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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. | 0ele
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The vice-president of Google has warned that digitized material from blogs, tweets, pictures, videos and official documents such as emails could be lost forever because the programs we need to view them will no longer exist. Our 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. He said that we might become a “forgotten generation or even a forgotten century” because of “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
Cerf said we should develop digital methods to preserve old software and hardware to read old files. “So much of the information about our daily lives is in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets and all of the world wide web. So it’s clear that we could lose a lot of our history,” he said. “If we want to keep it, we need to make sure that people can still see the digital objects we create today in the future,” he added.
What is ’bit rot’ and is Vint Cerf right to be worried? His warning highlights an irony about modern technology: we digitize music, photos, letters and other documents so that they survive for centuries but the programs and hardware people will need to read those files don’t survive.
“We are throwing all of our data into an information black hole. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them. But what we don’t understand is that, if we don’t do something, those digital versions may not be any better than the things that we digitized. In fact, they may be worse,” Cerf says. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
Ancient civilizations did not have these problems because people wrote histories down and we need only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future historians will have to read PDFs, Word documents and hundreds of other file types, using special software and sometimes hardware, too.
The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was normal to save documents on floppy disks and buy computer games on cassettes. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, we can now only find the equipment to view them in museums.
Cerf warns that we will also lose important political and historical documents because of bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln. She went to libraries around the US and found the paper letters of the people involved. “In today’s world, those letters would be emails and it will be almost impossible to find them one hundred years from now,” said Cerf.
He admits that historians will try to preserve important material. But he says that people often don’t understand the importance of documents until hundreds of years later. Historians have learned how Archimedes thought about infinity in 3BC because they found his writings hidden under the words of a thirteenth-century book. “We’ve been surprised by what we’ve learned from objects that have been preserved by accident,” he said.
Researchers in Pittsburgh are trying to find a solution to bit rot. They are creating a computer that can read old files.
Inventing new technology helps but it is only part of the solution. It could be even more difficult to get the legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies. “To do this properly, we might need to think about things like copyright. We’re talking about preserving documents for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Cerf. | 0ele
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A car with a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour, two seats and no pedals or steering wheel does not sound very interesting. But Google, in the US, shocked the car and taxi industries when it unveiled the latest version of its driverless car.
Google has begun testing the electric car at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The car does not have all the normal car controls, such as foot pedals. Instead, it has a smartphone app that calls it and tells it the destination, and a STOP button between the two seats in case the passengers need to override the computer.
The company is building about 100 prototypes for a two-year test. The company’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, said that the vehicle was still just a prototype. He says that they want to change the world for people who do not find it easy to travel around.
Talking about the car, he said, “You’re just sitting there; no steering wheel, no pedals. For me, it was very relaxing. About ten seconds after getting into the car, I forgot I was there. I found it really fun.”
Google says that the aim of the project is to improve safety. They say that the car is made with foam at the front and a plastic windscreen, so “it should be far safer than any other car for pedestrians”.
The cars have been built specially by a company in Detroit. Google will now test the cars, which are not yet for sale.
There need to be detailed scans of the roads before the cars can drive on them, because they cannot collect and process enough information in real time.
So far, there are detailed maps of about 2,000 miles of California’s roads, but California has more than 170,000 miles of roads.
Google says it wants to license the technology to traditional car makers when they have improved it.
But the idea that driverless cars will replace taxis with human drivers has alarmed some people.
Dennis Conyon from the UK National Taxi Association said that taxi drivers will become unemployed.
London has about 22,000 black taxis and Conyon thinks that the total number of people who drive taxis in the UK is about 100,000.
Other car makers, including Volvo, Ford and Mercedes, are going to make vehicles that will be different from Google’s version because they will have driver controls.
But Chris Urmson, director of the driverless car project at Google, said that the new prototypes do not have a steering wheel or brakes because a human passenger might not be able to take control in an emergency. He said that it was simpler just to have an emergency stop button.
Urmson said: “The vehicles will be very basic. But they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And, that’s an important step towards improving road safety and helping millions of people travel around more easily.”
So far, the Google versions of the driverless cars have driven 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the computer. The company says that thousands of people die each year on the roads and that about 80% of crashes are caused by human mistakes. | 0ele
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At the beginning of the final series of the TV programme, Downton Abbey, there is a feeling of sadness and everyone knows things are changing. The year is 1925 and Downton Abbey’s neighbours are selling their stately home. At Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham wants to reduce the number of servants.
The real Downton Abbey is Highclere Castle – a stately home owned by George Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon. At Highclere Castle, they have more money than before. Lady Fiona Carnarvon says that the huge success of Downton all around the world has paid for building repairs at the castle.
“It’s been an amazing magic carpet ride for all of us,” she said. “I’m very grateful. My husband and I love Highclere Castle. Now, millions of other people love it.”
At the moment, they only use the ground floor and first floor of Highclere, on the borders of Hampshire. But, a restoration project of tower rooms has begun. When it is finished, visitors will be able to climb up into the tower to an exhibition of the work of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Sir Charles Barry, who also rebuilt Highclere Castle between 1839 and 1842.
In 2009, when the Downton Abbey producers first asked about filming at Highclere Castle, the castle needed £12 million of repairs. “It was just after the banking crisis and we were worried. Then, Downton began and Highclere became a major tourist attraction.”
The number of visitors doubled, to 1,200 a day, after Downton Abbey, written by Julian Fellowes, was shown around the world. It was a hit in the UK in 2010 and, then, in the US. It is now shown on television in 250 countries.
The Downton tourists are part of a growing phenomenon. The organization, VisitBritain, says that nearly 30% of foreign visitors, nearly nine million people, visit castles and historic houses. Almost half of visitors to Britain now say they want to visit places from films or TV.
More than a million tourists take a tour of historic buildings each year and they spend more than £1 billion. Fifty-one per cent of Brazilians, 42% of Russians and Chinese, and 35% of Indian visitors will probably include a visit to a site of interest in their trips.
VisitBritain’s director, Patricia Yates, said: “The links between tourism, films and TV are strong.” She added that period dramas, like Downton Abbey, have also made places outside of London more popular.
“Downton Abbey expresses a certain view of Britain. It is a fantasy world, based in a particular time in history. It’s the first TV period drama that everyone knows and talks about.”
Lady Carnarvon says that the long-term future of Highclere might not be secure. But, she says, “The programme has allowed us to spend faster on the buildings.”
Highclere Castle plans a Tutankhamun event in 2022, 100 years after the 5th Earl of Carnarvon went to Egypt with Howard Carter and discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. Another event is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed the grounds.
“Every single day, don’t take anything for granted,” said Lady Carnarvon. “You have to invest in these great houses. I’ve tried to show people it is fun. We have special events, not just a walk around a dusty house.” | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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George W Bush, Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Hawking have done it. David Cameron, Barack Obama and Pamela Anderson have refused to do it. The Ice Bucket Challenge began in the US in July. It has raised $100 million for the ALS Association, an American motor neurone disease charity, and £4.5 million for a British charity, as well as thousands of pounds for charities in Hong Kong and Australia.
But some people are unhappy with the Ice Bucket Challenge. Animal-rights groups and environmentalists (people who want to protect the natural world) have criticized it. Some people say it wastes water. Other people criticize it because some people enjoy the fun and then do not donate anything to charity.
But the challenge continues to grow. If you don’t know how it works, someone gives a short speech to camera about the charity, then throws a bucket of ice cubes in water over their head or asks a friend to do it. Then, they give the names of three other people who have to do the same or donate money to the charity.
It was an unlucky coincidence that the Ice Bucket Challenge was happening during World Water Week, when people from all over the world met in Stockholm to discuss the planet’s water crisis. The charity WaterAid is asking people to use recycled water from their baths or rainwater from their gardens, or to use sea water.
Douglas Graham, of the UK Motor Neurone Association, said: “We are not surprised about the criticism but this is a wonderful windfall and we’re so grateful. We didn’t expect it but, suddenly, the donations just started.” The money is a very big help to a small charity that looks after sufferers of a terrible disease that has no cure and kills five people a day in the UK.
Former Baywatch star and animal-rights activist Pamela Anderson wrote a public letter to the ALS Association. In the letter, she said that she did not like the charity’s use of animal experimentation.
A few US stars have rejected the challenge because of California’s drought. Actor Matt Damon solved the problem by using water from his toilet. Actor Verne Troyer used milk, also for environmental reasons. And some people say the challenge caused a water shortage on the Scottish island of Colonsay.
Another criticism is that small charities won’t know what to do with the extra money but the MND Association rejects this. “Oh, we know what to do with the extra money here,” said Graham. “We pay for research to find the causes of the disease, and a treatment or cure. We give care and support to 3,500 people and they need it because this disease is expensive to manage. More than 50% of people with the disease die within two years.”
But, for many people with a connection to the disease, the awareness that the challenge has created is as important as the money. Normally, the MND Association gets about 300,000 hits a year on its website. On just one day recently, it had 330,000 hits.
“It is great to donate to any charity. I understand that some people might want to donate to a different charity,” said Graham. “In 2013, British people gave £62 billion to charity – we should be proud of that. It’s fabulous for us to get this windfall. Over the next few weeks, we will decide how to spend the money in the best way.” | 0ele
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In Iceland, you can be called Aagot, Arney or Ásfríður; Baldey, Bebba or Brá. Dögg, Dimmblá, Etna and Eybjört are fine and so are Frigg, Glódís, Hörn and Ingunn. Jórlaug is OK and so are Obba, Sigurfljóð, Úranía and Vagna. But, if you are a girl in Iceland, you cannot be called Harriet.
“The situation is silly,” said Tristan Cardew, a British cook who moved to Iceland in 2000. With his Icelandic wife, Kristin, Cardew is appealing against a decision by the National Registry in the capital Reykjavik – the registry decided not to renew the Cardew’s ten-year-old daughter Harriet’s passport because it does not recognize her first name.
The registry does not recognize the name of Harriet’s 12-year-old brother Duncan either, so, until now, the two children have travelled on passports with the names Stúlka and Drengur Cardew, which mean Girl and Boy Cardew. But, this time, the registry has decided to apply the law. “And the law says no official document will be given to people who do not have an approved Icelandic name.”
The situation meant the family were going to miss their holiday in France but they have 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. The law says that – unless both parents are foreign – the names of children born in Iceland must be submitted to the National Registry within six months of birth. If a name is not on a recognized list of 1,853 female and 1,712 male names, the parents must get approval from the Icelandic Naming Committee.
About 5,000 children are born in Iceland each year and the committee receives about 100 applications. It rejects about half of these names because it wants to preserve the Icelandic language. There is a law that says names must be able to have Icelandic grammatical endings and should be written using the ordinary rules of Icelandic spelling.
What this means is that names with letters that do not officially exist in Iceland’s 32-letter alphabet, such as “c”, are not permitted. Also, names that cannot be used with the case endings used in Icelandic are also rejected. “That was the problem with Harriet,” said Cardew.
The country’s naming laws have been criticized in recent years: in 2013, Blær – “Light Breeze” – Bjarkardóttir Rúnarsdottir won the right to be officially called her name, not “Girl”. The former mayor of Reykjavik, Jón Gnarr, has also called Iceland’s naming law “unfair, stupid and against creativity”.
The Cardews could solve Harriet’s problem by giving her an Icelandic middle name. “But it’s a bit late for that and much too silly,” said Cardew. “Are they saying they don’t want us here?” | 0ele
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1 Passing clouds
One of the good things about flying is seeing clouds very close. They seem to be light, but they carry a lot of water – around 500 tonnes in a small cloud. And water is heavier than air. So why don’t clouds fall out of the sky like rain? They do, but they take a very long time. An average cloud would take a year to fall one metre.
2 On cloud nine
Most of us are happy to call clouds “fluffy ones” or “nasty black ones”, but there are more than 50 cloud types. The 50 cloud types fit into nine categories. Cloud nine is the very big cumulonimbus, so to be “on cloud nine” means that you are on top of the world or very,
very happy.
3 Around the rainbow
The best place to see a rainbow is from a plane. Rainbows are made when sunlight hits raindrops. We see a bow because the Earth is in the way, but, from a plane, a rainbow is a complete circle.
4 Mr blue sky
Sunlight is white. It includes all the colours of the spectrum. As it passes through air, some of the light is scattered. Blue light scatters more than other colours, so the blue looks like it comes from the sky.
5 There’s life out there
We usually only see clouds and other planes from a flying aircraft’s window, but the air is full of bacteria – 1,800 different types of bacteria.
6 Turbulence terror
Even someone who flies all the time can feel sick because of turbulence. The good news is that no modern airliner has ever crashed because of these sudden and violent movements of air. People have been hurt when they are not strapped in or falling luggage may hit them – but the plane is not going to fall out of the sky.
7 You can’t cure jet lag
The world is divided into time zones. When you take a long flight, the difference between local time and your body’s time causes jet lag. But jet lag can be reduced if you keep food bland for 24 hours before travel, drink a lot and live on your destination time from the moment you get on the aircraft.
8 Supersonic 747s
Many of us have travelled faster than sound. There are many jet streams in the air around the Earth, especially on the journey from the US to Europe. A jet stream can move as fast as 250 miles per hour. If an airliner flying at 550mph enters a jet stream, the result can be that the plane flies at 800mph. That’s faster than the speed of sound.
9 Flying through time
Flying across time zones means that we travel through time. But this time travel is so small that crossing the Atlantic every week for 40 years would only move you 1/1,000th of a second into the future.
10 Terrible tea
Don’t blame the cabin attendant if your tea isn’t great. Water should be just under 100°C when you pour it on to tea leaves – but that isn’t possible on a plane. It’s impossible to get water hotter than 90°C during flight – so choose coffee.
11 I can’t hear my food
People often say that airline food is bland and without taste. But some of the problem may not be bad food. A plane is a noisy place and food loses some of its taste when there are loud noises.
12 Needle in a haystack
With modern technology, it seems strange that Malaysian flight MH370 could disappear – but finding a missing aircraft is a needle-in-a- haystack problem. The plane knows where it is but it does not send this information anywhere. The problem is not technology – the problem is that there is no law that says that planes must send this information.
13 Volcanic fallout
Air travel can be cancelled by volcanic activity. Ash melts in the heat of the engine, then solidifies on the rotors. It is very dangerous to ignore the volcanic ash.
14 The wing myth
For many years, we taught the wrong explanation for the way wings keep planes in the air. But now we know that a plane stays in the air because of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The shape of the wing pushes air down. As the air is pushed down, the wing gets an equal and opposite push up, and this lifts the plane. | 0ele
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A recent report says that the wealthiest people in India will become four times richer by 2018 – hundreds of thousands of new entrepreneurs and inheritors will become multimillionaires. In India, at the moment, business people are beginning to be confident again in the world’s biggest democracy.
Economic growth has been weak in recent years in India. The cost of basic foods has risen and the value of the Indian currency has fallen. The economy has not been good but there are now nearly a sixth more Indians with more than $3.75 million than in 2013, the report says. “Cities are mushrooming, the middle class is growing, there are lots more opportunities and Indian politics have improved a lot in recent months,” according to Murali Balaraman, a co-author of the report.
The richest people in India have money and houses that are worth a trillion dollars. This is about a fifth of the total wealth in the country. By 2018, that total will probably reach $4 trillion, the report says, and there will be three times more multimillionaires.
New rich people are buying lots of luxury things. “They really want to show or talk about their wealth and buying luxury things is a nice way to do it,” Balaraman said. Abhay Gupta, who works for the company Luxury Connect, said that more and more people will want to buy luxury things and experiences. “There is a huge class of people who want to copy very wealthy people,” he said.
Cars are very popular things to buy, the report says. In 2009, wealthy Indians bought Indian SUVs to impress their friends but now they buy foreign cars. Mercedes sold 47% more cars in India in 2013. BMW has launched a new $200,000 model in Delhi.
But companies sell fewer luxury cars because of India’s terrible transport system. Lamborghini’s Chief Executive, Stephan Winkelmann, said, in 2013, that the traffic and roads in India “are not so suitable” for the $450,000 sports cars. In India, Lamborghini sells two models: the Gallardo and the Aventador, which has a maximum speed of 217 miles per hour. Winkelmann said Lamborghini’s Indian customers were much younger than European customers. In India, a normal buyer is in his 30s. But the most popular investments are still houses – mainly in India – and jewellery.
India’s super-rich have often surprised people around the world with their very high spending. Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest man, has built the world’s most expensive home in Mumbai, the business capital. The 27-storey tower has helicopter pads, indoor cinemas and more than 600 people who work there. It is worth $1 billion.
The three-day wedding of the niece of Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon who lives in the UK and has $16 billion, cost $80 million. Hundreds of guests flew to Barcelona for the wedding and party, which was in a museum in the city.
But people who buy luxury things are becoming more and more difficult to satisfy, the report says. One super-rich person bought nine boxes of Japanese whisky that cost more than over $750 a bottle for a wedding party. The attraction of the imported whisky was that no one who came to the wedding would be able to find the same drink in India. Another super-rich person bought identical pairs of Louis Vuitton bags, then cut up half of them to make clothes that would match her bags.
Even the traditional Indian wedding is changing. Traditionally, people send presents such as silver plates, dried fruit or sweets with wedding invitations. But, now, rich people prefer to send gifts by top western designers. “These days, it’s Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton bags,” says Gupta.
Almost half the new multimillionaires live in small cities and many of them give a lot of money to charity. Co-author Balaraman says that more rich people will not create more social problems because a wide gap in wealth is an “accepted norm” in India. “People know that someone is rich and someone is poor and they carry on with their lives,” he explains. | 0ele
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An octopus has escaped from the National Aquarium in New Zealand. It escaped from its tank, slid down a 50-metre drainpipe and disappeared into the sea. Inky – a common New Zealand octopus – escaped after someone left the lid of his tank open. Staff at the aquarium believe that, in the middle of the night, when there was no-one in the building, Inky climbed down the side of the tank and travelled across the floor.
Rob Yarrell, national manager of the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier, said: “Octopuses are famous for their ability to escape. I don’t think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, because octopuses like to live alone. But, he is such a curious boy. He would want to know what’s happening on the outside. That’s his personality.”
One idea is that Inky crossed the aquarium floor – a journey of three or four metres – and then, he realized that freedom was very near so he entered a drainpipe that led directly to the sea. The drainpipe was 50 metres long and opened into Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
It is also possible that Inky escaped through 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 started looking for Inky. “The staff and I have been sad. But then, this is Inky and he’s always been a bit of a surprise octopus.”
Reiss Jenkinson, a keeper at the National Aquarium, said he was absolutely certain Inky was not stolen. “I understand octopus behaviour very well,” he said. “I have seen octopuses on boats escape through waste pumps. And, the security here is too good for anyone to take Inky and why would they?”
Because octopuses have no bones, they can fit into very small spaces and can squeeze through gaps the size of coins. They are also very intelligent and able to use tools. At the Island Bay Marine Education Centre in Wellington, an octopus visited another tank every night to steal crabs, then return to its own tank. Another octopus at the centre, Ozymandias, broke a world record for opening a jar.
Inky was brought to the National Aquarium several years ago by a local fisherman who found him in a fishing pot. Yarrell said, “He lived on the reef and fought with fish so he was quite ill.” According to Yarrell, Inky – who is about the size of a rugby ball – was an “unusually intelligent” octopus. “He was very friendly 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 increase security as a result of the escape but the staff now know “what octopuses can do” so they will be more careful. The aquarium is not looking for another octopus but, if a fisherman brought in another octopus, the aquarium might take it. “You never know,” said Yarrell. “There’s always a chance Inky will come home to us.” | 0ele
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1 Flappy Bird
Dong Nguyen, the inventor of the mobile game Flappy Bird, removed it from app stores. It was downloaded more than 50 million times and was making him around £30,000 each day. He said its success ruined his simple life. On Twitter, he said: “I cannot live like this anymore.”
Nguyen is the latest inventor who wishes he hadn’t created a monster:
2 The labradoodle
The labradoodle isn’t a monster – it’s lovely. But what’s monstrous is the way people sell crossbreed dogs since the labradoodle’s inventor, Wally Conron, first created the dog in the 1980s. “I’ve created a lot of problems”, he said. “There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs now.” Conron invented the labradoodle when he was working for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia. He invented it as a dog for a blind woman. Her husband was allergic to dog hair. He didn’t know that the labradoodle would become so popular.
3 The AK-47
Six months before his death in December 2013, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the assault rifle, wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and asked: “If my rifle killed people, am I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, 93 years old, the son of a poor farmer, Christian and Orthodox, responsible for people’s deaths, even if they were enemies?”
4 Electronic tagging
The electronic tag was first made in the 1960s to check if ex-prisoners went to school or work, and to reward them for good behaviour. Its inventors, Bob Gable and his brother Kirkland, were later horrified that the tag became a form of control and punishment. “It’s not pleasant,” Kirkland Gable said in 2010, “but I’m not in control of the universe. I have to realize there are some things out of my control.”
