more expensive magna and white teff varieties; poorer people usually eat less-valuable red and mixed teff and more than half combine it with cheaper cereals such as sorghum and maize.
The Ethiopian government wants to double teff production by 2015. It says that the grain could play an important role in school meals and emergency aid programmes, and help reduce malnutrition particularly among children and adolescents.
Though Ethiopia has a fast-growing economy, it remains on the UNs list of least-developed countries. An estimated 20% of under-fives are malnourished.
The governments Agricultural Transformation Agency aims to boost crops by developing improved varieties of the grain and introducing new planting techniques and tools.
The government does not allow the export of raw teff grain, only of injera and other processed products. But this could change: the goal is to produce enough teff for Ethiopia and for export.
Mama Fresh is a family company that has been selling injera to top restaurants and hotels in the Ethiopian capital for years. It also exports the flatbread to Finland, Germany, Sweden and the US, mostly for Ethiopians who live there. But, the company wants to double exports to America in 2014 and will soon start producing teff-based pizzas, bread and cookies.
Regassa Feyissa, an Ethiopian agricultural scientist and former head of the National Institute for Biodiversity, warns that, without careful planning, increased teff production for export may mean that farmers do not grow other important crops.
With not much Ethiopian teff on the international market, farmers in the US have started planting the crop. Farmers in Europe, Israel and Australia have also experimented with it. | 1 | Intermediate |
The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon intends to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man: the bard of Avon, born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564, who died there 400 years ago. Stratford remained hugely important throughout Shakespeare’s life, argues Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
“People have seen Shakespeare as someone who turns his back on Stratford and his family, goes to London to earn his fortune and only comes back to die,” he said. “But Stratford is where he bought land and property, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.” The seveneenth-century diarist, antiquarian and gossip John Aubrey, born 11 years after Shakespeare died, was at pains to point out there was nothing so very special about the bard. Aubrey, university educated, unlike Shakespeare, said that he acted “exceedingly well” and that “his Playes took well ”. The world has not agreed with Aubrey. The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be marked across Britain and the globe.
Macbeth will open in Singapore, Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeare’s Globe is completing the first world tour in the history of theatre, in which it has taken Hamlet to almost every country – North Korea is still holding out. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to showcase each of Shakespeare’s plays, along the South Bank.
The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and virtually every other theatre production company in the country will be marking the anniversary. Interpretations will range from the resolutely traditional to the Brighton-based Spymonkey’s Complete Deaths, a romp through the 74 deaths – 75 including a fly squashed in Titus
Andronicus – by stabbing, poisoning, smothering and smashing across the plays. There will also be hundreds of lectures, recitals, international academic conferences, films, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
For a man famous in his own lifetime, there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life and times. The plays would scarcely have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every scrap of every play they could find – drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors’ parts and 17 plays not known in any other version – into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those belonging to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a tattered copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious surviving documents will be gathered together in an exhibition at Somerset House in London, jointly organized by the National Archives and King’s College London, including four of his six known signatures, which are all slightly different.
The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, the court papers relating to the audacious move when Shakespeare and his fellow actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and accounts showing payments from the royal treasury for Boxing Day performances for James I and Queen Anne.
The outgoing Globe director, Dominic Dromgoole, recently jokily claimed Shakespeare as a true Londoner – albeit conceding “some spurious claim” by Stratford-upon-Avon. Stratford, however, will be insisting that the town made and educated Shakespeare. His old school room is being restored with a £1.4m Heritage Lottery grant and will open as a permanent visitor attraction.
Shakespeare bought the splendid New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died, according to literary legend, on St George’s Day, 23 April, the same day as his birth. “You don’t buy a house like New Place and not live there,” Paul Edmondson said. “The general public and many academics have consistently underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare.”
Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust describes New Place as “the jewel in the crown of the 400th anniversary celebrations” but, in truth, it is more of a gaping hole where the gem should be.
Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago and the house that replaced it, probably incorporating some of the original fabric, was flattened in 1759 by an irascible clergyman, Francis Gastrell, in a row over taxes. He had already cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer is said to have sat and worked, because he was irritated by all the tourists peering into his garden.
The gap in the Stratford streetscape has never been filled but a five-year archaeology project has peeled back the years and the news that Shakespeare’s kitchen had been found in the partly surviving cellars went round the world. The whole site is being redisplayed for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored. “Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “there would have been no Shakespeare.” | 2 | Advance |
Vienna is the world’s best city to live in, Baghdad is the worst and London, Paris and New York are not in the top 35, says an international study on quality of life.
German-speaking cities do well in the 18th Mercer Quality of Life study, with Vienna, Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt in the top seven.
Paris fell ten places to 37th. This was mostly because of the terrorist attacks on the city. Paris was just above London in 39th place.
The study looked at the economy, health, education, housing and the environment. Big companies use the results of the study to decide where they should open offices and factories and how much they should pay their employees.
Helena Hartlauer, 32, is from Vienna. She said she was not surprised about her city’s top position. For many years, Vienna’s government has spent money on good social housing. This makes Vienna a cheap place to live compared to other big cities.
“I live in a 100 square-metre apartment in a good area about 20 minutes’ walk from the city centre.
But my rent is just €800 (£625) a month.” A similar apartment in London costs over £2,000 and even more in New York, which came 44th in the study.
US cities do badly in the study, mostly because of worries about personal safety and crime. The US city in top position is San Francisco, in 28th position; Boston is 34th.
“You don’t realize how safe Vienna is until you go abroad,” said Hartlauer. “We also have terrific public transport – the underground trains run 24 hours at weekends and it only costs €1 per trip.”
“Vienna’s location is very special,” said Martin Eichtinger, Austrian ambassador to London, who lived in Vienna for 20 years. “The fall of the Berlin Wall helped make Vienna a centre for companies who want to do business in Central Europe.”
Mercer says Zurich in Switzerland has the world’s second highest quality of life but the Viennese say their city is far more fun. “There are more students in Vienna than any other German-speaking city,” said Hartlauer. “It’s a very young and lively city,” she added. | 0 | Elementary |
Galina Zaglumyonova was woken in her flat in central Chelyabinsk by a very big explosion that broke the balcony windows and broke pots containing her houseplants. When she jumped out of bed she could see a huge vapour trail in the morning sky and hear car alarms from the street below.
“I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Zaglumyonova. “There was a big explosion and then lots of little explosions. My first thought was that it was a plane crash.” In fact, it was a ten-tonne meteorite that fell to Earth in lots of pieces.
Almost 1,200 people were injured. More than 40 people were taken to hospital – most of them were hurt by flying glass. There were no deaths.
The meteorite entered the atmosphere at a speed of at least 33,000 miles per hour and broke into pieces between 18 and 32 miles above the ground.
The event caused panic in Chelyabinsk, a city of more than one million people to the south of Russia’s Ural mountains. People could see the vapour trail for hundreds of miles, even from neighbouring Kazakhstan.
Tatyana Bets was at work in the reception area of a hospital clinic in the centre of the city when the meteorite hit. “First we noticed the wind, and then the room was filled with a very bright light and we could see smoke in the sky,” she said. Then, after a few minutes, the explosions came.
At least three craters were found. One crater was more than six metres wide. Another piece of meteorite broke through the thick ice of a lake.
In Chelyabinsk, schools and universities were closed and people were told to go home early. About 200 children were injured.
Many people, mostly with cuts from flying glass, came into the clinic where Bets works. She said many of the students at a nearby college came to the hospital. “There were a lot of girls in shock”, she said.
More than 100,000 square metres of glass were broken and 3,000 buildings were hit. The total cost of the damage in the city is probably more than one billion roubles (£20 million).
The meteorite arrived a day before asteroid 2012 DA14 passed Earth very closely (about 17,510 miles). But experts said the two events were not connected.