5 Pepper spray
After police sprayed peaceful protesters with pepper spray at a University of California campus in 2011, Kamran Loghman, one of the scientists who helped develop the spray in the 80s said, “I have never seen such an inappropriate use of chemicals.”
6 The office cubicle
In the late 60s, a new kind of office was made to give workers privacy and increase how well and how quickly people work by giving more work space. But the cubicle became a way for companies to put employees into smaller spaces. The inventor, Bob Propst, said, in 1997, “the use of cubicles in modern companies is crazy.” | 0ele
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JMW Turner, one of Britain’s greatest painters, will be on the new £20 note, after a national vote. It will be the first time an artist is on a British banknote. The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, asked the public to say which deceased cultural person they wanted to see on the new banknote.
Turner, who is famous for his paintings of the sea, won the vote. There was a list that included 590 painters, sculptors, fashion designers, photographers, film-makers and actors. Thirty thousand members of the public suggested the people on the list.
The list included Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander McQueen, Derek Jarman, Laura Ashley, William Morris and Vanessa Bell.
The final five – Barbara Hepworth, Charlie Chaplin, Josiah Wedgwood, William Hogarth and Turner – were chosen because of their importance to the visual arts and British society and because of their influence.
They made the announcement about the new banknote at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate. Carney and the artist Tracey Emin, who grew up in the town, made the announcement together.
Carney said that banknotes are not just practical – they “can be a piece of art in everyone’s pocket”.
The note will show Turner’s 1799 self-portrait and also one of Turner’s most famous paintings, The Fighting Temeraire , a painting of a ship that had an important role in Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The note will also inlude a quote from the artist – “light is therefore colour” – and his signature. The signature is from his will, in which he left many of his paintings to Britain.
Historical people first appeared on banknotes in 1970. Turner, and also Winston Churchill and Jane Austen, will appear on the new polymer notes – a plastic-type material. Churchill is on the £5 and Austen is on the £10 note. The new £20 note will appear by 2020.
Turner was born in 1775 in London, the son of a barber, and he went to the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 14. In 1786, he went to Margate and there his love of painting and drawing the north-east Kent coast began. He returned to the Kent coast many times in his life and it was where he painted some of his most dramatic paintings. He said that, on the Kent coast, the skies were “the loveliest in all Europe”.
Turner painted more than 550 oil paintings and 2,000 watercolours in his lifetime. A film about Turner was made in 2014, with Timothy Spall as the artist.
Victoria Pomery, the director of Turner Contemporary, said: “The vote shows that Turner is Britain’s favourite artist.” | 0ele
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You’ve spent eight hours in the office. You’ve finished the most important work of the day. This is the time when most workers would think about going home.
But, for millions of Japanese employees, if they leave work and arrive home in time for dinner, people say that they are disloyal to their company.
But now, the government is trying to do something about Japan’s culture of overwork. It wants to make workers take at least five days’ paid holiday a year.
Japanese employees are allowed an average of 18.5 days’ paid holiday a year. Companies must allow them a minimum of ten days’ paid holiday, plus 15 one-day national holidays. But very few employees take these days. Most take only nine days of holiday, according to the labour ministry. Many British workers think that a two-week summer holiday is their right but workers in Japan think that a four-night vacation in Hawaii is a big self-indulgence.
By 2020, the government hopes that the law will make Japanese employees follow the example of British workers, who take an average of 20 days’ paid annual leave, and workers in France, who take an average of 25.
Japan’s employees are respected and admired in the rest of the world for their commitment to the company. But they often have no time for anything else.
Couples don’t have time to start families. So, Japan has a low birth rate and the population is declining. More employees are falling ill from stress or even dying through overwork.
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 from the Japanese government.
“Nobody else uses their vacation days,” says Erika Sekiguchi, a 36-year-old worker. She spends 14 hours a day at work and used only eight of her 20 days of paid vacation in 2014, six of which were sick leave.
Yuu Wakebe, who works at the health ministry, admits that he does 100 hours of overtime a month. “It is a worker’s right to take paid vacations,” Wakebe said. “But workers in Japan have to do a lot of extra work for no money.”
Workers are scared that their colleagues will think they are not working hard enough. This is one reason for a rise in stress-related illness, early death and suicide. About 200 people die every year from heart attacks and strokes in Japan, caused by long hours and hard work. | 0ele
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John Lewis’s 2015 Christmas advert shows a lonely old man who lives on the moon.
Department store John Lewis’s Christmas ad, which, for many people, shows that the Christmas shopping season has begun, aims to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for the charity Age UK. John Lewis will also encourage staff and customers to care for elderly people who might be alone over the holiday.
The department store has spent £7 million on a campaign that includes the TV ad, a smartphone game and merchandise, including glow-in-the- dark pyjamas. It has also built areas that look like the surface of the moon in 11 of its stores.
After two years of successful ads with cute animals – a bear and hare, then a penguin – this time, the story is about a young girl, Lily, who sees an old man living in a small wooden house on the moon through her telescope. The girl tries to send him a letter and a note via bow and arrow. Then, she floats him a present of a telescope tied to balloons. This helps them to make contact.
The ad’s message is: “Show someone they’re loved this Christmas”. This is similar to Age UK’s campaign: “No one should have no one at Christmas”. Profits from three products – a mug, gift tag and card – will go to the charity.
Rachel Swift, head of marketing at John Lewis, said that people talk about charities at Christmas and the ad makes you think about someone who lives on your street that might not see anybody.
The campaign features the Oasis track Half the World Away sung by Norwegian singer Aurora.
The ad cost £1 million to make. The moon scenes were shot at the Warner Bros Studios, where the Harry Potter films were made, and the specially built set was created by one of the team behind the latest Star Wars film, The Force Awakens.
As in the last few years, John Lewis showed a short film on TV and social media using the hashtag #OnTheMoon before it showed the full advert. There will be a full moon on Christmas Day 2015 – a complete coincidence, says Swift.
In 2014, the department store also spent £7 million on a campaign with a penguin and a young boy playing together. It had 22 million views on YouTube by the first week of January – more than the 16.6m views of Sainsbury’s ad with First World War soldiers sharing a bar of chocolate, the UK’s second most popular ad of 2014.
Swift said that John Lewis wants to just get “something right for the company at this time of year and do something we hope customers really love.”
Sarah Vizard, from Marketing Week, said “There are a lot more companies doing Christmas ads this year but I think a lot of those companies just show what you can buy in store. John Lewis does the emotional piece the best. I think people will think the ad is really cute.” | 0ele
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The last time she performed, we did not have mobile phones. Now, 35 years later, as she performs again, singer Kate Bush sees a very different world.
These days, most concerts are now lit up with phones and tablets, but Bush does not want her fans to watch her shows through a screen.
In August, before her concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Bush asked her fans to put down their mobile phones at her gigs.
Bush wrote on her website: “I have a request for all of you who are coming to the shows. We have chosen a theatre, not a large venue or stadium. Please do not take photos or videos during the shows.
“I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras.”
Bush is not the first singer or musician to say she doesn’t like phones at concerts. Roger Daltrey from The Who recently said it was “weird” that people looked at their screen and not the artist on stage.
He said: “I feel sorry for them, I really feel sorry for them. Looking at life through a screen and not being in the moment totally – if you’re doing that, you’re 50% there, right? It’s weird.”
In 2013, Beyoncé told a fan, “You can’t even sing because you’re too busy filming. Put that damn camera down!”
Recently, Dutch football fans at PSV Eindhoven protested against the introduction of wi-fi in their stadium. They held up banners that said “No wi-fi. Support the team,” and “You can sit at home.” Manchester United have also told fans to leave their “large electronic devices” at home.
Singer Jarvis Cocker said, “It seems stupid to have something happening in front of you and look at it on a screen that’s smaller than a cigarette packet.”
Even in the world of classical music, one of the world’s top pianists surprised the audience in June 2013 when he left the stage because a fan was filming his performance on a smartphone. Krystian Zimerman returned moments later and said: “The destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous.”
But Sam Watt says that filming at concerts makes the experience even better. He works for Vyclone, a phone app that puts together many videos uploaded by fans to create one long video of a show.
“Fans filming is now part of the concert experience – that is a just a fact. We take the videos that people are filming at concerts and mix them together with everybody else who was filming. The result is a really fantastic video,” he said.
“We think that filming at concerts adds to the experience, and I think that, if Kate Bush came round for a cup of tea, we could have a really interesting discussion about this,” he added. “People are going to film and they want those memories – you’ve got to accept it.” | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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Lego’s profits rose strongly in the first half of 2014, helped by the success of its Lego Movie in the US and UK.
The Danish toy company sold a lot more products in Europe, North and South America, and Asiaas children bought products linked to the film.
The film took more than $250 million in the US and £31 million in the UK between February and April 2014.
The movie cost about $60 million to make. It is entertaining and aimed at people who are likely to buy the company’s products.
Lego’s finance director, John Goodwin, said that the Lego Movie products had a positive effect on profits during the first half of 2014. They are now waiting to see what will happen after the movie comes out on DVD in the second half of 2014.
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego’s chief executive, said that Lego were very happy that they have sold more products in the first half of 2014. He said this was a result of Lego’s ability to develop, launch and distribute Lego products, which children all over the world put at the top of their wishlists.
Lego, based in the small town of Billund in Denmark, started producing its plastic bricks in 1949 and became a popular and well-known children’s toy around the world by the 1970s.
In 2003, the company nearly collapsed. Then, Knudstrop became Lego’s new chief executive. He got rid of hundreds of products and, then, refocused the business on its bricks.
The company opened its first factory in China in April 2014. | 0ele
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People are talking a lot about loneliness at the moment. The Office for National Statistics says that Britain is the loneliest place in Europe. British people have fewer strong friendships than other Europeans and they know their neighbours less well. Research at the University of Chicago has found that loneliness is twice as bad for older people’s health as obesity. They also found that loneliness causes almost as many deaths as poverty.
This is shocking but these studies do not talk about loneliness in younger adults. In 2010, a Mental Health Foundation survey found that loneliness was a bigger worry for young people than for the elderly. The 18- to 34-year-olds in the survey felt lonely more often, worried more about feeling alone and felt more depressed because of loneliness than people over 55.
“We know that loneliness is a problem for the elderly and there are day centres and charities to help them,” says Sam Challis, of the mental health charity Mind, “but, young people over 21 are too old for youth services.” This is not good because loneliness can cause mental health problems – loneliness causes stress, depression, paranoia, anxiety, addiction and it can cause suicide.
But what can young people do to prevent loneliness? One researcher says that social media and the internet can be both a good thing and a problem. They are a good thing when they allow us to communicate with friends and family far away but not when they replace face-to-face contact. “People present ‘perfect’ versions of themselves online and we expect to have social lives like the lives we see in the media,” says Challis. If we compare the ‘perfect’ lives of our friends with our own lives, this can make us want to stay at home alone.
A study of social media at the University of Michigan in 2013 found that using technology to help you meet new people can be a good thing. And, if you can’t go out, the internet can help you.
For example, Mumsnet, an online network for parents, can help you feel less alone when you are at home with young children.
Helplines can also reduce loneliness, at least in the short term. One in four of men who call the emotional support charity Samaritans say they are lonely. Get Connected is a free helpline for young people, where they can get help with emotional and mental health problems caused by loneliness.
At work, it can be a good idea to tell your employer how you’re feeling. Talking to your colleagues may seem like a waste of time but it can help to protect us from the emotional and psychological problems caused by working too hard.
According to recent research, loneliness is killing the elderly and, with an ageing population, we should try to reduce our isolation before it is too late. “Getting older doesn’t have to mean getting lonelier,” says Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of the relationship counselling service Relate. “But it is very important to create good- quality relationships earlier in life.” | 0ele
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American researchers say that a nasal spray containing the ‘Love hormone’ oxytocin could help children with autism behave more normally in social situations. Scans of autistic children showed that the chemical made the brain respond better to faces. This could make social interactions easierfor them.
The researchers said oxytocin might help other treatments that are used to help people with autism in social situations. “Over time, there would be more normal social responding. Autistic people would be more interested in interacting with other people; there would be more eye contact and more conversation,” said Kevin Pelphrey, of Yale University.
Autism is a disorder that one in 100 people have. It affects people in different ways, but causes difficulties in social interaction and communication. So far, there is no effective treatment for the social problems that autism causes.
Researchers at Yale have studied the brain chemical oxytocin. They say it is a possible treatment for the social problems caused by autism because it plays an important role in bonding and trust. But not all results are positive: one recent study found no significant benefit for young people who took the chemical for several days. But Pelphrey said oxytocin might help the brain learn from social interactions; it would work best when used together with therapies that encourage people with autism to interact more socially, he said.
Scientists tested 17 young people aged eight to 16 with autism. They gave them either oxytocin or a placebo through a nose spray. Then, the scientists scanned their brains while they looked at images of cars or the eyes of people expressing different emotions.
The scans showed that some parts of the children’s brains behaved more normally after oxytocin: they were more active when the person was looking at faces and less active when the person was looking at the cars.
“The study suggests that oxytocin might treat basic social motivation. This is something for which we don’t have a treatment in autism,” said Pelphrey. He said that it was too early to use oxytocin as a treatment for the social difficulties caused by autism and said people should not buy oxytocin online. “We don’t want them to try oxytocin at home. It is impossible to say what they are buying. This is not a treatment yet. It needs more research,” he said. But, the scientists were surprised to find that oxytocin did not help the children in social recognition tasks. It is also not known yet if oxytocin only has benefits for people with autism or has any bad side effects. Finally, oxytocin effects only last about 45 minutes, so it might be difficult to use it as a treatment.
“This study has a lot of evidence from animal and human work to show that oxytocin helps, but we need more research.” Said Simon Baron-Cohen.
Uta Frith, who studies autism at University College London, said: “According to this study, oxytocin may make faces more interesting. Disappointingly, this effect is seen only in brain activity and not in behaviour.” She said that, if we want oxytocin to become an important treatment for autism, we need to show that is has an effect on behaviour. | 0ele
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James Bond films are one of the world’s oldest and most successful film series. Twenty-three Bond films have been made so far. They have earned more than $6 billion at cinemas around the world. James Bond is not slowing down. In fact, the films are more popular than ever – Skyfall, which broke all records and became the biggest ever film at UK cinemas in 2012, earned a total of $1.1 billion.
So, there was a lot of interest when they announced more details about the 24th Bond film – especially its title, Spectre. The number one question is: can Spectre be as successful as Skyfall?
Charles Gant, film editor for Heat magazine, thinks it can. “They were very clever when they made Skyfall,” he says. “It was both modern and retro. Daniel Craig fans liked it and, also, older, more nostalgic Bond fans, who lost interest over the previous few films. With the new title,” he adds, “it is certain to be a success.”
Eon Productions is the company, started in 1961, that made Dr No and all the “official” Bond films. The company really wants the next film to be successful so it is using the same people that worked on Skyfall in the new film. Daniel Craig will play Bond and the same people have written the script. Most importantly, Sam Mendes will again be the director. According to Gant, Mendes is the best Bond director. Gant says: “Mendes attracted top actors like Ralph Fiennes. Actors like Fiennes will only be in a film if they like the director.”
The Bond series was not in trouble before the arrival of Mendes – and Craig – but the films were becoming a bit boring towards the end of Pierce Brosnan’s time as Bond. There were no longer any more original Bond stories to adapt and the films no longer had enough energy.
This was nothing new: the history of the Bond series has been one of constant change, especially of the lead actor: first, Sean Connery; then, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Brosnan and, now, Craig. Each new actor has been different and some have been better than others.
Lazenby only did one Bond film. Dalton’s two films, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, were during a period in the late 80s when more aggressive Hollywood action movies were more popular. According to Gant, “the period of Roger Moore’s last films and Dalton’s films didn’t excite audiences. Brosnan was more successful but Craig is the best. On the other hand, the early Bond films were sexy and exciting.”
Skyfall made more money than all the other Bond films. But some of the 1960s Bond films were almost as successful. With figures adjusted for inflation, the 1965 film Thunderball is only a little bit below Skyfall. And Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice both did better than the other Craig films. Licence to Kill made the least money of all Bond films and Moore’s final film, A View to a Kill, the second least.
Martin Campbell is an experienced British director and he planned one of the most elaborate stunts in Bond history. In the famous first scene of Goldeneye (released in 1995), Bond falls into a light aeroplane without a pilot. This scene helped to make the Bond series more modern and popular. Also, a very successful Goldeneye video game created new, younger fans of Bond and made people think that the Bond film was no longer boring and old-fashioned. | 0ele
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Benjamin Carle is 96.9% made in France, even his underpants and socks. Six Ikea forks, a Chinese guitar and some wall paint stopped him being called 100% French, but nobody is perfect.
Carle, 26, decided, in 2013, to see if it was possible to live using only French-made products for ten months as part of a television documentary.
He got the idea after the Minister for Economic Renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, asked the French people to buy French products.
For the experiment, Carle had to give up his smartphone, television, refrigerator (all made in China); his glasses (Italian); his morning coffee (Guatemalan) and his favourite David Bowie music (British).
It is lucky that his girlfriend, Anaïs, and cat, Loon, are both French, so he didn’t have to give them up.
“I wanted to see if it was possible to do what the minister was asking us to do,” Carle said.
He had just three rules: eat only food made in France, not have any contact with foreign-made products and to do it all on €1,800 a month (above the minimum wage of €1,430 to cover the extra cost of living in Paris).
The journalist was shocked to find out at the start of the experiment that only 4.5% of the things in his flat were made in France. Everything not made in France had to go, including the lightbulbs (China) and green beans (Kenya).
Without a refrigerator (none are made in France), he had to chill his food on the window ledge.
His foreign-made clothes, including his underwear, were replaced with more expensive alternatives: French-produced underpants (€26), socks (€9), polo shirt (€75), espadrille sandals (€26), but no jeans because none are produced in France.
Going out with friends was a problem – no American films, no Belgian beer, no sushi or pizza. When he stayed home, with no sofa for the first few months and no television, he listened to French singer Michel Sardou and read French novels. French wine was, of course, allowed and French-Canadian singer Céline Dion, but not French bands such as Daft Punk, who sing in English.
He could not use his British-made bicycle or even a French car because he discovered that the only affordable Peugeot, Renault and Citroën cars are not made in France. So, he bought an orange Mobylette moped.
His computer was replaced by a Qooq, a tablet that connects – slowly – to the internet and the iPhone, which he swapped for an old Sagem mobile.
Carle said his aim was to “save the French economy”. He said the experiment was part serious and part fun. He even asked a French language expert to check if he should use the word “cool” and other English words – the expert told him swap it for the nearest French alternative: “chouette”.
At the end of the experiment, a special “auditor” said Carle was 96.9% “made in France” and Montebourg gave him a medal.
Carle’s conclusion: “It’s not entirely possible to live 100% ‘made in France’, particularly in terms of new technology.
“This wasn’t about French nationalism or patriotism. It was trying to show that we should think about the way we buy and make different choices, and that is the same in all countries. If we want to save jobs and industries, we should support them.
“A T-shirt is more expensive in France but I can be sure it has been made by workers who are correctly paid and have good working conditions. I cannot be sure about a cheaper T-shirt produced in Asia or Morocco. People could do more as consumers.” | 0ele
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Joseph Roche is on the shortlist of astronauts for Mars One, a private mission that plans to send humans to live on Mars from 2025. He is on the shortlist but he is sceptical about Mars One.
The selection process, Roche says, did not “reach the standard of more traditional astronaut selection processes”. He also says the Dutch
Mars One team are naive because they believe they can succeed alone in the $6 billion mission. He says they should now accept it will probably not happen.
The group plans to send a lander and satellite to Mars in 2018, followed by a rover in 2020 and cargo missions starting in 2022. Humans will start arriving in 2025 and they will send more crews of four people every two years. The astronauts will not return to Earth.
Gerard ’t Hooft is a Dutch Nobel laureate in physics. He is a supporter of the project but he says he does not believe the Mars One plans are realistic. He said: “It will take longer and be more expensive. When they asked me to be involved, I told them: ‘You have to put a zero after everything’.”
Roche also said that there were not 200,000 people who applied to be astronauts, as Mars One said; there were only 2,761.
He talked about the selection process in more detail: “I have not met anyone from Mars One. At first, they said there would be regional interviews; we would travel there, and they would interview and test us over several days. To me, that sounded like a proper astronaut selection process.
“But it changed from a proper regional interview over several days to a ten-minute Skype call.”
Roche says he does not want to give more interviews because he doesn’t want to sound negative about space travel.
He said that being involved in the public debate about future missions is one of the most interesting and enjoyable things about his connection with Mars One. He then said that, “If a one-way mission to Mars ever became possible, I would always volunteer. For an astrophysicist, that is not a difficult decision to make.” But he does not think there will be a one-way mission in his lifetime. | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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Scientists have designed a mirror that sends heat into cold space. If you use the mirror, you don’t need to use air-conditioning units that keep buildings cool on Earth.
The scientists believe that the mirror could reduce by a lot the amount of energy we use to control air temperatures in offices and shopping centres.
Around 15% of the energy used by buildings in the US goes on air conditioning. The researchers say that the mirror could mean that we no longer need air conditioning.
Scientists in Stanford, California, found that a roof painted black was 60C hotter than the air temperature in sunlight. They found that aluminium was 40C hotter. But the mirror was 5C cooler than the air temperature.
“If you cover large parts of the roof with this mirror, you can save a lot of power,” said Shanhui Fan, an expert in the study of light at Stanford University. He led the development of the mirror.
Buildings warm up in different ways. Hot-water boilers and cooking areas release heat. In hot countries, warm air comes in through doors and windows. Then, there is visible light and infrared radiation from the sun, which also heat up buildings.
The Stanford mirror reflects 97% of the visible light that falls on it. But, more importantly, it releases heat. When the mirror is warmed up, it releases heat at a specific wavelength of infrared light that goes easily through the atmosphere and out into space.
The mirror is made from several layers of very thin materials. These layers help the mirror to release heat. The mirror sends the heat as infrared light out to space.
“The mirror can use the cold darkness of the universe, even during the hottest hours of the day,” the scientists say.
Shanhui Fan says the mirrors costs between $20 and $70 per square metre. He says that a mirror on a three-storey building could save 100MWh of electricity per year.
Fan also said that the mirror could cool buildings but it would not slow down global warming. But it would reduce the amount of electricity that businesses use.
“I’m really excited by this,” said Marin Soljačić, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You could use the mirrors on buildings and spend much less money on air conditioning or maybe you wouldn’t need it at all. You could put the mirrors on top of shopping malls.” | 0ele
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The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is on the edge of the Sahara Desert. It is now the centre for four linked solar mega-plants. The plants, together with hydro and wind, will give Morocco, in north Africa, nearly half of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020. The project is a key part of Morocco ’s plans to use its 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. The first phase, called Noor 1, will be ready in November 2015. The mirror technology it uses is more expensive than the solar panels that we can see on roofs all over the world but it will be able to produce power even after the sun goes down.
People have known for many years that the desert is a useful place to produce solar energy. In 1986, the German scientist Gerhard Knies said that the world’s deserts receive enough energy in a few hours to make power for all the people in the world for a whole year. But the challenge is to capture that energy and take it to where it is needed.
At Noor 1, there are 500,000 moon-shaped solar mirrors. The 800 rows of mirrors follow the sun across the sky. They whir quietly every few minutes.
When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will be as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and make 580 mega-watts of electricity, enough for a million homes.
Solar energy will make up a third of Morocco’s renewable energy supply by 2020. Wind and hydro will make up the other two-thirds.
“We are very proud of this project,” Morocco’s environment minister, Hakima el-Haite said. “I think it is the most important solar plant in the world.”
The Noor 2 and 3 plants, which are planned to open in 2017, will store energy for up to eight hours. This will mean that there could be solar energy available 24/7 in the Sahara and the rest of the region.
“We are already involved in transportation lines to take energy to the south of Morocco and Mauritania,” says Ahmed Baroudi, manager of the national renewable energy investment company. But he says the project will go further – even as far as the Middle East.
Exporting solar energy could have stabilizing effects within and between countries, according to the Moroccan solar energy agency (Masen). Morocco is making plans with Tunisia and they hope to export energy north across the Mediterranean, too.
“We believe that it ’s possible to export energy to Europe but, first, we have to build the connections, which don’t yet exist, ” said Maha el-Kadiri, a Masen spokeswoman.
Until that time, the solar energy will be used in Morocco. They might one day use solar energy to remove salt from sea water. | 0ele
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Music subscription services, like Spotify and Deezer, have made more than $1bn worldwide, as fans choose to pay for music online.
Income from music streaming and subscription rose by more than 50% in 2013 to reach $1.1bn. And, sales of recorded music in Europe grew for the first time in 12 years.
Many people still listen for free, but many others are willing to pay money to get a better choice of music. In three years, the number of paying subscribers rose from 8 million to 28 million, according to the 2014 digital music report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Subscription services are easily accessible from smartphones and tablets, so they are popular with people who want to try out new music without buying a download or a CD. People like this cheap, user-friendly and legal alternative to pirated downloads.
In Britain and America, streaming may soon make more money for the music industry than downloads from online stores such as Apple’s iTunes. A third of all digital sales globally now come from subscription services and the other two thirds come from downloads.
In the US, the percentage of people using subscription services and streaming rose from 19% in 2012 to 23%. At the same time, the percentage of people downloading fell from 28% to 27%.
In Britain, the number of people downloading music stayed the same at exactly one third, but subscribers grew from 19% to 22%. In Sweden, France and Italy, streaming is already more popular than downloading.
Thirty-nine per cent of all music sales are now digital. Sales of CDs and vinyl reduced a lot in 2013, but they still make just over half the music industry’s income.
Vinyl continued to make a comeback in some places. Sales increased by 32% in America and by 101% in the UK in 2013. | 0ele
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There are about 50,000 mystery shopping trips every month in the UK. Mystery shoppers pretend to be a customer in a store but they are really collecting information on the store and how good or bad its service is.The demand for mystery shoppers is growing because online shopping is becoming more popular.
“Retailers are becoming increasingly aware that shoppers who visit a physical store want a service and an experience they can’t get online,” says Simon Boydell, spokesman for Marketforce, which has more than 300,000 mystery shoppers. “Our clients want to know how well their stores are delivering on that experience.”
“We assign different store locations to each shopper and rotate them so that they never go back to the same shop within three months,” says Jill Spencer of mystery shopping company ABa. “Each day, they spend up to eight hours visiting five to ten stores, plus another hour or two writing detailed reports on every part of their visit.” For that, the mystery shoppers can earn up to £155 a day. Their expenses are also paid. Mystery shoppers who film their visits with a hidden camera can earn even more – around £300 a day.
Mystery shoppers are usually repaid any money they spend in the stores and may also be allowed to keep the products they buy. “They usually give me between £5 and £20 to spend at each store, to check the service I receive at the till,” says mystery shopper Laura. “I’m always given a specific task, such as buying something from a specific department or a new product range, but I can often buy whatever I want – and keep it.”
Like most full-time mystery shoppers, Laura is self-employed. She earns around £30,000 to £40,000 a year and that doesn’t include all the freebies she gets on the job. “With the perks, it’s enough to live on.” She finds it satisfying to return to a store where she has previously been a mystery shopper and see standards have improved. “I know it must be because of my feedback or why would they pay me to give it? I feel I’m not just doing a service for my company; I’m doing a service for all shoppers everywhere.”
More than 500,000 people have registered as mystery shoppers in the UK, but just 10% or less get regular work each month. This has led to a dramatic reduction in payment. Before, people were paid and got travel expenses, but now “you often just receive some money towards a purchase,” say Val, a 51-year-old former mystery shopper. Nowadays, mystery shopping companies mostly give freebies as an incentive. “Marketforce shoppers usually get a couple of pounds for a visit, for their time and effort,” says Boydell. “At the most, we’ll pay £15 to £25 plus expenses for a meal for two or a hotel stay, for example. We don’t directly employ any shoppers so we don’t have to pay them the minimum wage.” “I’d go on a cruise for nothing,” says Laura. “But I think mystery shopping companies that pay you a nominal fee to travel to a restaurant and eat a meal are exploiting people. I won’t do those jobs anymore.” But there are plenty of people who want to do those jobs.
Hannah, a 41-year-old lawyer, has made nearly 500 visits or the Mystery Dining Company in her spare time without receiving pay or travel expenses. She has enjoyed £200 meals at Michelin- starred restaurants and overnight stays at expensive hotels.
But, it can be hard work. Hannah says she spends two to four hours after each visit writing detailed reports on everything from the quality of the food to specific conversations with staff. And, she always needs to be able to name or describe the staff. She has to memorize all these details while eating her meal because she cannot openly write anything down. | 0ele
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Astronaut Scott Kelly has just spent 340 days in space. He says that Himalayan lakes, spacewalks and the US presidential campaign helped him to stay sane during his mission. It was the longest mission ever. “It seemed like I lived there forever,” Kelly said. He had been on several missions before but said that his biggest surprise was how long this mission felt. “Maybe, sometimes, you go bananas, ” he said.
Kelly and a Russian astronaut, Mikhail Kornienko, spent nearly a year on the International Space Station (ISS). They studied the effects on humans of weightlessness, radiation and the cramped conditions of spaceflight. This is research that NASA thinks is very important for a future mission to Mars.
Kelly said the length of the mission was the most difficult thing. He felt more pain after he returned to gravity than after shorter trips. Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, have spent the last year taking physical and mental tests. The tests will continue, to help NASA learn about what happens to the human body during spaceflight. Kelly described the sense of wonder he felt after he landed back on Earth. When the Russian capsule opened, he felt the cool air of Kazakhstan and smelled “a smell like a plant was blooming in that area”. It was the fresh air mixed with the burnt, “sweet” smell of a spacecraft that had just re- entered through the Earth’s atmosphere.
When he left the spacecraft, he said, he began to understand the importance of the mission: 340 days on a 15-year-old space station which is “a million pounds, the size of a football field, with the space, some say, of a six-bedroom house”. The ISS, he said, is a place that uses the power of the sun and an international team helped to build it. “The view is great, too,” he said.
Kelly posted amazing photos on social media of the Earth ’s cities, countryside, oceans and atmosphere. “The Earth is a beautiful planet,” he said. He described the beautiful waters around the Bahamas and the rainbow colours of the lakes of the northern Himalayas. But “the main thing you notice is how thin the atmosphere is,” Kelly said. “It is scary to see the thin atmosphere, together with large areas of pollution.”
He said he could see large areas of pollution: smoke clouds from wildfires cover parts of the US, parts of Asia have pollution nearly all year. He said the message “we need to save the planet” was slightly wrong: “The planet will get better; it’s us that won’t be here because we’ll destroy the environment.” “We must take care of the air we breathe and the water we drink. And I believe we do have a big effect on that and we have the ability to change it, if we want to.” Kelly was very active on social media so many people follow him online. But he said he didn’t know about it – instead, he watched the news and especially the 2016 US presidential campaign. The news helped keep him sane, he said, and also work: “I looked forward to the next event – for example, the next spacewalk, the next science experiment. That made a difference to me.” Being back on Earth with everyone still felt strange, he said.
Kelly said that he would probably not fly again with NASA. “But I don’t think I would ever say I’m absolutely, 100% finished,” he said. Maybe he will fly with private spaceflight companies, which are becoming more and more popular. “They might need a guy like me someday,” he said. “Maybe, in the next 20 years, you’ll be able to buy a cheap ticket, just go for a little visit.” | 0ele
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Scientists have made an “atlas of the brain”. It shows how the meanings of words are organized in different regions of the brain. The atlas uses rainbow colours to show how words and their meanings are grouped together in areas of the brain.
“We wanted to build a giant atlas that shows how the meanings of words are represented in the brain,” said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
No single brain region contains one word or idea. A single brain spot contains a number of related words. And, each single word appears in many different brain spots. Together, they form networks that represent the meanings of each word we use: life and love, death and taxes. All have their own networks.
The atlas shows how modern imaging can completely change what we know about how the brain does some of its most important tasks. With further work, the technology could have an enormous effect on medicine and other areas of study.
“It is possible that we could use this technology to decode information about what words a person is hearing, reading or possibly even thinking,” said Alexander Huth, the main author of the study. One possible use would be a language decoder that could allow people who can’t talk, because they have a serious illness, to speak through a computer.
To make the atlas, the scientists recorded people’s brain activity while they listened to stories. Then, they matched the transcripts of the stories with the brain activity data to show how groups of related words produced 50,000 to 80,000 responses all over the brain. Huth used short, interesting stories. The stories had to be interesting so that the people in the experiment would listen to the words and not fall asleep. Seven people listened to two hours of stories each. Each person heard about 25,000 words – and more than 3,000 different words – as they lay in the scanner.
The atlas shows how words and related terms use the same regions of the brain. For example, on the left-hand side of the brain, above the ear, is one of the tiny regions that represents the word “victim”. The same region responds to “killed” and “murdered ”. On the brain’s right-hand side, near the top of the head, is one of the brain spots used for family terms: “wife”, “husband”, “children”, “parents”.
Each word is represented by more than one spot because words often have many meanings. One part of the brain, for example, is used for the word “top” and also for other words that describe clothes. But, the word “top” also uses many other regions. One of them is for numbers and measurements, another for buildings and places. Interestingly, the brain atlases were similar for all the people in the experiment. This suggests that their brains organized the meanings of words in the same way. But, the scientists only scanned five men and two women. All are native English speakers. It is highly possible that people from different backgrounds and cultures will have different brain atlases.
Lorraine Tyler, a neuroscientist and head of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University, said the research was a great achievement. But, at the moment, the brain atlas does not show small differences in word meanings. “This research is amazing and new, there is still a lot to learn about how the meaning of words is represented in the brain.” | 0ele
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It is no longer legal to smoke a cigarette inside a bar in the world ’s drinking capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans city government has begun trying to reduce noise problems. The city is now stricter on noise in bars and nightclubs – and, at the same time, it has introduced new rules on noise.
“It is the wrong time for this,” complains bar-owner William Walker. He hates the anti-smoking law. “If they force people outside the bar to smoke, it is going to increase the tension that’s already there.”
Many of New Orleans’s best bars are in quiet neighbourhoods. Martha Wood lives beside a loud bar that has live music. “The bar was one reason I bought the house so I won’t ever complain about the noise,” says Wood. She also manages a live-music bar.
The Maple Leaf club became smoke-free in 2014. Another club also became smoke-free because performers asked for smoke-free nights. “A lot of the performance venues were already starting to show that consideration to performers. I wish the city had just let that happen, not force the ban into every bar that doesn’t have music,” says Zalia BeVille, manager of the All Ways Lounge.
Luckily, All Ways has an outdoor patio. Another bar, Lost Love Lounge, doesn’t have a patio. The owner, Geoff Douville, loves the ban – before, he felt forced to live with smoke to keep his bar popular. “I couldn’t ban smoking in my bar without a ban in the whole city,” says Douville. “People think I have that choice. But, if I make a no-smoking rule, they will choose another bar with smoking.”
Many small business owners also fear that the smoke-free rule will make them lose money. Neil Timms owns an English pub and saw a smoking ban before, in England. “Back home in England, every pub I knew closed because of the smoking ban,” remembers Timms of England’s ban, which began in 2007. To avoid the same problems, he’s spending money to build a patio.
But Douville feels the ban could be a great business opportunity. “There are lots of people who would enjoy coming to our bar but they never came because they didn’t want to smell like smoke for the next seven days – now, those people can come.” Douville isn’t worried about noise complaints: “No court is going to say a bar is a ‘nuisance’ after the city has introduced a smoking ban that forces you to go outside!” he says.
Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who introduced the ban, disagrees: “The responsibility is on the bar-owner to keep their customers respectful outside as well,” she says. “The owners need to tell them to go and have a smoke but be respectful to their communities. The idea that we can’t have clean air because it will cause noise problems is ridiculous. We can have clean air without noise problems – I think it’s about communication and creating partnerships between the communities and the businesses.”
Many people were worried that the police would not have time to give bars warnings and fines. So the health department will do it. Bar customers must “fill out a form or call 311 and include photographs of illegal smoking”.
Geoff Douville says that he’s used to noise complaints. “You will see: the neighbours who complain about the noise now are going to be the same ones who wanted the smoking ban. Of course they’re going to complain, ” he adds. “But it doesn’t mean they’re going to win.” | 0ele
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When we talk about climate change, we usually just talk about the problem. We usually forget the many solutions. These solutions make recycling faster, reduce emissions and create alternatives to plastic, air conditioning, smartphones and fast fashion that are better for the environment.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Copenhagen to present its latest report. There is now climate change on all continents. We must increase our efforts to reduce emissions to make sure that climate change does not get out of control. Copenhagen looked at the risks and challenges but it also looked at the solutions.
The Sustainia Award looked at ten best solutions to climate change. The solutions are used in 84 countries. From the areas of food, fashion, energy, transport, education and health, the awards showed that the future may not be so bad.
From California, we saw how we can now produce plastics from greenhouse gases. These plastics are good quality and not too expensive. From Switzerland, we learned a better way to recycle and reuse old clothes and shoes. And from Canada, we learned how smartphones can make bike-sharing easier.
The ten projects each offered unique solutions to the problem of climate change. The Nigerian project, Wecyclers, won the Sustainia Award 2014.
Wecyclers makes it possible for poor communities to make money from the waste from their streets. Families in Lagos collect the rubbish on the streets. Then, bicycles come and collect the waste. Families get points for the garbage they collect. They can use these points to get things they need.
Recycling companies buy Wecyclers’ waste. They make the waste into products such as mattresses, pillows and trash bags. Wecyclers helps to solve local waste problems in Lagos, where only 40% of the city’s rubbish is collected.
Only 46% of town and city waste in Africa is collected. More than 5,000 families are involved in the Wecyclers scheme and there are plans to start the project in other cities in Nigeria.
Solutions to climate change are often hi-tech. But, to solve all the different problems, we need different solutions. We can’t just reduce emissions – we must also use our natural resources more intelligently and create healthier lives for ourselves. | 0ele
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People today might not hear the sounds of the natural world because they screen out the noises around them, says a US researcher.
More background noise can make people oblivious to the uplifting sounds of birdsong, water and trees in the wind. You can often hear these sounds even in cities, said Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service.
The problem is even worse because people listen to music through their earphones instead of listening to the birds and other sounds of nature. Natural sounds are easily drowned out by traffic, music and others noises, Fristrup said.
“This learned deafness is a real problem,” Fristrup told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose. “We are training ourselves to ignore the information that comes into our ears.”
“This gift that we are born with – the ability to hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds – might be lost,” he said.
This is the problem: we hear so many noises that we stop listening.
For the past ten years, the US National Park Service has recorded sound levels at more than 600 parks in the US, including Yosemite in California, Yellowstone and Denali in Alaska. There was noise from human activity in all the parks, for example aircraft, motorbikes, motorboats and tour buses.
Fristrup’s team say that noise pollution more than doubles every 30 years. “It’s not surprising people put on earphones,” he said.
“More background noise has the same effect on your hearing as fog has on your vision – you are aware of only a small area around you,” he said. Even in our cities, there are birds and things to appreciate in the environment but we are losing the ability to hear them.
People quickly become used to changes in their environments, including more noise. Fristrup worries that we will forget how much quieter the world could be. “If finding peace and quiet becomes too difficult, many children will grow up without the experience and I think it’s a very big problem,” he said.
Other scientists reported health benefits from listening to natural sounds. Speaking at the same meeting, Derrick Taff, a social scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said that listening to recordings from national parks, of waterfalls, birdsong and wind, helped people feel less stressed.
“We know that natural sounds are very important to people. They are some of the main reasons people visit protected areas. They want to hear the natural quiet, the birdsong, and the wind and water,” Taff said. “We may be losing this as people are listening to their iPods all the time. My advice is to go to your protected areas and experience what you are missing.” | 0ele
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Governments in Europe dream of finding a magic solution to rising unemployment. But, in the poorest parts of the EU, unemployment continues to rise.
Now, in Sardinia, Italy, a mayor thinks he has found an answer to his town’s unemployment problem. Valter Piscedda, the mayor of Elmas, a small town near Sardinia’s capital, Cagliari, wants to pay residents to leave. The town will pay for ten unemployed local people to take English lessons, get on a cheap flight and look for jobs in other parts of Europe.
“This idea comes from common sense and experience, ” he told the Guardian. “In the past year and a half – especially in the past few months – I have seen young people, almost every day, who have lost hope that they will find work. Some ask for help in finding work here. Others have tried everything and, now, they want to go and gain work experience abroad; life experience, too.”
So he decided to help people who want to gain experience abroad.
Sardinia, and also much of southern and central Italy, is struggling with high unemployment. Unemployment was at 17.7% in the second quarter of 2014, according to Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. More than 54% of people under 25 are out of work.
For the Adesso Parto (Now I’m leaving) programme, Elmas will give €12,000 to the first ten applicants aged between 18 and 50. The applicants must be out of work and have lived in the town for three years. They do not have to be university educated and they must not earn more than €15,000.
The idea of helping people to leave is sensitive at a time when many Italians – many of them clever young graduates – are leaving their country every year. But Piscedda believes that the people he is sending away might return “and give me back 100 times what we gave them”. More importantly, he wants the scheme to help the people most in need.