There were lots of rumours in the first few hours after the incident. Reports on Russian state television and in local media suggested that the Russian military blew apart the meteorite.
The ultra-nationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said it was not a meteorite. He said it was a weapons test by the United States.
Some people were selling pieces of meteorite through internet sites within a few hours of the impact.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that it shows us that the whole planet is vulnerable. | 0 | Elementary |
Intermediate
Fit in four minutes sounds like a headline from a health magazine or an impossible promise on late-night satellite TV. Then you try Dr Izumi Tabatas training programme 20 seconds of allout effort, ten seconds of rest, repeat eight times and, after collapsing on the floor, you realize you were wrong.
Tabata has seen it all before. They were dead! he laughs as he remembers the first time he tried out his system on his university students in the early 1990s. After four minutes hard exercise they were completely exhausted. But after six weeks they saw the results and were surprised. We all were.
He began his research after he watched Japans speed skating team in the early 1990s he noticed that short bursts of incredibly hard exercise seemed to be at least as effective as hours of moderate training. Tabata tried to prove this with a simple experiment. One group of moderately trained students did an hour of steady cardiovascular exercise on an exercise bike five times a week. The other group did a ten-minute warm-up on the bike, followed by four minutes of Tabata training, four times a week plus one 30-minute session of steady exercise with two minutes of Tabata.
The results were very surprising. After six weeks of testing, the group following Tabatas plan exercising for just 88 minutes a week had increased their anaerobic capacity by 28% and their VO2 max, something that shows your cardiovascular health and maximal aerobic power, by 15%. The control group, who trained for five hours every week, also improved their VO2 max, but by 10% and their training had no effect on anaerobic capacity.We also measured increases in heart size after three weeks of doing the exercises, says Tabata
But you have to work very, very hard. You cant sit on a cross trainer, chewing gum and reading the latest issue of HELLO! The programme demands intensive bursts on a stationary bike or rowing machine; explosive bodyweight exercises, sprints and so on. Remember how you felt after doing a 100m sprint at school? Imagine doing eight of them with only a tensecond break to recover.
All-out effort at 170% of your VO2 max is the basis of the programme, says Tabata. If you feel OK afterwards, youve not done it properly. The first three repetitions will feel easy but the last two will feel impossibly hard. In the original plan the aim was to get to eight, but some only managed six or seven.
One person on an online forum wrote: When done correctly you should meet God. Most people are incapable of doing it correctly and shouldnt even try. Tabata doesnt completely agree. Everyone can do it but beginners should start with educated trainers so that they can work at the correct intensity for them, he explains. He adds that his programme burns an extra 150 calories in the 12 hours after exercise, even at rest. So, although it is used by most people to get fit or by fit people to get even fitter it also burns fat.
Its slightly surprising, therefore, that only serious athletes follow the programme at the moment. But that may change now that Tabata has agreed a deal that will lead to a network of instructors and a DVD range released towards the end of the year. I decided to do this because I often go on YouTube and, while I am pleased that people are doing it, some are doing it wrong because they dont realize how hard they need to work, says Tabata.
So should we all start following this plan? Richard Scrivener, a former rugby fitness coach, says that while the benefits are clear, Tabatas are an addition, not a replacement, to a favoured sport or training method. Runners, for instance, need a high level of running economy, which comes from learning the skills and running for many miles, says Scrivener, But they could reduce the number of long runs and the overall mileage by introducing Tabata training. This will give joints the chance to rest and recover, especially if you have a history of injuries and you would probably therefore get more benefit from the long runs when you do them.
Gym rats can benefit by doing three strength sessions and three Tabatas a week. And the rest of us can slowly increase the number of sessions, although we know that it will never get easier because every session needs maximum effort. Thats the cruel genius of the programme: it is hard and effective. | 1 | Intermediate |
Rebecka Singerer is often told that the beer she wants is too dark and too strong for her. Men often tell her to “have something sweeter”.