In Elmas, the scheme has got mixed reactions. “There is little work here,” said Alessandro Macis. “The opportunity to go abroad to learn about the workplace and experience other cultures can be very worthwhile. The son of a friend of mine who didn’t study much is in London and he’s doing very well. He started as a waiter. Now, he’s a cook and he’s learning English.”
Others were not sure. “I heard about it but I thought it was strange. If you have that money to pay for people to go away, why don’t you use that money to keep them here?” said Consuelo Melis, who works in a local café.
But Piscedda says, “The work I can create, as mayor, is temporary. I can ask someone to clean a piazza. I can ask them to clean it again. I can ask someone to clean the streets. But these are all temporary things that give nothing more than a little bit of money for a few months.” | 0ele
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Robert Mysłajek stops. Between two paw prints on a mountain path, the scientist finds what he is looking for. “Droppings!” he says happily. It is so rare to see a wolf that seeing droppings makes it a good day.
But it is getting easier to see a wolf. There are now about 1,500 wolves in Poland. The number has doubled in 15 years. The wolf, the brown bear, the lynx and the wolverine are Europe’s last large predator carnivores. Scientists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are coming here to find out how the country has saved wolves who have a bad reputation even in fairy tales.
Bits of bone and hair stick out from the droppings. “It ate a red deer,” says Myslajek. “I can tell you all about this wolf – what it eats, if it’s a male or female, its sexual habits, age, health and family connections.”
DNA tests have shown that Polish wolves are travellers. “One wolf walked to the Netherlands, where it was hit by a car. They travel very far. They need space. The average territory of a Polish pack is 250 square kilometres,” said Mysłajek.
The scientist says wolves can move up to 30 kilometres during a single hunt. “The pack that he is tracking is a strong group of eight or nine animals. “This year, we have recorded five cubs, two young wolves and two adults.
“We follow them using special cameras in the forest and by following their prints in the mud and snow. In each family group, only one pair of adults has cubs each year. All the wolves in the pack look after the young.”
Mysłajek, the son of a shepherd, doesn’t understand wolves’ bad reputation. “Why did we have to have the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, with its big bad wolf?”
He is fascinated by these animals, who remained in the wild 33,000 years ago when other types of dog decided on a much more comfortable life as pets.
Mysłajek says only the need to save forests and control the wild animal population can save Europe’s wild carnivores, especially the unpopular wolf. “Natural predators balance the ecosystem. They reduce the number of herbivores, which allows trees to grow tall for birds to nest in.”
The ban on wolf hunting in the western Carpathian mountains became law in 1995 and in the whole of Poland in 1998. There are now wolf packs in nearly all the country’s major forests where the wolves exist together with humans.
The Polish government pays compensation to farmers when a wolf kills their farm animals. Mysłajek tells farmers to put up electric fences. He also tells them to use two things that wolves find scary: strings of small red flags (to keep wolves away from sheep) and the Tatra Mountain Sheepdog.
Poland didn’t have many big roads until recently and this has helped wolves. In 1989, when the communists left power, Poland had only one motorway. Big road projects began after Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and they now have to consider wild animals.
The way people think about wolves has also changed. “For many years, hunting was a part of life in Poland. In 1975, there were fewer than 100 wolves in Poland.”
Mysłajek says that Polish wolves are much safer now but they are not completely safe. Packs go into neighbouring countries – Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia – where there is still hunting.
He says Poland’s new government doesn’t like wolves. “The Environment Minister, Jan Szyszko, is a hunter. There are 120,000 hunters in Poland and they have a lot of influence.
“It’s not easy to defend wolves. You can’t say to the politicians that wolves are a big tourist attraction. Most tourists want to see the animals but wolves stay away from humans. They have a very strong sense of smell.” | 0ele
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According to a recent scientific study, organic food has more healthy antioxidants than regular food. It also has fewer toxic metals and pesticides. The international team that did the study suggests that changing to organic fruit and vegetables could be as healthy as adding one or two portions of the recommended ‘five a day’ fruit and vegetables.
The team, led by Professor Carlo Leifert, concludes that there are big differences between organic and non-organic food. Organic food has between 19% and 69% more antioxidants. It is the first study to show clear differences between organic and regular fruits, vegetables and cereals.
The researchers say that the higher levels of antioxidants have the same effect as “one to two of the five portions of fruits and vegetables that people should eat every day”. They say this means that organic food is better for our health.
The findings will make people argue even more about whether or not organic food is better for people. Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition at King’s College London, said the research showed some differences. “But are the differences relevant? I am not sure.” He also said that research showed organic cereals have less protein than regular crops.
The results of the research are based on an analysis of 343 studies from around the world – more than ever before – which examine differences between organic and regular fruit, vegetables and cereals. Helen Browning, who supports organic farming, said that the research showed that how we farm affects the quality of the food we eat.
Leifert and his colleagues conclude that many antioxidants reduce the risk of serious diseases, including diseases of the heart and certain cancers. The researchers also found much higher levels of cadmium, a toxic metal, in regular crops.
They found four times more pesticides on regular crops than on organic food.
People will criticize the research: including so many studies in the analysis could make the results unreliable. Also, the higher levels of cadmium and pesticides in regular food are still below recommended limits. But, the researchers say that cadmium stays in the body and that some people may want to avoid this. They also say that recommended limits are for single pesticides and not for the mixture of chemicals that farmers use on regular crops.
Another criticism of the research is that the differences it found may be the result of different climates, different types of soil and different types of crops; they may not be the result of organic farming. But, the biggest criticism will be about possible health benefits. The most recent major analysis, which included 223 studies in 2012, found little evidence of health benefits. “Other studies did not find evidence that organic foods are much more nutritious than regular foods,” it found.
Sanders agrees. “You are not going to be healthier if you eat organic food,” he said. “What is most important is what you eat, not whether it’s organic or regular. It’s whether you eat fruit and vegetables at all.”
Shoppers say that healthy eating (55%) and avoiding chemicals (53%) are the main reasons they buy organic food. Browning said: “This research supports what people think about organic food. In other countries, there is much more support and acceptance of the benefits of organic food and farming. We hope that now the UK will accept organic food like people in the rest of Europe. | 0ele
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Tua Pittman from Raratonga in the Cook Islands is a traditional navigator. To him, a canoe is more than just a form of transport. “The canoe is our island, the crew is the community and the navigator is the leader,” he says. “On a canoe, you are not just going from one place to another using the stars, the moon, the sun and the birds. Navigation is showing your crew the light of life.”
It has been a busy week for the crews of four sailing canoes – they are in Sydney for the start of the World Parks Congress. Tua’s journey began at the Cook Islands on 25 September. The islanders sailed to Samoa, then Fiji, Vanuatu and onto the Gold Coast. Then, they travelled south to Sydney. Around 100 crew were involved in the voyage and they tried to travel using only traditional navigation techniques. Sadly, said Tua, the crews had to use modern navigation equipment sometimes to reach Australia in time for the Congress.
The trip is called the Mua Voyage. It is a partnership between the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Oceania Regional Office and five Pacific Island countries: Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Fiji. The main aim of the 11,000km trip was to deliver a special message to the World Parks Congress.
The message said “We see fewer fish than in the past, and they are smaller. And foreign fisherman take our fish. Our coral reefs, the greatest in the world, and our fishing grounds are disappearing. Our ocean is very big but not limitless.”
The Pacific Islanders’ message to the delegates of the Congress was urgent. But a lot of time has been spent at the Congress trying to set a new target for the amount of the ocean that needs special protection. According to the IUCN, in 2013, less than three per cent of the world’s oceans was in marine protected areas and less than one per cent of that is ‘no take’ (no fishing). But there should be a lot more ‘no-take’ areas because the last World Parks Congress in 2003 set a target of 20-30%.
After difficult talks, the World Parks Congress agreed new targets for marine protected areas. The new target is not 20-30%; it is at least 30%. And they must try to solve the problem of biodiversity.
Tua Pittman is very happy with what the Congress has decided for the world’s oceans. “It’s a huge reward for all the effort that we made to be here. To hear they made that decision is fantastic. It’s a step in the right direction.”
He is 55 and, in his lifetime, he can already see that it is much harder to catch fish. He also said that pollution is getting worse, particularly close to big cities such as Sydney. And climate change is already having a serious effect on Pacific Islanders. “The decisions of the big countries have a small effect on developed, large countries, but they have a very big effect on small countries.”
The Mua Voyage had taken years of preparation and planning. It was critical to the voyagers that the world listened to their message and took action. Pittman said that the leaders of rich countries should think more like traditional navigators who see that their boats are just tiny specks in an enormous sea. Most importantly, Tua says that politicians must change how they do things. “The world needs to find a different path.” | 0ele
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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.” | 0ele
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A new scientific study says that global warming might make temperatures rise more than people think. The scientist who led the research said that, if emissions of greenhouse gases are not reduced, the planet will be at least 4C warmer by 2100. This is twice the level the world’s governments consider to be dangerous. The research shows that fewer clouds form as the planet warms. This means that less sunlight reflects back into space and this makes temperatures 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 research, said that their work was new in two ways. First, it found what controls the cloud changes and, second, it did not accept the lowest estimates of future global warming; it believed the higher, more damaging estimates.
“4C would be catastrophic, not simply dangerous,” Sherwood said. “For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics and it would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet.” And, if the ice sheets melt, sea levels will rise by many metres.
The research helps to show how much warming is caused by rises in carbon emissions, say scientists who have commented on the study, published in the journal Nature.
Experts at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies said the explanation of how fewer clouds form as the world warms was a good one. They also agreed that this showed future climate change would be bigger than people think. To measure the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate, scientists estimate what the rise in temperature would be with twice as much CO in the atmosphere as in the pre-industrial age – and this will probably happen within 50 years. For twenty years, those estimates have been from 1.5C to 5C: a wide range. The new research has reduced that range to between 3C and 5C, by studying the biggest cause of uncertainty: clouds.
Researchers use computer climate models to predict future temperatures and it was important to include the way clouds form 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 fall slowly back down without forming clouds.
In reality, both things happen and climate models that include the second possibility predict much higher future temperatures than the models that only include the nine-mile-high clouds. “Climate sceptics like to criticize climate models because they are sometimes wrong, and we know that they are not perfect,” said Sherwood. “But we are finding that the mistakes are being made by the models that predict less warming, not the models that predict more warming.” He added: “Sceptics may also point to the pause in the rise of temperatures since the end of the 20th century, but there is more and more evidence that we cannot see this pause in other measures of the climate system.
And the pause is almost certainly temporary. ” The world’s average air temperatures have increased quite slowly since a high point in 1998, which the ocean phenomenon El Niño caused. But, greenhouse gases are trapping more and more heat and over 90% disappears into the oceans. Also, a recent study suggested that it may seem there is a “pause”, but this is only because we did not have temperature readings from polar regions, where there is the most warming. Sherwood accepts that his team’s work on the role of clouds does not mean for sure that temperature rises will be in the higher range. He added that a 4C rise in the world’s average temperatures would have a serious effect on the world and the economies of many countries if we do not reduce emissions. | 0ele
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A new report says that almost one billion people will remain in extreme poverty by 2030 if countries don’t try to solve the social, economic and cultural problems that keep them poor. The report by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network says that many people may rise above the poverty line of $1.25 a day, but fall back again when they have problems such as drought or illness and insecurity or conflict.
The report found that, in parts of rural Kenya and in South Africa, 30 to 40% of people who escaped from poverty fell back again. This percentage rose to 60% in some areas of Ethiopia between 1999 and 2009. Even in successful countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, the proportion was 20%.
Individual examples show how easy it is for people to fall back into poverty. Amin is from a village in Bangladesh. His income has fallen slowly, because of his illness and his wife’s illness, the cost of his son’s marriage, the death of his father and loss of goods such as fishing nets. Lovemore, from Zimbabwe, is now one of the poorest people in his village. He recently lost his job because of ill health and has to look after his five grandchildren after the death of his daughters.
“We need to make sure that people who come out of poverty remain above the poverty line permanently. Too many families return to poverty when they have personal or bigger problems. Governments shouldn’t assume that, just because somebody’s income hits $1.25, that means the problem is solved,” said Andrew Shepherd, the main author of the report.
According to the UN, the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 is still possible. But the report says that countries need to make changes to achieve zero poverty. There was a drop in extreme poverty from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 1.2 billion in 2010, but the report says that progress in the next 15 years will be much more difficult. There has been a lot of progress in China but there will probably not be similar progress in other parts of the world.
The report says countries should try to help the chronically poor – those who are poor for many years or their entire lives – and stop people becoming poor. “Governments have been quite good at moving people over the poverty line because that is quite easy. But they have avoided the more difficult job of trying to reduce chronic poverty,” said Shepherd.
The report says progress on poverty reduction has helped people who were already closer to the poverty line, but has helped the chronically poor much less. It will not be possible to get to zero poverty if development policies don’t focus on the chronically poor, it adds. The report suggests three ideas. They all cost a lot of money.
The first is social help – to bring the poorest people closer to a good-enough standard of living. The second is education, from early childhood to the start of work, so people can escape and stay out of poverty. The third is economic growth policies that make sure that the benefits of increasing national wealth reach the poorest people.
All this will cost money and the report says higher taxes will be necessary. Aid will also be necessary for the start-up costs for social assistance, healthcare for everyone and to finance education. “There remains a huge role for aid in the next 20 years, as many developing countries spend less than $500 on each of their citizens a year. Even Nigeria, with its oil wealth, spends only $650 per person,” Shepherd said.
The authors say governments should have a national development plan and make sure the poorest people are represented politically as well as trying to stop difficult social customs, such as dowries and witchcraft, that make extreme poverty worse. | 0ele
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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.” | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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Roger McKinlay is the former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation. He says that our use of GPS (global positioning system) technology is damaging our ability to find our way. “If we do not look after them, we will lose our natural navigation abilities because we rely on technology more and more,” he wrote.
McKinlay believes it will take a lot of time and money before navigation systems will be good enough for technologies such as driverless cars to become successful. He says we need better research into systems for navigation. Also, children should learn to find their way using more traditional methods. “Schools should teach navigation and map reading,” he wrote.
In 2012, 39% of adults in the UK had a smartphone. In 2015, 66% of adults had a smartphone. So most people now use GPS technology. But McKinlay, a satellite communication and navigation consultant, believes that we should be careful not to only use our smartphones for navigation. “If we don’t practise using our navigation skills, we will lose them,” he wrote.
Research from 2009 supports this idea. “We studied a group of current London taxi drivers and a group of retired London taxi drivers,” said Dr Hugo Spiers of University College London, who is an author of the study. The results showed that the retired taxi drivers did worse on navigation tests than the current drivers. “We were able to show that their abilities decreased after they stopped using their knowledge.”
Spiers also believes it is dangerous to rely on technologies like GPS. But he says that the biggest problem is that technologies can lead drivers into dangerous situations. One of the deaths caused by satnavs (satellite navigation) was of a driver who, in 2010, drove into a lake in Spain. “It can be dangerous to use a satnav,” said Spiers.
The way we use navigation technology also has an impact on our own abilities, says Spiers. If drivers listen to instructions, they don’t need to think about where they are going, he says, but the use of smartphone apps as digital maps is better. When you use digital maps, “you have to think hard about where you are going,” he said.
McKinlay believes there have to be big improvements in navigation technologies before we can have futuristic things like driverless cars and smart cities. “For really important jobs – like landing aeroplanes or flying aeroplanes – GPS is still not good enough, ” he said.
McKinlay believes humans must still able to take control of their navigation. “We don’t want people to go into total shock when their smartphone disappears or the battery goes flat,” he said. “Technology isn’t magic – it is just a tool.” | 0ele
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Scarlett Johansson is suing a French novelist for €50,000. She says that he wrote things about her personal life that are not true.
La premiere chose qu’on regarde (The First Thing We Look At) by Grégoire Delacourt is the story of a French model who looks so similar to the American actor that the book’s main male character thinks she is Johansson. In the novel, the model’s beauty means that men see her only as a sex object and women are jealous of her. She has many adventures as Johansson and, in the end, dies in a car crash.
Johansson does not feel flattered by the best- seller. Her lawyer, Vincent Toledano, told Le Figaro that Delacourt ’s novel illegally used Ms Johansson’s name. He has now gone to court because Johansson does not want the book to be translated or to become a film.
Delacourt said that he chose to mention Johansson because she is famous for her beauty. He said: “I wrote a work of fiction. My character is not Scarlett Johansson. ”
On French radio, the author recently said the legal action was “sad.”
Delacourt is one of France’s best-loved authors; his last novel, My List of Desires, was translated into 47 languages and they are making a film of it. But he said he was “speechless” when he found out Johansson was suing him.
“I thought she would ask me to go for a coffee with her. I didn’t write a novel about a celebrity,” he said. “I wrote a real love story about women’s beauty, especially interior beauty.
“If an author can no longer write about the things that surround us – a brand of beer, a monument, an actor – it’s going to be difficult to write fiction.
“I’m not sure she’s read the novel because it hasn’t been translated yet.”
Emmanuelle Allibert, spokeswoman for publisher JC Lattès, said taking legal action was “crazy”. “We have never known anything like it. It is very surprising because the novel is not even about Scarlett Johansson. It is about a woman who is Scarlett Johansson’s double.”
The author ’s legal situation would be easier if he had published the book in the USA and not in France. Lloyd Jassin, a New York lawyer, said that the case would probably not go to court in the United States.
“I thought she might send me flowers because the book was a declaration of love for her, but she didn’t understand,” Delacourt said. | 0ele
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Do you want your child to be good at sport, play for the school team and, maybe one day, even be in international competitions? Well, try to make sure that your child is born in November or October. A study by a top expert on children’s physical activity has found that schoolchildren born in November or October are fitter than everyone else in their class.
Children born in November or October were fitter, stronger and more powerful than children born in the other ten months of the year. They are especially fitter, stronger and more powerful than children with birthdays in April or June. Dr Gavin Sandercock of Essex University and his colleagues found that children born in the autumn 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 things: stamina, handgrip strength and lower-body power. The results showed that a child’s month of birth could make big differences to their levels of fitness, muscle strength and ability to accelerate, all of which predict how good someone is at sport.
November children were the fittest because they had the most stamina and power and were the second strongest. Children born in October were almost as fit – they scored highest for strength and came 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 a huge physical advantage,” said Sandercock. These gaps could decide who became a top-level athlete because “selection into elite sports may often depend on very small differences in a person ’s physical performance ”.
The study found that, when scores for the three kinds of fitness were put together, children born in April were the least fit, followed by children born in June. The findings seem to show that children born in the early months of the school year enjoy a double “autumn advantage” – we already know that they have an academic advantage and, now, they also seem to be better at sport, too.
The authors of the study believe that the most likely explanation is that children born in autumn get more vitamin D over the summer months towards the end of pregnancy. John Steele, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust, said the quality of a young person ’s introduction to sport at school can be “a major factor” in their sporting development. “Children that get a high-quality first experience will have greater agility, balance and coordination, and are more likely to develop an enjoyment of physical activity and be good at sport as they grow up”, he said.
UK Sport could not say if a majority of the 1,300 athletes it gives money to were born in November and October. Natalie Dunman, its head of performance, said that the differences shown in the new study were true for teenagers in junior-level competitions, but that the differences disappear before sportspeople were in adult competitions. She said: “With adult athletes, there are many factors that make a champion and we don’t think that month of birth is one of the key ingredients.” | 0ele
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As soon as the children at a primary school in Stirling, Scotland, hear the words “daily mile”, they leave the classroom and start running around the school field. For three-and-a-half years, all the pupils at St Ninian’s Primary School have walked or run a mile each day. They do it at different times during the day. There has been an increase in obesity in children in the UK but none of the children at this school are overweight.
The daily mile has done a lot to improve these children’s fitness, behaviour and concentration in lessons so many other British schools are doing the same. Their children also get up from their desks and take 15 minutes to walk or run round the school or local park.
Elaine Wyllie, headteacher of St Ninian ’s, 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 we’ve done is amazing.”
One in ten children are obese when they start school at the age of four or five, say the Health & Social Care Information Centre. And, in the summer of 2015, a study found that schoolchildren in England are more unfit than they have ever been. For this reason, primary schools can see the benefits of the daily mile. It has been introduced in schools in various parts of the UK and other schools are planning to introduce it soon. Just in Stirling, 30 schools have already started or are going to start the daily mile.
“Running is a good way to improve children’s fitness, and it’s free and easy. The most important thing is that the children really enjoy it. If they didn ’t enjoy it, you couldn’t continue with it.
They come back inside with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. It’s how children used to look,” said Wyllie. At St Ninian’s, teachers take their pupils out of lessons to the school’s playing field for their daily mile at a time that suits that day’s timetable. Only ice or very heavy rain stop them. Researchers from Stirling University have begun a study to look for evidence of the physical, cognitive and emotional benefits of the daily mile. Dr Colin Moran, who is leading the study, said: “The children don’t seem to have problems with obesity; they seem happier and teachers say they learn better. So we designed a study that tests all of these things.” They will compare St Ninian’s pupils with children from another school in Stirling where children haven’t started running yet.
Kevin Clelland, a primary school teacher from Leeds, visited St Ninian’s. Then, he convinced the other teachers in his school that it was a great idea. He said: “It’s such a simple thing to do but seems to have such an amazing impact. We really want to improve the fitness of our pupils.” His school is now building a running track.
Paralympian, Tanni Grey-Thompson, chair of ukactive, a health organization for physical activity, said: “All children need to achieve 60 active minutes every day – this can be in a lesson, on the walk to school or in the playground. It’s fantastic to see ideas like the daily mile. It shows that schools want to improve children’s fitness and their cognitive behaviour, and make a real difference to schools, teachers, parents and young people’s lives. We know sitting still kills; not sitting still helps children build skills that will help them for the rest of their lives.”
The Scottish government also supports the idea. A spokesperson said: “Learning in PE is improved by ideas like the daily mile, which can help parents keep their children healthy. We are pleased to see that so many Scottish schools are taking part or want to.” | 0ele
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A subway system has billions of inhabitants: the bacteria of Swiss cheese and kimchi, plague and human skin. Now, for the first time, scientists have started to study the bacteria in a city’s subway – and they have found many interesting results.
Dr Christopher Mason, a scientist at Weill Cornell Medical College, led a team that tested the New York City subway system for 18 months. His team found meningitis at Times Square, a trace of anthrax on a train carriage and bacteria that cause plague on a rubbish bin and ticket machine at stations in uptown Manhattan.
The team said the findings of plague and anthrax are not serious. They said that there was only a very small trace of anthrax, that rats probably carried the plague and that no one has become ill with plague in New York for years.
“The results do not show that people in New York are at risk,” the study says. In fact, most of the bacteria the team found are harmless to humans.
Some of the results were not a surprise. They showed that people “should wash their hands”, Mason said. He also said that they found many bacteria that are helpful, like the bacteria used for making cheese.
All around the subway, there were bacteria from cheeses – brie, cheddar, parmesan and the mozzarella found on New York pizza. The bacteria of Swiss cheese were found in midtown Manhattan and the financial district, and the bacteria used to make kimchi and sauerkraut showed up in the financial district and Bay Ridge.
Bacteria that can cause illness and infections were very common. Bacteria that cause diarrhoea and nausea, as well as E.coli, and the bacteria that can cause skin infections and urinary-tract infections were common all over the city. The scientists found bacteria that cause tetanus in Soho and bacteria that cause dysentery at a station in the Bronx and in Harlem.
Mason and his team collected more than 1,000 samples from all of New York’s 466 open subway stations. They found 15,152 different species, nearly half of which were bacteria.
The good news, they said, is that these bacteria are not spreading sickness or disease in New York and that the subway and city are as safe as everyone thought.
“In fact,” Mason added, “I’ve become much more confident riding the subway.”
Many findings made sense: stations like Grand Central and Times Square, where there are more people, had more bacteria. The Bronx, with its diverse neighbourhoods and stations, had the greatest diversity of bacteria; Staten Island, with just three stops, had the lowest diversity of bacteria.
The researchers found sea and fish bacteria at South Ferry, a station that flooded during Hurricane Sandy.
The next steps, Mason said, are studies of other cities, which have begun in Paris, São Paolo and Shanghai. They also want to do more studies of New York. He said he hoped the research would help health officials to prevent and track diseases. | 0ele
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The UK prime minister, David Cameron, says he is happy about the result of the Scottish referendum. 55% of people in Scotland voted to keep the 307-year-old union with England and Wales, and 45% voted against it. The prime minister promised more devolution in Great Britain.
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, said he accepted Scotland had not decided to vote for independence this time. He said the referendum was a “triumph for democratic politics” and he said he would work with the government in London in the best interests of Scotland and the rest of the UK. “We have touched sections of the community who have never before been touched by politics,” he said.
The yes campaign had four big successes – it won 53% of the vote in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow, 57% in Dundee and 51% in North Lanarkshire. But the no campaign won in 28 areas. It won easily in areas where people expected it to do well, including Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire and Borders. But it also did well in areas that people said might go to the yes campaign, including the Western Isles. In total, the no campaign won 2,001,926 votes (55.3%) and the yes campaign won 1,617,989 votes (44.7%).
In his speech, Cameron said that there would be constitutional reforms, including in Scotland, but not until after the general election. And he said that there would be changes in England, too. “We have heard the voice of Scotland and, now, we must hear the millions of voices of England,” he said.
Cameron added: “The people of Scotland have spoken and it is a clear result. They have kept our country of four nations together and, like millions of other people, I am delighted. As I said during the campaign, it would have broken my heart to see our United Kingdom come to an end. So, now, it is time for our United Kingdom to come together and to move forward with a balanced settlement, fair to people in Scotland and, importantly, to everyone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well.”
Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, said the referendum was a vote from the Scottish people for change. “We know our country needs to change. We will deliver stronger powers for a stronger Scottish parliament, a strong Scotland.” But he said that would go beyond Scotland. “We will also make changes in England, Wales, and the whole of the United Kingdom.”
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said a vote against independence was “not a vote against change”. “We must now deliver the radical new powers to Scotland,” he added.
The UK Independence Party leader, Nigel Farage, said Cameron’s offer of more devolution for England did not go far enough. “The English are 86% by population of this union. They’ve not been a part of this for the last 18 years. We still have a situation where Scottish MPs can vote in the House of Commons on English-only issues. I think what most English people want is a fair settlement,” he said.
Cameron will try to calm tensions when he makes another statement on the result. The prime minister will explain how he will give more powers to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. The prime minister wants to move fast to show that the three main UK party leaders will keep the promises they made during the referendum campaign. | 0ele
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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.” | 0ele
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The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon is going to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man. He was born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564 and died there 400 years ago.
Stratford was important to Shakespeare all his life, says Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “People often think Shakespeare left Stratford and his family, went to London to earn his fortune and only came back to die,” he said. “But Stratford is where he bought land and houses, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.” The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be celebrated across Britain and the world. There will be performances of Macbeth in Singapore and Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeare’s Globe is completing the first world tour in the history of theatre. During the tour, it has taken Hamlet to every country except North Korea. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to show each of Shakespeare’s plays.
The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and almost every other theatre production company in the country will celebrate the anniversary. There will be traditional and experimental performances of the plays. There will also be hundreds of lectures, international conferences, films, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
Shakespeare was famous in his own lifetime but there is little documentary evidence about Shakespeare’s life and times. His plays survived because his friends and actors collected together every bit of every play they could find and made the First Folio, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
The actor Mark Rylance has called the First Folio his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those that belong to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious documents will be shown in an exhibition in London.
The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, documents from the time when Shakespeare and other actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and details of payments for performances for James I and Queen Anne. The director of the Globe Theatre recently said as a joke that Shakespeare was a true London man. But people in Stratford believe that the town made and educated Shakespeare. They are rebuilding his old school room and will open it as a visitor attraction. Shakespeare bought New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died in 1616 on 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 underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare. ”
Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there. He says the late plays were planned in his library and probably written there.
Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago. Another house was built in the same place. That house was destroyed in 1759 by a bad- tempered priest, Francis Gastrell, in an argument about taxes. He also cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer sat and worked, because he didn’t like all the tourists looking into his garden.
The house has never been rebuilt but they have found Shakespeare’s kitchen in the cellars. The area where the house was will be on display for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored. “Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “there would have been no Shakespeare. ” | 0ele
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Noise from ships may disturb animals such as killer whales and dolphins much more than we thought before. New research shows that underwater noise could stop these animals communicating and make it more difficult for them to find food. It is well known that noise from ships disturbs large whales. But, US researchers have found noise also disturbs smaller sea creatures such as killer whales, also known as orcas. Dolphins and porpoises may have the same problems.
“The main problem is that even a small increase in sound may make it more difficult for whales to find food using echo,” said Scott Veirs, who led the research. “That’s worrying because their food, a kind of salmon, is already quite scarce. Hearing a salmon’s click is probably one of the most difficult things a killer whale does. It is harder to hear that click if there’s a lot of noise around you.”
The researchers used underwater microphones to measure the noise made 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 ship, including cruise ships, container ships and military ships, that passed through the strait about 20 times a day.
Some ships are quieter than others but the average noise next to all the ships was 173 underwater decibels, the same as 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 vacuum cleaner.
Veirs said scientists already knew about the effect of underwater noise on large whales. But, the new research shows the danger to smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises. “We think that ships make low-frequency noise, like the sound of lorries or trains,” he said. “Most noise is at that low frequency but there is more background noise in the high frequencies, too. This might be causing a big problem that we need to study more.”
Lots of underwater noise can cause many problems. Whales may have to stay closer together to hear each other. And, if they cannot find food easily, they will need to use their extra blubber. This is a problem because this blubber often contains manmade pollutants that are poisonous to whales if they get into their bodies.
Veirs said ships that pass near whales need to be quieter. “It should be easy to reduce noise pollution,” he said. “Military ships are much quieter and there could be simple ways of using that technology on normal ships. Another way to reduce noise is to slow down. Reducing speed by six knots could decrease noise by half.”
Some whale species are safer now because there is less whaling but other types of whale are still in danger for many different reasons. The US has recently protected nearly 40,000 square miles of the Atlantic to save a species of whale with just 500 individuals left.
In Europe, killer whales have dangerously high levels of illegal chemicals in their blubber. Scientists are still trying to find out if pollutants caused the deaths of five whales that were found on beaches on the east coast of Britain in January 2016. And, around the coast of Australia, whales are in danger from oil and gas drilling, as well as Japan’s recent decision to start whaling again in the seas of Antarctica. | 0ele
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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?” | 0ele
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When you enter a department store, cameras are watching you. If you pick something up, a camera will make sure you don’t put it into your bag. Cameras will follow you around the store. But new technology is less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, gender and shopping habits.
A few months ago, IT company Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) wrote a report that said around 30% of stores use facial recognition technology to track customers in shops. Facial recognition is a technology that can identify people – it analyses and compares people’s faces. Shops use special cameras for this, like the Intel RealSense camera.
Joe Jensen, who works for Intel, says that the aim of using RealSense technology in shops is not to get information about specific people’s lives but to understand, in general, people’s lifestyles and shopping habits. “We don’t need to know a particular shopper. We need to know what characteristics this shopper has and that, when those characteristics are present, this is what a person usually does.”
This technology makes it possible to predict what a person may or may not do in a shop. If, for example, a woman is walking quickly towards the sock section, a store can automatically put ads on screens specifically for 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 internet has been using techniques like these for years. If you search for something on Amazon, you’ll get ads for similar products on other sites. But it’s not easy to use these systems in shops. People do not react to cameras in the same way as they do to cookies on websites.
One company, Hoxton Analytics, has developed a technology that puts people into categories based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of people’s shoes, the system can identify a customer ’s gender with 75-80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, says that they wanted the system to be different from facial recognition. “I thought, why don’t we simply look at the clothes someone’s wearing? ” he said. “If I just showed you a photo of someone’s body, you could probably tell me what gender they are. But pointing a camera at someone’s body feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was – what about people’s shoes?”
People use the word “creepy” a lot during discussions of tracking in stores. Stores need to find a way of getting information without seeming intrusive.
McCormack says, “Right now, shops are doing lots of intrusive things but we just don’t know about it. We tell the shops that, if you know someone’s a male or a female, your advertising will work better. If you know that everyone in your shop right now is a male, you’ll advertise PlayStations not hairdryers.”
It is easy to understand that stores want some of the information online stores collect. We allow this to happen online so why not in shops? But shopping centres are different from websites – you walk from one shop to another without a computer asking you if it’s ok to collect information about you.
But young people who are growing up with online shopping do not think online advertising is invasive. In the CSC report, a survey showed that 72% of people aged 55 or more said they were very uncomfortable with these types of technologies in real shops. But only 51% of 16-24 year olds said they were uncomfortable. In any case, there are more and more eyes watching you and they care a lot about what you’re wearing. | 0ele
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The average six-year-old child understands more about digital technology than a 45-year-old adult, a new report says.
The arrival of broadband in the year 2000 has created a generation of digital natives, Ofcom (which checks standards in the UK communications industries) says in its report. These children, who were born in the new millennium, are learning how to use smartphones and tablets before they can talk.
Jane Rumble from Ofcom said that, because they are growing up in the digital age, children’s communication habits are different from older generations, even from the 16-to-24 age group.
800 children and 2,000 adults took Ofcom’s “digital quotient”, or DQ, test. The test finds out how much people know about tablets, smart watches, superfast internet, 4G mobile-phone networks and mobile apps. It also tries to find out how happy they feel about using them.
In 6- to 7-year-olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and online television, the average DQ score was 98. Adults aged between 45 and 49 scored an average of 96. Digital understanding is highest between 14 and 15 years old – this age group have an average DQ of 113.
People can now test their digital knowledge with a short version of the questionnaire. It will give anyone a DQ score. The website also gives people advice on how to improve their understanding and protect themselves and their families online.
The ways in which children contact each other are very different from older generations.
The biggest change is in time spent talking on the phone. Twenty years ago, teenagers spent their evenings on the home telephone line, talking about love and friendships in conversations that lasted for hours.
But, now, for children aged 12 to 15, phone calls make up just 3% of time spent communicating through any device. For all adults, this rises to 20% and, for young adults, it is 9%. Today’s children communicate most by sending written messages or through sharing photographs and videos.
Over 90% of the time they spend using devices is spent sending messages: chatting on social networks like Facebook, sending instant messages through services like WhatsApp or even sending traditional mobile-phone text messages. Just 2% of children’s time using devices is spent emailing. Adults spent 33% of their time using devices emailing.
When they are not using their phones, 12- to 15-year-olds have a very different relationship with other media, too. A digital seven-day diary shows that only half of their viewing time is spent watching live television, compared to nearly 70% for all adults. They spend 20% of their time watching short video clips, for example on YouTube, or news clips on Facebook and other social sites. The rest of their viewing time is spent watching DVDs, streamed content through Netflix or iTunes and recorded television programmes. | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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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.” | 0ele
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A long time ago, cinema audiences were taken to a galaxy far, far away.
That was 1977 but, in 2015, just before its seventh film, interest in Star Wars is not slowing down. Now, there is news of a new film about Han Solo and of a reappearance for Darth Vader.
“Fans around the world are always waiting for new poster art, new trailers and other information,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst. “I don’t think any other movie franchise could cause this much excitement.”
The latest Star Wars mania started after Disney bought Lucasfilm from Star Wars creator, George Lucas, in 2012. After Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm, it announced that there would be three more Star Wars films – VII, VIII and IX – plus plans for spin-off movies.
They have now announced details of the second spin-off. It is a story about Han Solo, the character played by Harrison Ford in the first three films. This second new film will be released in May 2018.
Before that, they will release Episode VII in December 2015, directed by JJ Abrams and called Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Episode VIII will come out in 2017 and a spin-off called Rogue One will arrive in cinemas in 2016.
Lots of people are very interested in the rumour that Darth Vader, the villain from the original films, will reappear in Rogue One. This interest shows the power of Star Wars.
Lucasfilm-Disney are creating a cinema “universe” around Star Wars, with many different characters and stories. They are doing the same thing as the very successful films produced by Marvel Studios. Disney also bought them, in 2009.
Disney knows a lot about marketing: Dergarabedian says the decision to make all six existing Star Wars films available on streaming services is “a brilliant way to make people excited about the new film”.
There has been much enthusiasm for Star Wars for at least twenty years. This is shown by the huge number of novels, comic books, video games and merchandising that Lucasfilm has created.
Michael Rosser, news editor for the magazine Screen International, says this is what makes Star Wars the top film franchise. “The great thing about the first Star Wars films was that they created a huge universe of characters and stories,” he said.
“For years, people have wondered how the different parts of the story fit together. This new film goes back to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker so it will reconnect with the first Star Wars film. The prequels did not do that.”
Rosser is talking about the three films Lucas directed between 1999 and 2005, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. They were about the life of Luke Skywalker ’s father, Anakin, who becomes Darth Vader. They got quite bad reviews but they made $2.5 billion.
“It shows the power of Star Wars – the prequels were disappointing but they still made a lot of money,” said Rosser.
“The movie studio wants to continue the franchise and make sure new films are of good quality. They also want people to go to the cinema at a time when lots of people are watching films at home. But you don’t want to watch Star Wars on your iPhone.”
Dergarabedian expects big business when The Force Awakens opens at cinemas in December 2015. “It should make at least a billion dollars. Star Wars is the ultimate movie franchise.” | 0ele
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We do not yet live in an age of flying cars, as predicted in the 1985 film Back to the Future II, but smartphones and other new technologies are creating exciting possibilities. Experts agree that economic and population changes, new technology, and environmental concerns are having a big effect on transportation.
With an ageing transport infrastructure, cities in the US have to change and improve their transportation. Experts and scientists now realize that old ways of reducing traffic congestion aren’t enough to solve the problems of population growth and carbon emissions, and transportation is now an environmental problem.
Big US cities like Los Angeles and Chicago are adding more bus lanes and pedestrian walkways, and expanding rail networks. At the same time, they are creating advanced technologies that will allow a vehicle to drive itself and communicate with other vehicles and its environment.
Here are three of the key ideas that experts predict will change transportation in the future.
Taxi-sharing services like Uber and apps like Waze, which finds the quickest routes for drivers, are completely changing how people move around and affecting the way traffic moves through a city. Communication between riders and drivers, between different vehicles and between cars and infrastructure is bringing transportation into a new era.
According to a recent study, people born in the 1990s are using cars less than older generations. According to the study, people born in the 1990s are making 4% fewer car trips and travelling 18% fewer miles per year, on average, than older generations did at the same time in their lives. And, people who still drive cars are experiencing less traffic thanks to Waze.
Traffic congestion is improving in other ways, too. At the moment, a traffic light knows when a car is getting close but that’s all. Companies are developing technology that allows a vehicle to tell traffic control systems not only that it is present but also where it is going and how fast it is travelling.
We have known about driverless cars ever since Google began testing the vehicles in 2012 but no-one really knows when driverless cars will become commonplace. But, there is already some automation of cars. Automation will probably happen in stages: first, there might be automated buses with their own lanes, then perhaps lorries in ports or mining towns: vehicles that are connected electronically and travel one behind another.
The idea of a fully automated transportation system is interesting because it could improve safety – people’s mistakes won’t cause accidents any more. It could also help reduce carbon emissions and traffic congestion. But, it will take a long time to get fully automated because the average age of cars on the road is 11.5 years old.
To see what driverless cars might look like on the road, go to the video at: vimeo.com/37751380 .
The world is trying to slow down climate change and countries and cities are trying to reduce emissions. These things could have a big effect on the future of transportation and lead to zero- and low-emission vehicles and apps that encourage more walking, cycling and carpooling.
When thinking about the future of transportation, it’s also important to think about why people travel: they may be going to work, to meet friends or family, or to do the shopping. Technologies that reduce the need for those trips – for example, online meetings or online work – could also have a big effect on transportation. | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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There are many quirky solutions to help make our cities better places to live, such as glow-in-the-dark trees, underground bike sheds and solar-powered bins.
City living is good in many ways but it is not always possible to lead a sustainable lifestyle in a city. Pollution, traffic and loss of green spaces are just some of the daily problems that people in cities have to live with.
We look at ten quirky solutions that could make our cities better places to live.
1 Pop-up parks
Today’s cities sometimes look like they’re built for cars and not for people. The pop-up park is a simple idea. You need an empty car park, a small amount of money and a plant or two, and you can make your own private park. The PARK(ing) project started as an arts experiment in San Francisco. It has since spread across the world.
2 Underground storage
Not everyone in a city has a car. Bikes are in fashion but there is one problem: where to keep the bike safe? An engineering company in Tokyo has a solution: an underground bicycle park. Just seven metres wide, the bicycle park goes deep enough into the ground to keep 204 bikes.
3 Glow-in-the-dark trees
When most people think of trees that glow in the dark, they usually think of Christmas trees. Not Daan Roosegaarde. The Dutch designer-artist has invented a plant that is like a light. The technology joins DNA from glowing marine bacteria with a plant to create a glow like a jellyfish. Roosegaarde hopes that this technology could one day replace normal street lighting.
4 Pedestrian electricity
Every day, hundreds of people in the east London neighbourhood of West Ham cross a pedestrian walkway close to the underground station. They probably don’t notice the springiness of the walkway. And they probably don’t know that the springy rubber surface powers the streetlights above. The floor has tiles that capture the energy from pedestrians ’ footsteps and turn it into electricity. There is a similar system at London’s Heathrow Airport.