“No, I don’t want a fruit beer. Women can drink whatever they want,” she says.
Now Singerer, a childminder, has joined FemAle, a group of female drinkers in Gothenburg, to make and sell beer. It is Sweden’s first beer that is made by women.
People in Sweden can now buy We Can Do It, a bottled pale ale. Its label is similar to Rosie the Riveter, created as part of a US Second World War poster. The poster became a symbol of women’s power at work.
The person who started the group is Elin Carlsson, 25. She paints cars at the Volvo factory outside the city. “We Can Do It is not a female beer. It is a beer brewed by women that anyone can drink,” she says. “It’s nothing to do with feminism; it’s about equality – we wanted to show we can do it.”
There is a lot of prejudice in the beer world. Carlsberg and other big brewers have spent millions trying to sell beer to women. Carlsberg’s Eve and Copenhagen beers, Foster ’s Radler and Coors’s Animée are some of the beers they tried to sell to women – they were lighter, flavoured beers – but they were unsuccessful.
FemAle’s way of making beer is different. They invite women to tastings that allow women to try flavours and styles of beer that they may not normally try. These tastings are the way to “get more girls into the beer world”, the group says. “Bring your mother, sister, girlfriend, aunt and grandmother so we all can learn more about beer.”
We Can Do It was Felicia Nordström’s idea. She is a bar worker who says she was fed up with male beer snobs telling her: “What do you know about beer?”
She talked to FemAle and they joined Ocean, a local independent micro-brewery. One weekend they created the recipe; the next weekend they brewed 1,600 litres.
This beer is not aimed at women,” says Thomas Bingebo, the head brewer at Ocean. “When the big breweries target women, it usually fails. This is something completely different.”
The first bottles of We Can Do It were sold out straight away. Other breweries have already asked FemAle if they can brew new beers with them.
“Women choose a glass of wine because they don’t know about beer. They don’t know what to order,” says Carlsson. “We open up new worlds to them.” | 0 | Elementary |
On one day in August, one in seven people on Earth, 1 billion people, used Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. In a decade, the social network has transformed people’s relationships, privacy, their businesses, news media, helped topple regimes and even changed the meanings of everyday words.
“A more open and connected world is a better world.
It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities and a stronger society that reflects all of our values,” wrote Zuckerberg in the post announcing the numbers. These are just some of the ways his company changed everything – for better or worse.
1 Facebook has changed the definition of “friend”
“To friend” is now a verb. And, unlike in real life, when the ending of a friendship can be deeply traumatic, it is easy to “unfriend”, a word invented to describe ditching a casual acquaintance when they are no longer enhancing your Facebook newsfeed. Although the meanings of the words “share” and “like” are essentially the same, Facebook has brought an entirely new weight to the terms. School and university reunions have become redundant – you already know whose career is going well, whether the perfect pair have split and you’ve seen endless pictures of your schoolmates’ babies. You won’t be surprised by an ex in the street with a new girlfriend or boyfriend: you already know they’re dating someone else from the romantic selfies.
But, unlike in real life, Facebook has no hierarchy of friendships. A classmate from one project at university who you haven’t seen in 15 years, a friend-of-a-friend from a stag do or a colleague you’ve never actually spoken to in person – they are all Facebook friends in the same way as your closest mate or your spouse or your mum.
It doesn’t necessarily mean we see them the same way. Professor Robin Dunbar is famous for his research that suggests a person can only have roughly 150 people as a social group. Facebook hasn’t changed that yet, he believes, but, in an interview with the New Yorker, Dunbar said he feared it was so easy simply to end friendships on Facebook that, eventually, there may no longer be any need to learn to get along.
2 We care less about privacy
There’s a wise saying: if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. Facebook embodies that philosophy and created an entire industry from it. The astonishing thing is that users know that and they willingly hand over that information.
Pew Research Center found that most young people are more than willing to hand over their details.