5 Supertrees
Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay has a group of man-made trees. Up to 50 metres high, these steel ‘supertrees’ have flowers growing up them. They collect rainwater and 11 of the 18 trees also have solar panels on their ‘branches’. | 0ele
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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’.” | 0ele
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'The age of the big British summer music festival, including Glastonbury, is ending, according to the top rock manager Harvey Goldsmith.
He has produced and worked with most of the western world’s biggest music stars, including the Who, the Rolling Stones, Queen, Madonna, Bob Dylan and Luciano Pavarotti. He says that the biggest problem is a serious lack of major new bands to follow on from the old ones.
“The age of the music festival peaked about two years ago,” he said, speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Wales. “There are too many festivals and there are not enough big bands to headline them. That is a big, big problem for us. And we are not producing new bands that can headline – like the Rolling Stones, Muse, even the Arctic Monkeys.”
There were about 900 music festivals in the UK between May and September in 2014, he said, and they cannot all continue. There will be lots of small combination festivals where it isn’t just music but also poetry or books or magic shows.
Goldsmith, 69, said that he is working with Robin de Levita, the Dutch producer of the Who’s 1970s rock musical Tommy. They will bring the first stage adaptation of the teen book and movie series The Hunger Games to a new 1,100-seat theatre in Wembley, London, in June 2016.
Talking at Hay, Goldsmith also revealed some of the secrets of his long career in the music industry. He said that Keith Moon put dynamite down a Sydney hotel room toilet to unblock it. And, he said that John Lennon had stage fright at Madison Square Garden in 1974 – he vomited and they had to push him onto the stage. “It’s bizarre how common stage fright is among artists. It’s odd how afraid they get but, as soon as the music starts, they’re fine,” he said.'
He also gave the answer to a rock ’n’ roll mystery: why Elvis Presley never performed outside North America. Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told Goldsmith that the real reason why Elvis never performed in England was because Parker was an immigrant.
“He explained that it was because he was an illegal Dutch immigrant. He didn’t want to risk leaving the US,” said Goldsmith.
And his ultimate rock ’n’ roll performer? “Freddie Mercury was our most powerful stage performer, the best live performer we’ve ever had.”
But there is no group to follow Queen, he said. “We’re not producing a new generation of this kind of band. Coldplay is probably the last one and that was ten years ago.
“So, with no big bands to headline, there are no big shows. Glastonbury now can’t find any more big bands. The time of big music festivals is really ending.” | 0ele
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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 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 they probably won’t mate because Sudan is 42 so he is old. There are only two other northern white rhinos in the world, both in zoos, both female.
The image seems to show that humans are gentle – armed men guard Sudan and stay with him. But, of course, it shows that humans are cruel. Sudan is in danger from poachers. The poachers kill rhinos and cut off their horns to sell them for medicine. Sudan has had his horn cut off to stop the poachers but he is still in danger.
Sudan doesn’t know how precious he is. His eye is a sad black dot in his big face as he walks around the reserve with his guards. His head is a marvellous thing. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone, a head of pure strength. How terrible that such a powerful head can be so vulnerable.
Sudan does not look so different from the artist Albrecht Dürer ’s rhinoceros from 1515. Dürer was a Renaissance artist. He drew an exotic beast from an exotic place. In 1515, the ruler of Gujarat in India sent a live Indian rhinoceros to the king of Portugal. The king sent it to the Pope but the ship sank and it died.
Human beings – we always kill the things we love. This hasn’t changed 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 were gentle and powerful, like Sudan. A woolly rhino in Chauvet Cave seems young, an animal full of life. But the same people who painted such sensitive pictures of Ice Age rhinos helped to kill them all.
Today, people love rhinos. But, at the same time, people are killing more and more rhinos. The northern white rhino is the rarest kind of African rhino. There are more southern white rhinos and black rhinos. But, in some countries, more and more people want rhino horn to use as a traditional medicine. And this increases the poaching. 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 nearly been hunted to extinction – in spite of the guards and their guns. The poaching is totally out of control. The Javan rhinoceros is also nearly extinct. India has successfully protected the Indian rhinoceros but here, too, poaching is a problem. Sudan is such a majestic animal. Have we learned nothing since the Ice Age? | 0ele
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Cathal Redmond was swimming off the Greek coast. He took some photos of colourful fish with his first underwater camera and he was sure they would be great. But, when he looked at the photos later, they were brown and murky. The photos were bad because he was holding his breath underwater so he didn’t have enough time to take the pictures. He thought that all he needed was a little more time to photograph the fish in their natural environment.
To help with this problem, he has invented the Express Dive. It is a refillable air storage device, which you hold in your mouth. It lets you swim underwater for two minutes. It is somewhere between snorkelling, which is very limited, and scuba diving, which gives people the freedom to breathe underwater but needs heavy and expensive gear. The prototype of his invention looks like a combination of a scuba mouthpiece and a water bottle.
“I wanted to let people to do more – not just get underwater and spend 30 seconds holding their breath,” says Redmond, 27. In 2006, the Irish designer completed a scuba-diving course and loved the feeling of being able to breathe underwater and watch fish in their natural environment. But all the equipment he needed was less enjoyable.
“I didn’t like that I had about 50kg of equipment on me. And getting into the water was quite strange when you are used to trying to stay at the surface. It was a very surreal experience,” he says. “The real problem is that scuba diving limits what you can do. It allows you to stay underwater for longer but it takes a lot of planning. You have 20kg to 50kg of gear with you – you can’t just walk on the beach and decide you want to go in. Planning is a very big part of it.”
It was during a final-year project for his degree that Redmond produced the Express Dive. The device has two main parts. When above the surface, the device takes in air through a vent in the mouthpiece. The air is compressed and stored in a tank, which has a light that flashes green when it is full. When it has finished taking in air, the vent closes and, when the person dives, air is fed back through the mouthpiece. The light turns from green to red when the air starts to runs out. The device can take in enough air for two minutes of diving and takes approximately the same amount of time to refill.
Redmond says the mouthpiece feels similar to a snorkel. They have tested the prototype in parts. Redmond says he has shown that the motor can compress two minutes of air into the device and that a person can hold the device in their mouth.
What he has not yet done is test the device on a diver, completely underwater for two minutes. But, with enough testing, Redmond is sure the device will work well and that it will not be dangerous for swimmers underwater. The device will probably cost £280, he says, and it will probably weigh from 1kg to 3kg.
Perhaps some people think two minutes of air is not enough and is not much better than snorkelling. But, Redmond says two minutes can make all the difference underwater. The typical swimmer can hold their breath for about 40 seconds while underwater. “Two minutes is not a lot of time but it is a lot longer than that,” he says. | 0ele
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You probably know a vaper – someone who smokes e-cigarettes. But has vaping started to become less popular? Statistics suggest that smokers and recent ex-smokers (the majority of vapers) may already be using e-cigarettes less. The big e-cigarette companies will study the figures carefully because they have spent millions of pounds on a technology that they thought was becoming more popular.
E-cigarettes do not contain tobacco and produce vapour, not smoke. In 2014, the health charity Action on Smoking and Health published figures that showed that the number of British users of electronic cigarettes has increased three times from 700,000 users in 2012 to 2.1 million in 2014.
But figures from the Smoking Toolkit Study show vaping may be becoming less popular. The number of vapers who are smokers and ex- smokers rose until the end of 2013, when 22% of smokers and ex-smokers were vaping. But this percentage stopped rising in 2014. Then, it dropped to 19% at the end of the year. Professor Robert West, who collected the data for the Toolkit, described the figures as statistically important.
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. “The number of people who use e-cigarettes while continuing to smoke is going down,” West said. “We’ve only been studying vaping for just over a year, so it’s a short time period, but we are not seeing growth in the number of long-term ex-smokers or ‘never ’ smokers using e-cigarettes. The number of people vaping might change but, at the moment, it looks like it’s staying the same.”
Experts believe that vaping will probably not become fashionable with young non-smokers. Only 1.8% of children are regular e-cigarette users. But e-cigarettes seem to be most popular with adults who want to quit. “The figures published this month show that the use of electronic cigarettes by smokers has stopped rising. But the figures also show 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 is improving their experience and helping them to switch from traditional cigarettes.”
“E-cigarettes are like a sort of nicotine patch,” West agreed. “They are more popular than nicotine patches but we do not know if they are more effective. One-third of people who want to quit smoking use e-cigarettes. They are the most popular method of stopping.”
The European Commission (EC) wants to increase taxes on e-cigarettes, which could make them less popular. A new EC tobacco directive becomes law in 2016. It will limit the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes to below their current levels. This may mean vapers will have to increase the number they smoke to get the same effect. This is another thing that may make e-cigarettes more expensive.
West suggested that politicians should see e-cigarettes as something that helps people stop smoking. He doesn’t think they should follow the same laws as smoking. “Some local authorities and organizations treat e-cigarettes like cigarettes – they ban them in public places and outdoors,” he said. He thinks we should support vapers not attack them. | 0ele
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You probably know a vaper – someone who smokes e-cigarettes. But has vaping started to become less popular? Statistics suggest that smokers and recent ex-smokers (the majority of vapers) may already be using e-cigarettes less. The big e-cigarette companies will study the fi gures carefully because they have spent millions of pounds on a technology that they thought was becoming more popular.
E-cigarettes do not contain tobacco and produce vapour, not smoke. In 2014, the health charity Action on Smoking and Health published fi gures that showed that the number of British users of electronic cigarettes has increased three times from 700,000 users in 2012 to 2.1 million in 2014.
But fi gures from the Smoking Toolkit Study show vaping may be becoming less popular. The number of vapers who are smokers and exsmokers rose until the end of 2013, when 22% of smokers and ex-smokers were vaping. But this percentage stopped rising in 2014. Then, it dropped to 19% at the end of the year. Professor Robert West, who collected the data for the Toolkit, described the fi gures as statistically important.
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. “The number of people who use e-cigarettes while continuing to smoke is going down,” West said. “We’ve only been studying vaping for just over a year, so it’s a short time period, but we are not seeing growth in the number of long-term ex-smokers or ‘never’ smokers using e-cigarettes. The number of people vaping might change but, at the moment, it looks like it’s staying the same.”
Experts believe that vaping will probably not become fashionable with young non-smokers. Only 1.8% of children are regular e-cigarette users. But e-cigarettes seem to be most popular with adults who want to quit. “The fi gures published this month show that the use of electronic cigarettes by smokers has stopped rising. But the fi gures also show 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 is improving their experience and helping them to switch from traditional cigarettes.”
“E-cigarettes are like a sort of nicotine patch,” West agreed. “They are more popular than nicotine patches but we do not know if they are more effective. One-third of people who want to quit smoking use e-cigarettes. They are the most popular method of stopping.”
The European Commission (EC) wants to increase taxes on e-cigarettes, which could make them less popular. A new EC tobacco directive becomes law in 2016. It will limit the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes to below their current levels. This may mean vapers will have to increase the number they smoke to get the same effect. This is another thing that may make e-cigarettes more expensive.
West suggested that politicians should see e-cigarettes as something that helps people stop smoking. He doesn’t think they should follow the same laws as smoking. “Some local authorities and organizations treat e-cigarettes like cigarettes – they ban them in public places and outdoors,” he said. He thinks we should support vapers not attack them. | 0ele
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BB King was most famous for blues music but he was always interested in other types of music and different cultures. Perhaps it is too early to say he is “the last of the bluesmen” but it is hard to imagine that any future blues artist will have the influence as BB King. He influenced thousands of musicians and millions of music fans in a career that lasted 65 years.
Riley B King was born in Mississippi, the son of African-American farm workers. He learnt the guitar from a family friend and learnt to sing with a quartet of gospel singers. In his early 20s, he moved to Memphis.
He was soon playing regularly at a bar in West Memphis and he also became a disc jockey, with a show on a local radio station. He was known as “The Beale Street Blues Boy” but this was shortened to “Blues Boy King” and then to “BB”. In 1950, King began recording for Modern Records.
He had his first hit in 1952 with Three O’Clock Blues. It was number one in the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it was the first of many hits. King developed a style that was new and different but had its roots in blues history. He often praised the musicians who influenced him and he usually mentioned T-Bone Walker first. He also mentioned the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
He once explained that his guitar technique was partly the result of his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” During the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist in many series of concerts. In 1956, he played 342 concerts. In 1962, he tried to change that working pattern by signing with a major label, ABC. But the first records under that contract were not very successful with his fans or with the record company.
But his 1965 album, Live at the Regal, has become famous and influenced many younger musicians. He had more R&B hits with blues songs and, in 1969, he was near the top of the pop charts – where no blues artist had been for many years – with a song called The Thrill Is Gone.
It was a long time before he became known to a rock audience but musicians who admired him brought him to the attention of rock fans. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “kids suddenly started saying to me, ‘You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.’ And I’d say, ‘Who told you that?’ And they’d say, ‘Mike Bloomfield’ or ‘Eric Clapton’. These young musicians made me popular again.”
From then on, King was well known as a leading blues artist. He went on international concert tours to Japan, Australia, China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners in Chicago and at San Quentin.
In 1990, doctors told King he had diabetes and he reduced his touring. He now had to play sitting down but his singing and playing were almost as good as ever. The celebrations for his 80th birthday, in 2005, included an award-winning album with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, tributes from Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “goodbye tour” that was not a goodbye at all.
In 2009, King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012, he performed at a concert at the White House, where the US President, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago. King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others died before him. | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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Introduction
Did you know that, in the UK, there is no law that says restaurants have to pass on tips to staff?
A new government report asked workers, employers and customers what they thought about tipping. After reading the report, the UK government says it wants to change the rules to make sure that low-paid workers get the tips that customers leave for them.
The report said that some waiters are made to pay a 15% administration fee on tips that customers pay by credit or debit card.
The government said that it wants customers to know that tips are voluntary. They want the tipping process to be made clearer so that everyone can understand it.
We asked waiters around the UK what they think of tipping, including how much money they get from tips and if it’s fair.
2. Elle, 22, Edinburgh: ‘We never know whether it’s fair’
Average tips: £20 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... France
I have three part-time jobs. My day job is in a café where the staff work both in the café and in the kitchen so all our tips go in a pot and we all get the same. My evening job is at a restaurant where we don’t get our tips but we get the minimum wage plus an extra £2.50 per hour. My third job is events catering and nobody ever tips.
In restaurants, because a lot of customers add tips by card, the staff never see how much the tip is – so we don’t know if what we get is fair or not. The system seems better in France, where they don’t tip much but being a waiter is seen as a proper job with job security and good wages.
3. Ashley, 22, London: ‘Tips go towards customer breakages’
Average tips: £10-15 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Australia
I work in a London pub in the evenings and I do day shifts at a local restaurant. In both places, all the tips are collected and shared out at the end of the night. Money is taken from the tips to pay for breakages by staff and customers.
It is very unfair that our tips are shared out, especially when one member of the team doesn’t work hard enough. It’s really unfair that money from our tips is taken for breakages by customers. The managers should have ways to pay for broken glasses and plates without taking our tips. I make around £20 a shift in tips but often I only get £10-15 of that money.
I really need tips because I am only paid £7 an hour. I’d prefer to get a good basic wage (like in Australia) and not have to rely on tips.
4. Tom, Manchester: ‘A big night of tips can help pay the rent’
Average tips: £40 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Italy
Where I used to work, waiters kept 80% of cash tips and 40% of card tips. The rest went to the other staff in the restaurant.
It’s hard to say how much I earn in a shift; maybe about £40. It can make a big difference. Sometimes, waiters need a good night to be able to pay their rent.
They have got tipping right in Italy, where customers don’t add a big tip but usually round up their bill so, if their meal is €19, they leave a €20 note and don’t ask for change. | 0ele
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On one day in August, one in seven people on Earth, 1 billion people, used Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. In ten years, the social network has changed people’s relationships, privacy, their businesses, news media, helped to end unfair governments and even changed the meaning of common words.
“A more open and connected world is a better world,” wrote Zuckerberg.
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. In real life, it is difficult to end a friendship but, on Facebook, it is easy to “unfriend” someone. “To unfriend” is a word invented to describe ending contact with a Facebook friend. The meanings of the words “share” and “like” are the same but Facebook has made the words more important to us.
School and university reunions are unnecessary – you already know whose job is going well and you’ve seen pictures of your schoolfriends’ babies. You won’t be surprised if you see an ex in the street with a new girlfriend or boyfriend: you already know they’re with someone else because you’ve seen the romantic selfies.
In real life, some friends are more important than others but, on Facebook, all friends have the same importance. A classmate from university who you haven’t seen for 15 years, a friend-of-a-friend from a party or a colleague you’ve never spoken to – they are all Facebook friends in the same way as your best friend, or your husband or wife, or your mum. It doesn’t mean we see them the same way. Professor Robin Dunbar is famous for his research that says a person can only have about 150 people in their social group. Facebook hasn’t changed that yet, he believes. But Dunbar says he fears it is so easy to end friendships on Facebook that, one day, people may not need to learn to get on with each other.
2 We care less about privacy
Most young people are happy to give Facebook their personal details. Ninety-one per cent post a photo of themselves, 71% post the city or town where they live, more than half give email addresses and a fifth give their phone number.
More than 80% list their interests, which allows companies to try to sell things to them. But most young users limit who can see their profiles – 60% allow friends only.
3 Facebook has created millions of jobs – but not in its own offices
Michael Tinmouth has worked with companies such as Vodafone and Microsoft. He says, “Thanks to Facebook, companies have a better understanding of their customers than ever before. The data available is extraordinary. You know who your customers are and who they are friends with and what they think about your company.”
And advertisers pay a lot for that. Facebook earned $3.32 billion from advertising.
Facebook can also be dangerous for companies. Suddenly, customers don’t simply complain on the phone or on a small internet forum – angry customers can post their complaints for hundreds of their friends to see or even on the company’s own page.
4 Facebook has been the tool to organize revolutions
Organizing demonstrations has been revolutionized by Facebook. Manchester University’s Olga Onuch found that half of all the Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine had got their information from Facebook.
Many people told Onuch that they needed Facebook to read the truth about what was happening – they don’t trust traditional media.
5 Facebook makes news, breaks news and decides what is news
About 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 63% of all users say they get news from the internet. About a third of Facebook users post about politics and government.
Most people will first read an item of news on Facebook or other social media, mostly on mobiles. | 0ele
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If we reduced the amount of food we wasted around the world by just 25%, there would be enough food to feed all the hungry people in the world. Each year, we waste 1.3 billion tonnes of food, about one third of all the food we produce. This includes about 45% of all fruit and vegetables, 35% of fish and seafood, 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products and 20% of meat. We waste food like this, when, at the same time, 795 million people suffer from hunger.
The problem is global but is different in different parts of the world. In developing countries, there is a lot of “food loss” – this is when food is lost because of poor equipment, transportation and so on. In rich countries, there are low levels of “food loss” but high levels of “food waste”, which means people throw away food because they have bought too much or shops reject food because it doesn’t look good.
In developed countries, people and shops throw away between 30% and 40% of all food bought but, in poorer countries, people throw away only 5% to 16%.
“In the developing world, there is almost no food waste,” says Robert van Otterdijk, coordinator of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Save Food programme. “Food waste is happening in countries where people have more money, so they can throw away food. But there is a lot of food loss in developing countries because of the poor conditions they have.”
The environmental impact of food loss and waste is high. The carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2. This means that, if food waste were a country, it would produce more greenhouse gases than any country, except the US and China.
“We cause the problem of climate change because we produce and use too much – we are not in balance with what the Earth can provide,” says van Otterdijk. “Production of food is one of the biggest production sectors in the world. If we waste one-third of all this, you can imagine what a huge effect this has on the natural resources – on land, water, energy and greenhouse gases.”
The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand produce the most food waste. People in those countries waste 39% of all the food they buy. The next is Europe, where people throw away about 31% of all the food they buy. In the UK, 15 million tonnes of food is lost or wasted each year. British people throw away 4.2 million tonnes of edible food each year. This means that 11.7% of all food people buy is wasted, which costs each family £700 a year.
The foods most often found in British bins are bread, vegetables, fruit and milk. The most wasted food in the UK by weight is bread – people throw away 414,000 tonnes (22.4%) of all the bread they buy. By percentage, the most wasted food is lettuce and leafy salads – people throw away 38% (64,000 tonnes) of all they buy.
The UK has improved in the past ten years, thanks to a campaign to reduce waste. Van Otterdijk says the UK has been very successful in reducing food waste. Between 2007 and 2012, the amount of food waste produced by UK households decreased by 21%, from 5.3 million tonnes to 4.2 million tonnes.
Van Otterdijk says that more and more people are interested in food waste and this is great. “We have to do much more, and companies and governments also need to help,” he says. “But, if it continues like this, maybe, after ten years, the situation around the world will be better.” | 0ele
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Clay Cockrell is sitting in his office opposite the Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.
Cockrell is a former Wall Street worker who is now a therapist. He spends large parts of his days walking in Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, talking to some of New York’s wealthiest people.
“Many of the very wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are,” he says.
So, what problems do America’s 1% have? “There is guilt that they are rich,” he said. “There is the feeling that they have to hide that they are rich. And, then, there is the isolation – being in the 1% can be lonely.”
Counsellors say that things have become worse since the financial crisis in 2008. People now talk about the gap between rich and poor more because of groups like Occupy Wall Street.
“Occupy Wall Street had some important things to say about the gap between rich and poor but it was negative about the 1%,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist. The media, she said, makes the rich “feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed”.
“Sometimes, I am shocked by things that people say. You would never talk about another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to talk about wealthy people.”
“It’s really isolating to have a lot of money. People’s reaction 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. But it’s harder to talk about being rich than it is to talk about being poor. People don’t mind if you 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 says, the rich hang out with other rich Americans who understand them and their problems.
In the US, over the last 30 years, the number of very wealthy people has grown. In 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more – excluding the value of their main home – was 10.1 million. There were 1.3 million households worth $5 million and 142,000 worth $25 million or more.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or with your money.
“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with other people, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell.
“Wealth can stop you from connecting with other people,” said the wife of a man who made about $80 million. Some Americans keep their wealth secret.
“There are a lot of people hiding their wealth because they are worried about negative judgment,” said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about their problems, people don’t have a lot of sympathy,” she said.
Cockrell said that there is a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make – they let their money be the most important thing in their lives.
“If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems. There are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing,” he said. “Your problems are real.” | 0ele
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Is this the moment when streaming goes mainstream?
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), only 41 million subscribers used music streaming services around the world in 2014. In the record business, it is the area that is growing the fastest but it is still quite small. Also, many subscribers have streaming as part of a mobile phone package so nobody knows if they use the service or not. Apple hopes to reach 100 million subscribers. The subscription fee would be $120 per year so Apple would earn $12 billion a year. By comparison, the entire global worth of recorded music in 2014 was just under $15 billion. Apple is good at making products go mainstream but it’s not that good.
Is this the end of downloading?
The iTunes Store arrived in 2003 (2004 in Europe). Apple was able to persuade consumers to pay for downloads and it grew a really big business with an estimated 70% market share. Downloads were still 52% of total digital income in 2014, according to IFPI. Apple has most of this – this means it is the biggest music retailer in the world. But download earnings reached their highest point in 2013 in the UK at £283 million and fell to £249 million in 2014.
Download sales fell in the US in 2013 so Apple bought Beats in 2014 because it wanted to move from music ownership (downloads) to music access (subscription streaming). Apple, and the record industry, cannot afford to get rid of the download market yet – so streaming and downloading will have to coexist under the Apple brand. Most people like music but don’t love it enough to pay $120 a year to listen to it. On average, people in the UK, for example, spent just £39.52 on music in 2014. Even Apple will find it very difficult to make people triple the money they spend on recorded music.
Has Apple Connect made Apple the most artist-friendly service?
Apple Connect is somewhere in the middle of YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud. It allows artists to post music, videos, photos and more to their profile pages. Apple has good relations with the music industry and, also, with artists. It has a good reputation among artists. This is a bit different from Spotify – artists from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift have criticized Spotify. There is probably going to be a revolution and Apple is trying to make sure it has the support of artists.
Where are the artist exclusives?
Artist exclusives is going to be the interesting bit when Apple Music opens. It will be very important for streaming to have exclusive rights to big albums. Spotify paid a lot of money to get Led Zeppelin and Metallica exclusively. Apple already has the music of AC/DC and the Beatles for download on iTunes but it is uncertain if these two will want to move to streaming. It was an easy decision for artists to give iTunes the download exclusive on an album because most people download music using iTunes. But trying to do that in streaming is not the same thing.
Is this going to kill Spotify?
Some people already believe that Apple Music will destroy competitors like Spotify. But it’s not that simple. Other companies have been offering music streaming for many years but Apple hasn’t – it has no experience of music streaming. The winner of this battle will not be the company with the best service; it will be the company with the most money. Apple’s competitors have an advantage but they are losing a lot of money. Spotify, for example, lost €93.1 million in 2013. But Apple is different – it started 2015 by becoming the most profitable company in business history. It had $178 billion in the bank. | 0ele
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Volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes can make a city totally disappear. But there are two other things that can make it disappear, too – water and sand.
One hundred years ago, Venice – one of the most beautiful and low-lying cities in the world – used to flood about ten times a year. Now, its lowest point, Piazza San Marco (only three feet above sea level) floods approximately 100 times a year.
But rising sea levels are not the only cause. In many parts of the world, the land is also sinking. In Venice, the city sank by 20cm between 1950 and 1970. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is also sinking by about 2cm a year – but the situation in Jakarta is much worse – it is sinking 10 to 20cm every year. In the past three decades, the city has sunk four metres.
The Indonesian capital has pumped out so much water to support its population that the land above is too dry. This is creating a bowl.
There are many plans to save Venice, and Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are taking the problem seriously. But it is not same in Miami where politicians will not accept that the city has a serious problem.
There are three main problems in Miami. It is less than ten feet above sea level; an increasing number of tropical storms are flooding the city; and it is built on porous rock, which absorbs the rising seawater. This water then fills the city’s foundations and comes up through drains and pipes. This forces sewage upwards and pollutes the city’s fresh water. It is possible that it may, one day, be impossible to live in Miami.
In the Maldives, the populations of whole islands may leave their homes. The capital is Malé. It has a population of 153,379 and is only four feet above sea level. Malé has built a ten-foot sea wall, which cost $63 million. But, in the long term, Malé and the rest of the islands will only be safe if sea levels stop rising.
In Africa, the Sahara is getting bigger – it is moving south at a rate of 30 miles per year. This is a problem for people who live in northern Mauritania.
People may have to leave the Californian resort of Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, in the next decade. The problem in California is not caused by global warming – the problem is that there are too many people there. In 1870, the total population was only half a million but, now, the state is home to 38 million people. And these people have 32 million cars.
Every person in Rancho Mirage uses more than 200 gallons of water every day. This is causing a man-made drought. They have reduced water use by 25% but this will probably not make much difference. The long-term answer in California’s desert is for people to leave some cities.
Fire is a growing problem to towns and cities in America – in fact, forest fires cause the most damage after bad storms. There were 800 major fire disasters there between 1953 and 2014. A new report by the USDA Forest Service shows the increasing number of towns and cities that are particularly vulnerable to wildfire.
Many cities are fighting a losing battle against nature but is it possible to choose the world’s most vulnerable city? Natural disasters are very difficult to predict – but the future for Malé does look very bad. Its new sea wall might continue to work but the islands around the Maldives capital are going to disappear soon. And, if they disappear, Malé’s reason for existing disappears, too. | 0ele
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How long can you hold your breath? I’m trying it right now. The first 30 seconds are easy. I want to give up at 45 seconds but I continue and it gets easier for a while. But, as I go past one minute, my heart is pounding. I breathe out a tiny bit and this helps. One minute and 12 seconds. I’m quite impressed with myself.
In some sports, it is very important to be able to hold your breath, particularly in freediving. In 2006, I met Sam Amps, who was captain of the UK freedive team. At a swimming pool in Bristol, she taught me some simple ways to help me hold my breath for longer while swimming underwater. By the end of the session, I could hold my breath for 90 seconds, long enough to let me swim across the pool. Sam swam across the pool three times easily. She could hold her breath for five minutes, while swimming. Five minutes!
I asked how she did it: very slow breathing for several minutes before each dive, then a big, deep breath before diving in.
Our heart rate doesn’t slow down when we hold our breath. At least, it doesn’t if you’re doing it on land. When you’re under cold water, the heart rate slows down in most people. This change in our bodies is useful in diving – but it is even more useful for not drowning.
Holding our breath is becoming very useful in one particular area of medicine. Radiotherapy for breast cancer involves pointing radiation exactly at the tumour. It’s usually done in short periods, between breaths. But, if the patient can hold their breath for several minutes, it means that doctors can give the complete radiation dose, in the right place, all at the same time. The problem, of course, is that most people cannot hold their breath for several minutes. But doctors at University Hospital Birmingham have shown that, if patients are given air with extra oxygen before holding their breath, they can hold it for five-and-a-half minutes.
Surprisingly, to achieve this you have to fool the diaphragm. When you breathe in, you’re pulling the muscle of your diaphragm flat so that the volume of your chest increases – this pulls the air into your lungs.
When you hold your breath, you keep your diaphragm like that. If you breathe extra oxygen before a breath-hold, as in the Birmingham radiotherapy experiments, you may be able to stop the diaphragm from becoming tired too quickly. So, it’s your diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing, that is in charge when you are holding your breath. But, in the end, even if you’ve fooled it for a while, the signals from the diaphragm become too strong and you have to give up – and take a breath. | 0ele
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“If we don’t win, it doesn’t mean anything,” said billionaire Donald Trump in South Carolina. He hopes to be the Republican presidential nominee. He is worried he might not win but he shouldn’t be worried because he has been at the top of the opinion polls for four months. “I want to pick my date for the election. I want it next Tuesday,” he told a crowd of 11,000 people. He needs their support to continue until March 2016 so he is chosen as the presidential candidate in November 2016’s general election.
Strangely, recent controversy has only made him more popular.
First, he shocked prisoners of war when he said that he didn’t believe Vietnam veteran John McCain was a hero because he allowed the enemy to capture him. Then, in the first television debate, he was rude to a woman who asked him difficult questions.
Trump has also insulted Mexican immigrants to the US and said that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently thrown out of a political meeting deserved to be attacked. He seemed to laugh at a New York Times journalist for his disability and said Muslim Americans supported the 9/11 attackers.
Some people still hope that, eventually, even Trump’s 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 winning.
“He’s not a conservative, he’s not a liberal – he believes in himself,” former presidential rival, Bobby Jindal, told the Guardian.
Trump tells his supporters that the three things that he is most against – immigration reform, freetrade deals and Barack Obama’s national security policy – have become the most important issues of the election.
He believes that every undocumented immigrant in the US should be sent back to their country and he wants to ask Mexico to pay for a border wall – “A real wall. A very tall wall, taller than that ceiling.” This might not sound possible but these ideas have possibly destroyed the campaign hopes of Jeb Bush, who wants immigration reform.
So what can stop Trump? Often, polls this far away from election day can be incorrect because most people have not made up their minds. Among Americans who say they are Republicans, current polls say that he has 25-30% of the vote.
Steve Deace, an Iowa conservative, said that Trump’s behaviour is “both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it creates loyal supporters who love Trump’s personality. On the other hand, it means he cannot change that personality.”
Republican Frank Luntz believes Trump speaks for voters who, for the first time, feel as if they have a mouthpiece and like the fact that they feel like they are heard. He says, “Trump says what they’re thinking and, the more outrageous he is, the more they agree with him. He’s saying what no politician would say and that’s another reason they like him.”
That is certainly the feeling among ordinary supporters who go to his very crowded campaign events.
“I like the way he speaks,” says Sandra Murray of Dubuque, Iowa. “This country is a big mess and he could be the man to help us.”
Other supporters offer a simpler explanation. “He’s not afraid of anybody or anything. That’s cool.” | 0ele
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Life isn’t fair sometimes. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and is now worth $48 billion. James Goodfellow also invented something that millions of people around the world use every day – the cash machine – but it didn’t make him rich. In fact, he earned just £10 from the patent and has not made any money from it since.
Who is the inventor of the ATM? People have argued for years over this question. In 2005, a man called John Shepherd-Barron received a UK honour as the “inventor of the automatic cash dispenser”. But, the UK government is now saying it was Goodfellow who invented the ATM.
In the mid-1960s, Goodfellow’s managers asked him to think of a way to allow customers to withdraw cash from banks on Saturdays. “Most people worked during the week and couldn’t go to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would give cash to a customer,” he says. “I wanted to develop a cash machine and, to make this happen, I invented the PIN [personal identification number] and a coded token.”
Goodfellow’s first machines were installed in 1967. At around the same time, Shepherd-Barron was developing a similar machine. His machine didn’t use plastic cards – it used cheques.
Most people agree that Shepherd-Barron’s ATM was the “world’s first” to be installed and used by the public. The first one was at a bank in north London. It was opened on 27 June, 1967 – a month before Goodfellow’s ATM appeared. But, Goodfellow registered the patent for his machine on 2 May, 1966, 14 months before Shepherd-Barron’s ATM machine was first used.
Shepherd-Barron received an official honour for his invention and Goodfellow says: “My one big regret is that I never said anything about it until John Shepherd-Barron received the honour in 2005. The Queen gave him this honour for inventing the automatic cash dispenser. That really annoyed me and I complained about it.”
Shepherd-Barron is dead now but, in a 2005 interview, he criticized Goodfellow. He said Goodfellow’s invention was a failure.
The cash machine is now used all over the world and, every year, there are more and more: there are now three million ATMs worldwide and there will be four million by 2020. The good news for Goodfellow is that people are beginning to recognize him for his invention. The website ATMInventor.com says: “Who invented the idea of an ATM? We believe it was Luther George Simjian. Who invented the ATM as we know it? It was James Goodfellow for holding a patent date of 1966.”
Even better for Goodfellow, his invention is in a 180-page guidebook called Life in the United Kingdom. In the section about “great British inventions of the twentieth century”, it says: “In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937-) invented the automatic teller machine (ATM) or ‘cashpoint’.”
So after all these years, Goodfellow is finally among a group of famous British inventors with John Logie Baird (the television), Alan Turing (the Turing machine), Sir Frank Whittle (the jet engine) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the World Wide Web). When he was asked what he did with the £10 he received in the 1960s, Goodfellow said he spent it on a night out. “It didn’t change my life,” he said. | 0ele
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Our new international survey, including 33 countries, shows how wrong people around the world are about some important things.
British people think the richest 1% own 59% of their country’s wealth, when they actually “only” own 23%. Americans think that 33% of their population are immigrants but it is really only 14%.
Brazilians think the average age in their country is 56, when it is only 31. Russians think that 31% of their politicians are women, when it is only 14%.
In Britain, people think that 43% of young adults aged 25-34 still live at home with their parents, rather than the actual 14%. In India, people who did the online survey think 60% of the whole country also has internet access, when really only 19% do.
So, why do people across the world know so little about these things?
Some of us don’t understand the questions. For example, most countries overestimate how many people are not religious: in the 33 countries, people thought 37% are not religious but the real number is actually just 18%. This is because we are thinking of how many people practise their religion, rather than how many people say they have a religion.
Rural areas are large so that is why people overestimate how many people live in the countryside.
We see things from our own perspective and find it difficult to imagine that there is a lot of variety in our countries. For example, the people from India who did the survey really overestimated their population’s access to the internet. Most people did the study online – and, in developing countries, this means the people who did the survey were probably wealthy. What we found from the survey is that people generalize from their own situations and forget that other people’s situations might be different.
In Britain, this is probably the reason why people overestimated how much the richest people own, how many young people are still living at home and what proportion of the population are immigrants (the guess is 25%, when it is really only 13%). People are worried about these things and, because of this, they overestimate.
But, the survey suggests there are also some problems that people are not very worried about but they should be more worried. For example, most countries really underestimate how much of their population is overweight. The worst case is Saudi Arabia, where people think only 28% are overweight, when 71% are. Britons think it is 44%, when actually 62% are overweight.
In many ways, it is the differences between countries that are the most interesting and important aspects of the study. The top 1% in Russia own 70% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% in New Zealand only own 18%. Half of Italians aged 25-34 still live with their parents but only 4% in Norway. The average age in India is 27; it is 47 in Japan. Only 10% of politicians are women in Brazil, Hungary and Japan, when 44% are in Sweden.
When the reality is so strange and varied, it is not surprising that we’re often so wrong. | 0ele
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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. | 0ele
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Many of us know we don’t get enough sleep but imagine if there was a simple solution: getting up later. In a speech at the British Science Festival, Dr Paul Kelley from Oxford University said schools should stagger their starting times to work with the natural rhythms of their students. This would improve exam results and students’ health (lack of sleep can cause diabetes, depression, obesity and other health problems).
Dr Kelley said that, when children are around ten, their natural wake-up time is about 6.30am; at 16, this rises to 8am; and, at 18, a person’s natural waking hour is 9am, although you may think they are just a lazy teenager. The normal school starting time works for 10-year-olds but not for 16- to 18-year-olds. For the older teenagers, it might be better to start the school day at 11am or even later. “A 7am wake-up time for older teenagers,” says Kelley, “is the same as a 4.30am start for a teacher in their 50s.”
He says the solution is not to tell teenagers to go to bed earlier. “The body’s natural rhythm is controlled by a particular kind of light,” says Kelley. “The eye has cells that report to a part of the brain that controls our sleep rhythms over a 24-hour cycle. It’s the light that controls it.”
But it isn’t just students who would benefit from a later start. Kelley says the working day should be more linked to our natural rhythms. Describing the average sleep loss per night for different age groups, he says: “Between 14 and 24, people lose more than two hours. For people aged between 24 and about 30 or 35, they lose 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.”
So, should workplaces have staggered starting times, too? Should people in their 50s and above come in at 8am, people in their 30s start at 10am and the teenage apprentice at 11am? Kelley says that synchronized hours could have “many positive effects. The positive side is that people’s performance, mood and health will improve. It’s very positive 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 because drivers would be more awake, he says. It could mean the end of rush hour because people would stagger their work times and the times of their school run. A later start to the day for many, says Kelley, “is something that would benefit all people, particularly families. Parents go and try to wake up teenagers who are waking up three hours too early. It creates problems for everybody.”
So, what time does Kelley start work? “I am 67 so that means I’m like a 10-year-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 when he was younger. | 0ele
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One day, drones could deliver packages to your home. When will this happen? If you believe Amazon, it will be soon. Other people are not so sure. They have to invent the right technology but, also, they have to consider public safety.
Amazon say that they will be ready as soon as the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) introduce rules for using drones. The FAA will finally introduce rules for using unmanned aircraft by June 2016. But the technology has a long way to go before then and larger machines aren’t legal yet – only drones up to 25kg will be legal. And the FAA says in the rules they want to introduce that drones will all have to use different radio frequencies that nobody can block or hijack.
Professor Sajiv Singh, who works for delivery company NearEarth, said that flying drones is quite simple – you just give it some basic instructions: go to this height, do this short task, go back home. But even short flights from a mobile landing place could cause serious problems, he said.
“They’re not planning to deliver in areas where nobody lives; they’re planning to deliver from a warehouse to the consumer, which will probably be in a town or city,” he said. “The drone will have to see hazards. Maybe there will be things that the map doesn’t know about. Maybe there will be construction equipment that wasn’t there but is there now. Maybe GPS signals will be blocked so it’s going to have an incorrect idea about where it is.” All this can be solved, he said – but it’s difficult.
One big problem is keeping radio contact with a drone and planning for what happens if that contact breaks. “If a drone loses radio contact, it will keep going and crash into the ground,” said robot expert Daniel Huber.
“We already have most of the technology we need,” said Huber. He is working on a program that will use drones to check telephone lines, bridges and so on. “We can make drones fly around a certain area and look at every surface.”
Huber said about Amazon: “They say that many packages are light – a drone can carry a kilogram for 15 minutes. If you have a vehicle that can go into a neighbourhood, it can deliver from that vehicle. You need a 15-minute distance, and typical drones have about that distance.” It’s one way, he said, to make sure people are safe. “The larger the distance, the more dangerous it becomes.”
Of course, safety is still a big worry – Singh points out that for a passenger aeroplane to be allowed to fly, it can only have one serious failure every one million hours. Drones, he said, are much less safe. “The Reaper drone, for example, has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said.
Part of the reason for this is simply that air travel is dangerous so standards are much higher. “If you fly a passenger aeroplane, often they will say, ‘Oh, a small part isn’t working; we have to go back,’” Singh said. “And people have been flying passanger aeroplanes for 60 years! I hate to think that a drone might come down on a busy road.” Part of the solution, Singh said, is planning for every situation: “If things fail, the drone has to do something sensible.” | 0ele
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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.” | 0ele
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There are worse things to do in life than stroll along Rio’s Copacabana beach in the sunshine on the way to watch a World Cup match. So it was not surprising that England fan Anthony McDowell from Liverpool was in a good mood. “The place is lovely. The people are great. There’s a party atmosphere,” said McDowell. “The only thing that could be better is the England team.”
He and six friends were among the thousands of supporters from around the world who have made the beach into a party zone. Some danced, some took photos, some drank, but mostly they just walked and talked about football, waiting for the next game to begin on the big screen nearby.
The friendly, mostly peaceful mood was very different from the protests, transport chaos and stadium problems during the preparations for the World Cup. But, now the football has started, visiting supporters want to enjoy the experience. “If I knew, when I started planning, how complicated and expensive it would be, I wouldn’t have come. But, now that we’re here, it’s great,” said Brian Hill, another England fan.