An overwhelming majority of 91% post a photo of themselves, 71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%, more than half give email addresses and a fifth give their phone number. But, as so much of a person’s life is shared online, Facebook gives a platform for everyone to cultivate an image and a fanbase. In an article for the journal Frontiers in Psychology, academics described a new phenomenon, the emergence of the “Facebook self ”. More than 80% list their interests, allowing brands to target them most effectively. But most younger users do restrict their profiles, with 60% allowing friends only.
3 Facebook has created millions of jobs – but not in its own offices
Facebook has essentially created an entire sector, including indirect employment for people whose job it is to make the platform work for their brand.
“It is a tool like no other,” said Michael Tinmouth, a social media strategist who has worked with brands such as Vodafone and Microsoft. “Marketers have an understanding of a brand’s consumers like they have never had before. The data and analytics available to you are extraordinary. You know who your customers are, who they are friends with and how they engage with your brand.”
And advertisers pay a lot for that. Facebook reported ad revenue was up 46%, reaching $3.32bn. Facebook is also a minefield for brands. Suddenly, rather than complaint conversations taking place over the phone with a customer service representative or on a small specialist internet forum, angry customers can post their complaints for hundreds of their friends to see or even on the page where all loyal fans of the brand have been carefully cultivated. And an injustice can go viral.
4 Facebook has been the tool to organize revolutions
Though the Arab Spring was dubbed the Twitter revolution, organizing demonstrations and direct action has been revolutionized by Facebook. Manchester University’s Olga Onuch found Facebook had been the key medium for reaching half of all the Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine. Facebook posts signalled the start of the Maidan protests during the hours after it was announced that Ukraine would not sign a free trade and association agreement with the EU, Onuch found. The posts organized live action, not just online anger. Mustafa Nayyem, the Ukraine activist, posted: “If you really want to do something, don’t just 'like' this post. Let’s meet near the monument to independence in the middle of the Maidan.”
Many of those interviewed in Onuch’s research said they relied on Facebook for the truth about what was happening – unable to trust traditional media.
5 Facebook makes news, breaks news and decides what is news
Roughly 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds say the internet is their main news source and 63% of users overall, according to the Pew Research Center. About a third of Facebook users post about politics and government.
Most people will first encounter a piece of journalism or an item of breaking news via Facebook or other social media, and most of those encounters will be on mobiles.
Users might never have to leave the site to get their news: Instant Articles will see stories run within Facebook. It allows news companies to sell ads around their articles, gaining them 100% of that revenue, while Facebook can also sell ads around that article, with 70% of the revenue from the social network’s advertising also going to the news companies.
Facebook has also changed the ways journalists write stories. It is a resource many reporters cannot now live without. For better or (often) worse, it is a directory to find, contact and glean information for almost any ordinary person, who might suddenly find themselves at the centre of the day’s biggest news story. Facebook has its own newswire, sharing the most useful user reaction to breaking stories, including pictures and videos.
6 Users are changing Facebook
It used to be a site to get students connected, with only elite US universities allowed access.
In 2014, a decade after its launch, 56% of internet users aged 65 and older have a Facebook account. And 39% are connected to people they have never met in person.
Groups have given way to pages, writing on each other’s walls is passé and carefully curated albums have given way to instant mobile uploads. More than ever, the site is a gateway not just to your friends but to the rest of the internet.
We may as well get used to it, said David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect . “It might very well go away further down the road but something this big takes a long time to disappear,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Facebook has proven its ability to change and it will continue to be a very, very major player.” | 2 | Advance |
Angry waiters are asking people to support their battle to keep their tips. Protesters plan to target PizzaExpress restaurants, to try to get the restaurant chain to stop taking a percentage of tips for staff that have been paid on credit and debit cards. Protesters have also started an online petition – they hope that people who go to the restaurants will support them.
Some employees are very angry because PizzaExpress keeps, as an admin fee, 8p out of every £1 paid when tips are given by card. The chain, which has 430 restaurants in the UK, earns around £1 million a year from this practice, according to the union Unite.
“We believe this 8% fee is unfair. If the chain values its staff, it should pay them the total tips from customers,” said Chantal Chegrinec of Unite. “We are starting with PizzaExpress but they are not the only company who do this. And we will target other companies after this.”
The first protest will take place at a PizzaExpress restaurant at the British Museum in London. Unite did a survey of PizzaExpress staff after a Chinese company bought the chain in 2014. Lots of the staff complained about the 8% deduction from their tips so that’s why Unite began the campaign.
One angry PizzaExpress employee, who does not want to give her name, said that the admin fee cost her £3 a night. “I have worked at PizzaExpress for 15 years,” she said in a letter to Unite. “After all this time, I’m still only paid the national minimum wage of £6.50 an hour. So you see my colleagues and I need customer tips to increase our low wages. I work hard and am good at my job but, when PizzaExpress thinks it can take a percentage of our tips, I get upset.”
Restaurant chains Ask and Zizzi also deduct 8% of the tips paid by card. But other chains deduct even more. Café Rouge, Bella Italia and Belgo deduct 10%; Strada and Giraffe do, too.
A spokesperson for PizzaExpress said that the money they take from tips pays for a system that they use to share the tips among staff. “Staff use this system to decide how to share tips made by card,” she said.
The chain sells 29 million pizzas a year in its UK restaurants. It says it does not make a profit from the admin fee. But other restaurant groups do not deduct an admin fee from tips. Wagamama, Pizza Hut and TGI Friday all take nothing. Frankie & Benny’s, Chiquitos and Garfunkels used to take 10% but stopped years ago.
Unite recently targeted ten PizzaExpress restaurants in south London. They distributed leaflets to customers – the customers were “shocked and disgusted ” by the practice. PizzaExpress says they mention the admin fee at the bottom of the menus. But the employee who wrote to Unite said that customers were always surprised by the admin fee. Most customers then paid the tip in cash. Almost 6,000 people have signed Unite’s online petition.
One waiter said that at least a third of his money is from tips. He doesn’t work for PizzaExpress but has worked for 11 years for another restaurant chain. “I work in a busy London restaurant and I usually serve 150 people every night. I earn £40 to £50 in tips,” he says. “That seems like a lot but that money is very important to me because my basic pay is only £6.50 an hour.” | 0 | Elementary |
A Canadian man became famous because he gave a free round-the-world trip to a woman with the same name as his ex-girlfriend. The man has now returned from the trip with the woman he chose. Unfortunately, people who followed the story were disappointed because the pair did not fall in love. Jordan Axani, a 28-year-old from Toronto who started a charity, arrived back in Canada with Elizabeth Quinn Gallagher and said the pair were like brother and sister.
Axani became famous in 2014 when he offered an air ticket to any Canadian named Elizabeth Gallagher. He reserved a three-week holiday with his girlfriend but they split up and he was unable to change the name on the tickets.
Axani’s new travelling companion, was, of course, called Elizabeth Gallagher. She was a 23-year-old student from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. This Elizabeth Gallagher, who calls herself Quinn, replied to an online posting from Axani and he chose her. Before the trip, she already had a boyfriend. But people still hoped that the globetrotters might fall in love. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
“I’m going to be very clear,” Axani said, soon after the pair returned to Toronto. “The trip was never a romantic idea. It was completely platonic. I do not think of Quinn in a romantic way at all. She is a good friend. I think of her as a little sister – that is all.”
But it was difficult to create that brother-sister relationship. “It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t immediate. It took us about a week to really understand each other,” Axani said. They made some mistakes as the pair got to know each other. “At the end of the trip, we’d developed a really great rhythm – one second, we had really funny jokes and, the next second, we knew when the other person needed time alone.”
The pair did not fall in love, but Axani said the trip was “fantastic”. They visited Milan, Venice, Vienna, Prague, Khao Lak (in Thailand) and Hong Kong. A favourite place was Prague, Axani said, where they met more people than anywhere else on the trip. “During two and a half days, I think we met about 24 people. So that’s a lot of stories, that’s a lot of people and that’s a lot of love for their home city of Prague.”
People followed the pair on Twitter and Instagram, Axani said. And they were even recognized in the street in Hong Kong. “It was an adventure. We had a great time. We learned a lot about ourselves and about each other.”
Axani arrived back in Toronto at 3am and went directly to a meeting at his charity, A Ticket Forward. Axani started the charity after his online posting went viral – he plans to offer round-the-world-trips to victims of abuse, cancer and war.
Axani also wants to turn his story into a television show or film, he said. “There’s been lots of interest from many production companies.” Axani said he was not looking for his next Elizabeth Gallagher yet. “I’m not looking for anything. But we’ll see,” he said. “As always, life is a journey.” | 0 | Elementary |
Low-income countries will remain on the front line of human-induced climate change over the next century, experiencing gradual sea-level rises, stronger cyclones, warmer days and nights, more unpredictable rainfall, and larger and longer heatwaves, according to the most thorough assessment of the issue yet.
The last major United Nations (UN) assessment, in 2007, predicted runaway temperature rises of 6°C or more by the end of the century. That is now thought unlikely by scientists, but average land and sea temperatures are expected to continue rising throughout this century, possibly reaching 4°C above present levels – enough to devastate crops and make life in many cities unbearably hot.
As temperatures climb and oceans warm, tropical and subtropical regions will face sharp changes in annual rainfall, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in Stockholm and published online in September.
East Africa can expect to experience increased short rains, while west Africa should expect heavier monsoons. Burma, Bangladesh and India can expect stronger cyclones; elsewhere in southern Asia, heavier summer rains are anticipated. Indonesia may receive less rainfall between July and October, but the coastal regions around the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand can expect increased rainfall extremes when cyclones hit land.
“It is virtually certain that, in the long term, global precipitation will change. High latitude countries, such as in Europe or North America, are expected to receive more rainfall, but many subtropical arid and semi-arid regions will likely experience less precipitation. Over wet tropical regions, extreme precipitation events will very likely be more intense and more frequent in a warmer world,” said the report’s authors.
They added: “Monsoon onset dates are likely to become earlier or not to change much while monsoon withdrawal rates are very likely to delay, resulting in a lengthening of the season.”
Scientists in developing countries and commentators have welcomed the report, which they said backed their own observations.
“The IPCC makes the case that climate change is real and happening much more strongly than before. We are already seeing the effects of climate change in Bangladesh and across south Asia. It’s not news to us. Most developing countries are facing climate change now. They do not need the IPCC to tell them that the weather is changing,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Dhaka.
Scientists have also lowered projections of sea-level rises. Depending on future greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels will rise an average of 40 –62 cm by 2100. Nevertheless, there will be significant geographical variations; many millions of people living in the developing world’s great cities, including Lagos and Calcutta, are threatened.
Weather disasters are also more likely in a warmer world, the report suggests. Although the global frequency of tropical cyclones is expected to decrease or remain essentially unchanged, they may become more intense, with stronger winds and heavier rainfall.
Life in many developing-country cities could become practically unbearable, given that urban temperatures are already well above those in surrounding countryside. Much higher temperatures could reduce the length of the growing period in some parts of Africa by up to 20%, the report said.
Dr Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, says: “Climate models are not yet robust enough to predict impacts at local and regional scales, but it is clear that everybody is vulnerable in some way.”
The charity Oxfam predicted that world hunger would worsen as climate changes inevitably hurt crop production and disrupt incomes. They suggested the number of people at risk of hunger might climb by 10% to 20% by 2050, with daily per-capita calorie availability falling across the world.
“The changing climate is already jeopardizing gains in the fight against hunger, and it looks set to worsen,” said Oxfam. “A hot world is a hungry world. If the remainder of the 21st century unfolds like its first decade, we will soon experience climate extremes well outside the boundaries of human experience.” | 2 | Advance |