The trip has not been without its problems. Hill travelled for more than 20 hours to get to Rio. His son’s sunglasses were stolen almost as soon as he sat on the beach. And, they have been surprised that many bars do not have big screens for the games. But, like many fans, they said they loved the atmosphere of this tournament, which has had a spectacular start.
Everyone enjoyed Robin van Persie’s extraordinary diving header for the Netherlands against Spain. And, there have been lots of goals: 28 in the first eight games – almost three times as many as at the same stage in South Africa in 2010. Latin-American teams have been very successful so far and, as most fans are from neighbouring countries, this has added to the carnival atmosphere.
Up to now, the tournament has avoided the problems many people predicted, though it is not trouble free. The stadiums were delivered late and – in some cases – not fully finished, but there have been no structural problems or difficulties entering the grounds.
As at previous World Cups, ticketing has been a problem, with many empty seats at several games. FIFA spokesman Saint-Clair Milesi said that only 48,000 of the 51,900 seats were filled at the game between the Netherlands and Spain.
The Globo newspaper listed a number of problems in the 12 host cities. Almost all had worse traffic jams than usual. The worst transport problems were in Natal, where bus drivers were on strike. In Salvador, some journey times were five times longer than usual. “Traffic was already bad but this week it is chaotic,” said Jecilda Mello, a local person.
But, protests have happened less often since the opening day, when small demonstrations took place in several cities and police used pepper spray. Since then, the only security problem has been petty theft and overexcited fans. Police used pepper spray on Argentinian fans when they started a spontaneous street party and blocked roads.
The huge distances have created some very different World Cup experiences. The tournament has had only a small effect on São Paulo, South America’s biggest city. But, far away in Manaus – the remote Amazonian city where England played Italy – visitors said there was World Cup fever with brightly decorated streets and flags on many cars.
The English Football Association chairman, Greg Dyke, said there was a big difference in atmosphere. “We’ve had a really warm welcome in Manaus. It’s a big thing for them. But we were in São Paulo for four or five days before the first match and it was hard to see until the last day that the World Cup was happening. It was weird.” | 0ele
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McDonald’s is the world’s biggest burger chain and a symbol of American consumer capitalism. But, these days, the golden arches of McDonald’s are not looking so golden. The company has got much bigger since 2003 but, now, the numbers of customers are falling. McDonald’s says that its worldwide sales have fallen by 3.3%.
The company has problems almost everywhere. In China, sales fell by 23%. In Europe, sales fell by 4%, mostly because of problems in Ukraine and the anti-western mood in Russia. Health inspectors have investigated around 200 of McDonald’s 450 restaurants in Russia and they have closed ten restaurants.
But the worst crisis is in the US, where McDonald’s has around 40% of its restaurants. Almost 60 years since Ray Kroc opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, consumers are losing their appetite for a Big Mac and fries.
Sales have fallen every month for 12 months in the US. Many younger diners are eating at rival companies such as Chipotle Mexican Grill. The number of 19-to-21-year-olds who visit McDonald’s once a month has fallen by 13% since 2011.
Another problem is that McDonald’s hamburgers were recently named the worst in America in a poll of more than 32,000 American diners – they said they would rather eat a burger at Five Guys, Smashburger or Fuddruckers. Many people also believe that McDonald’s is less healthy than most of its rivals, especially Chipotle. Chipotle uses antibiotic-free meat and “locally sourced, seasonal” ingredients.
McDonald’s asked customers for their opinions in the US in October. Someone asked “Have you ever used pink slime in your burgers?” – ‘pink slime’ is the beef filler that is used for dog food. McDonald’s stopped using this meat product in 2012 but McDonald’s Chief Executive Don Thompson said the company still had to improve people’s opinions about the freshness and quality of its ingredients.
McDonald’s has always had a reputation for fast service at low prices. But, since it introduced $2 items on its dollar menu, people think it is more expensive than its rivals and many consumers complain that service is slower.
But Mary Chapman at food analysts Technomic said that it wasn’t fair to say that McDonald’s was more expensive than its rivals. “Prices have gone up but they haven’t gone up as quickly as the rest of the fast-food chains in the US.” Prices at McDonald’s have increased by 4.8% since 2009, much less than the fast-food average (up 19.4%).
But people are right when they complain that the queues are longer. McDonald’s has a bigger menu than some other restaurants, with more complicated items – its chicken McWrap takes 60 seconds to make. “I think it is worth waiting but the guy behind me who wants his double cheeseburger for a dollar might not,” said Chapman.
McDonald managers are promising to improve people’s opinions about its food in the US. Thompson has promised more organic food and “build your own burgers”. But, to reduce queues, he also wants to introduce simpler menus. How can the company have simpler menus and, at the same time, a larger selection of fillings? “They want to simplify the menu but also offer ‘build your own burgers’ – that sounds tricky,” said consumer expert Mark Kalinowski. Only four out of McDonald’s 14,000 US restaurants have tested “build your own burger”, he said. “Right now, we are sceptical; we would like to see more detail.”
Sales are falling but McDonald’s continues to expand around the world: by the end of 2014, it expects to open 1,400 new restaurants. Kalinowski thinks that McDonald’s sales will continue to fall but he thinks it will be number one for many years. | 0ele
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Like a typical bad boyfriend, Dan Sullivan arrived late to breakfast with the Guardian because the police stopped him on his motorcycle.
Sullivan works too much, he says. He misses dinner dates. He forgets to give presents.
And so, like many others in Silicon Valley, the 27-year-old has started a business: BetterBoyfriend.me, a service that sends girlfriends and wives a present every month for about $70.
Sullivan is testing the service and has about 350 boyfriends as his clients. Most clients, he says, are his friends from university and other friends who are founders of start-ups or work for companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. The girlfriends of these men get presents from Sullivan.
Each month, Sullivan’s clients choose from a list of seven possible gifts (chocolate, tea sets, etc). Then, Sullivan sends the gift to the boyfriend.
For Sullivan, the surprise was the real relationships that he has formed with his clients. Sullivan says he has begun to see himself as a sort of relationship consultant for the boyfriends.
Sullivan says he’s made mistakes. In the beginning, the gifts he sent included receipts with his name on, Dan Sullivan. “One of the boyfriends wrote to me and said, 'She’s not mad but Cynthia found out'.”
Of all the women BetterBoyfriend.me deliver packages to, about 50% know that Sullivan chooses the presents they receive: “It’s connected with age. I think, after you’ve been married for a longer time, you don’t keep many secrets.”
And over the year, the young founder says he’s got to know the boyfriends really well. They’ve even sent a package to a hospital delivery room. The key, he said, is to remember that his relationship is with the boyfriend.
When he first started his company, he attached tags that said BetterBoyfriend.me to flower bouquets and went to the Mission District in San Francisco.
“I looked for couples and gave the flowers to the girl but the boyfriends didn’t like that. Not at all,” he said. “So I changed my idea and gave the flowers to the boyfriends.” | 0ele
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Opposition to Western Australia’s shark cull has intensified as thousands of people took to beaches across the continent to call on the state’s premier to end the policy, and RSPCA Australia and Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson spoke out against it. The controversial catching and killing of sharks longer than three metres began after what the state government called an “unprecedented” number of shark attacks on Western Australia’s coast, which saw a 35-year-old surfer killed in November 2013. He was the sixth person to die from a shark attack in two years.
However, according to the Shark Attack File, Australia as a whole has averaged one shark- related fatality a year for the last 50 years. Kate Faehrmann, a board member at the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said from a protest in Perth: “We’ve been saying all along that this policy won’t work. Drumlines, used to catch the sharks, are indiscriminate killers. They’ll kill sharks whether they’re one, two, three metres or more, as well as dolphins, turtles and other things. That’s why the community doesn’t want it.”
Thousands of people protested on Perth’s Cottesloe Beach and Sydney’s Manly Beach, as well as hundreds at Glenelg, in south- west Adelaide, and at beaches in Victoria and Queensland. Faehrmann said the protests had shown Australians wanted sharks protected: “What’s amazing is so many people in Australia love sharks. This has demonstrated something about the national psyche, that, despite Jaws, despite all the fear, people are coming out in their thousands across the country to say, 'That’s their ocean. We respect them, we love them and we don’t want them killed.'” Anthony Joyce, a surfer who once had his foot caught in a shark’s mouth, said: “The number of sharks they are going to kill is going to make no difference in the scheme of things.”
The state government has refused to provide a running tally of sharks killed, though there have been reports of sharks smaller than three metres being released after getting caught on drumlines, floating drums anchored to the sea bed with bait hanging on hooks beneath them. Conservationists argue there is no evidence the cull will reduce the number of shark attacks on humans, as no previous cull has solely used drumlines. Researchers at the University of Western Australia say the recent spate of shark attacks in the state may have more to do with the state having the fastest-growing population in Australia, rather than a rising number of sharks.
Richard Peirce, chairman of the UK-based conservation charity, the Shark Trust, said that the cull would be ineffective and potentially lure 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 that could be seen to take positive initiatives with regards to shark – human interactions by trialling alternatives to indiscriminate killing has ignored the best advice and opted for an approach that is ineffective and counterproductive,” he said. “The indiscriminate nature of drumlines is often overlooked – even if monitored through the day, leaving the lines in overnight has the potential to attract other predators into the area, attracted by those sharks and other species hooked and injured.”
Globally, in 2012, there were 80 unprovoked attacks by sharks, seven of which proved fatal, compared to nearly 100m sharks killed by humans each year. RSPCA Australia released a statement saying it believes the cull is unjustified. “There is no evidence that the increase in attacks is a result of increasing shark numbers. Rather, 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 told Fairfax Radio the policy was backfiring. “I’m sure one of the reasons Western Australia Premier, Colin Barnett, did it was because he was thinking it would encourage tourism. It’s going to do quite the reverse, I think. You’re advertising a problem that doesn’t exist in a major way and you’re deterring people from wanting to come to Perth and your beautiful countryside around it. All you’re going to achieve, I think, is to worry people unnecessarily.” | 0ele
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1 Race engineer
A race engineer takes information from the driver and gives it to the mechanics.
Typical salary: You start at £25,000 and very soon earn 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 gives this to the mechanics.”
Qualifications: A university degree, usually in automotive/mechanical engineering or motorsport technology. Hands-on experience is essential.
To succeed as a race engineer, you need … to be able to work under pressure.
Worst thing about the job: The long hours. “Race engineers work 24/7,” says Chris Aylett, CEO of the Motorsport Industry Association.
2 Ethical hacker
Typical salary: A newly qualified hacker will usually have a minimum salary of £35,000 to £50,000. This rises to £60,000 to £90,000 when they become team leader.
What the job involves: A company pays an ethical hacker to hack into its computer system to see how well it might fight a real attack.
Qualifications: You don’t need a degree in computer science. The industry accepts people with a very wide range of qualifications and skills.
To succeed as an ethical hacker, you need … a passion for technology and detail. You should also enjoy solving difficult problems.
Worst thing about the job: When you are testing the security of a new customer ’s network and you find that they have already been hacked.
3 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: You descend to the sea ed and look for unexploded bombs and mines. Then, you safely collect the weapons or safely dispose of them.
Qualifications: To dive offshore, you must have diving qualifications. To be able to dispose of the bombs safely, you’ll also need a special qualification and years of experience.
To succeed as a bomb-disposal diver, you need … to be calm in stressful situations. You work alone under water, with zero visibility and, if you don’t like living in small spaces with lots of other people, this job is not for you.
Worst thing about the job: You will be away from home for at least six months of the year.
4 Social engineer
Typical salary: Graduates start on £25,000. Your salary will rise to between £50,000 and £80,000.
The job: Companies pay a social engineer to try to trick their employees and make them give the engineer secret information.
Qualifications: Usually, social engineers have a degree in IT but an understanding of psychology is also useful.
To succeed as a social engineer, you need … to be a good liar. You also need to have strong personal ethics and to understand the law.
Worst thing about the job: Other people may misunderstand your job: social engineers are not spies but most people think they are.
5 Power-line helicopter pilot
Typical salary: £65,000
The job: To fly close to power lines in a helicopter so that someone can check the lines with a camera.
Qualifications: A private-helicopter-pilot licence, a commercial pilot’s licence and around 2,000 hours of experience flying at low levels.
To succeed as a power-line helicopter pilot, you need … a steady hand and to stay calm in difficult situations. Pilots often have to fly next to 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.
6 Private butler
Typical salary: £60,000 to £90,000
The job: An employer can ask a private butler to do anything from managing other staff, serving at every meal, running errands and looking after guests to booking restaurants, house security, housekeeping and cooking.
Qualifications: You don’t need any qualifications 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 it’s difficult to have a family life. | 0ele
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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%). | 0ele
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Poorer countries will be most affected by climate change in the next century.
Sea levels will rise, there will be stronger cyclones, warmer days and nights, more rainfall, and larger and longer heatwaves, says a new report.
The last big United Nations (UN) report, in 2007, said there would be temperature rises of 6°C or more by the end of the century. Scientists now think this will not happen, but average land and sea temperatures will probably continue rising during this century, possibly becoming 4 °C hotter than now. That rise would ruin crops and make life in many cities too hot.
As temperatures rise and oceans become warmer, there will be big changes in annual rainfall in tropical and subtropical regions, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in Stockholm and published online in September 2013.
East Africa can expect more short rainfalls and west Africa should expect heavier monsoons. Burma, Bangladesh and India can expect stronger cyclones; elsewhere in southern Asia, there will probably be heavier summer rainfalls. Indonesia may receive less rainfall between July and October, but the coastal regions around the south China Sea and Gulf of Thailand can expect more rainfall when cyclones hit the land. 'Rainfall patterns will change. Northern countries, for example in Europe or North America, will probably receive more rainfall, but many subtropical, dry regions will likely get less rain,' said the report.
The report also said that the monsoon season will probably start earlier and last longer.
Scientists in developing countries are happy with the report. “The IPCC says 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 experiencing 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.
Scientists have also lowered their predictions for sea-level rises. Sea levels will probably rise an average of 40 –62 cm by 2100. But many millions of people living in the developing world’s great cities, including Lagos and Calcutta, are in danger.
Weather disasters are also more likely in a warmer world, the report says. The number of tropical cyclones will probably not change, but they may become more intense, with stronger winds and heavier rainfall.
Life in many developing country cities could become very difficult, especially because city temperatures are already higher than those in the countryside. Much higher temperatures could reduce the length of the growing period in some parts of Africa by up to 20%, the report said.
The charity Oxfam said that world hunger would get worse because climate changes hurt crop production. They said the number of people at risk of hunger might increase by 10% to 20% by 2050.
“The changing climate is already hurting the fight against hunger, and it looks like it will get worse,” said Oxfam. “A hot world is a hungry world”. | 0ele
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Intermediate
When you see the word Amazon, whats the first thing you think of the worlds biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet shop and which do you think is most important?
These are questions in a debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have made objections to a bid made by the huge US e-commerce company for a prime new piece of cyberspace: .amazon.
The Seattle-based company has applied for its brand to be a top-level domain name (currently .com), but the South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses.
Together with many other disputed claims to names, including .patagonia, the issue goes directly to the heart of debates about the purpose and governance of the internet.
Until now, the differences between commercial, governmental and other types of identity were easy to see in every internet address by the use of .com, .gov and 20 other categories.
But these categories or generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as they are technically known are about to see the biggest expansion since the start of the worldwide web.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a US-based non-profit organization that plays a key role in cyberspace governance has received bids (each worth almost $200,000) for hundreds of new gTLDs to add to the existing 22.
Amazon has applied for many new domains, including .shop, .song, .book and .kindle. But the one that has caused most discussion is its application is for its own brand.
Brazil and Peru have asked for the .amazon application to be withdrawn. They say a private company should not be given a name that is also the name of an important geographical area, an area that runs through and across their territories and is also used for certain regions and cross-border organizations.
Allowing private companies to register geographical names as gTLDs to strengthen their brand or to profit from the meaning of these names is not, in our view, in the public interest, the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology said.
Brazil said its views were supported by other members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela).
There have been other objections over proposed top-level domains that take geographical, cultural or contested brand names.
Argentina is unhappy that the US outdoor clothing retailer, Patagonia, is claiming a domain name that has been known far longer as a region of spectacular beauty that also has its own parliament. Argentina rejects the .patagonia request for a new generic top-level domain. Patagonia is an important region for the countrys economy because it has oil, fishing, mining and agriculture resources. It is also a region with a vibrant local community and it is a major tourist destination.
The contested proposals are expected to be discussed again at a meeting of ICANNs Governmental Advisory Committee in Durban in July. The first approved domain names will probably be in use before the end of 2013. | 1int
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Intermediate
To tourists, Amsterdam still seems very liberal. Recently the citys Mayor assured them that the citys marijuana-selling coffee shops would stay open despite a new national law to prevent drug tourism. But the Dutch capitals plans to send nuisance neighbours to scum villages made from shipping containers may damage its reputation for tolerance.
The Mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, says his controversial new 810,000 policy to deal with antisocial behaviour is to protect victims of abuse and homophobia. The camps, where antisocial families will be rehoused for three to six months, have been called scum villages because the policy is similar to proposals from Geert Wilders, the far-right politician, who last year said that repeat offenders should be sent to a village for scum.
Bartho Boer, a spokesman for the Mayor, says that the plans are not illiberal. We want to defend the liberal values of Amsterdam, he says. We want everyone to be who he and she is whether they are gay and lesbian or resist violence and are then victims of harassment. We as a society want to defend them. According to Boer, the villages are not for a problem neighbour who has the stereo too loud on Saturday night but people who are extremely violent and intimidating and in a clear situation where a victim is being harassed again and again.
People found guilty of causing extreme havoc will be evicted and put in basic temporary homes, including converted shipping containers in industrial areas of the city. We call it a living container, says Boer. Housing antisocial families in these units, which have showers and kitchens and have been used as student accommodation, will mean that they are not rewarded for their behaviour by being put in better accommodation.
Dutch newspaper the Parool has written that in the 19th century troublemakers were moved to villages in Drenthe and Overijssel, which rapidly became slums. But Boer insists that the government has learned from past mistakes and is not planning to house antisocial families together.
It would be more accurate to call them scum houses than scum villages, says Boer, because we dont want to put more than one of these families in the same area. After a maximum of six months in these houses, in different parts of the city, the families will be found permanent homes. The city government expects to move around ten families a year into this programme, which starts in 2013.
The temporary accommodation will be heavily policed, but antisocial families will also have access to doctors, social workers and parole officers. They are taken care of so the whole situation is not going to repeat at the new house they are in, says Boer. | 1int
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Intermediate
Brazils latest funk sensation, Anitta, has won millions of fans by making the favela sound popular, but she is at the centre of a debate about skin colour.
Anti-discrimination campaigners and social commentators say the music industrys fastest rising star has had to give up her blackness to be a success in the predominantly white middle-class market.
The controversy began with the publication of then-and-now photographs that show a dramatic lightening of Anittas skin tone since she signed a deal with Warner.
In the first photo, when she was quite unknown, she looked darker. In the second a marketing photo after she became famous she seems lighter. The contrast has restarted discussion about whether you need to have light skin to get ahead in Brazil.
Jarid Arraes, a psychology student and blogger, wrote a post criticizing the discrimination in media and marketing that she felt Anittas image change represented. People refuse to accept that they are racist and they think they live in a multiracial democracy, but the statistics show that is far from the case. White is the image of the rich, the nice, the successful, the good, while people see black as the opposite of all that.
Born Larissa de Macedo Machado, the diva-to-be was a church chorister in her childhood. In her teens, she made a name for herself in Rio de Janeiros baile funk scene as a dancer and singer.
She now has an album and a huge hit single, Show das Poderosas, which topped the charts and attracted 52 million YouTube views.
Many people love her because she is a pop idol with a strong message and some catchy tunes. Her marketing team want people to see her as a cultural bridge between the predominantly black and mixed-race shanty towns on Rios hillsides and the wealthier and whiter communities below.
gangsta references and explicit lyrics of baile funk. Now, however, questions are being asked about whether she or her marketing team have gone too far in changing her. Arraes says that if pop stars have curly hair, they will want to straighten it. If they have a big nose, they will want to make it smaller. It creates a vicious cycle for how you feel about yourself.
This is a sensitive topic in this largely mixed-raced nation. Brazil one of the last big countries in the world to ban slavery has the largest population of African descent outside Africa, but race and where your family come from are less important there than colour. There is a clear link between skin tone and inequality.
In Brazilian cities, white workers earn roughly twice as much as those of African descent. Up until 2011, black or mixed-race students also spent two years less at school on average.
Most business and government executives are white, while most menial jobs are done by black and mixed-race workers. If you walk through Ipanema, Gvea or other rich districts, you are far more likely to see black nannies pushing strollers with white children than a white nanny pushing a black child.
Defining colour is complex. People who define themselves as white were in the minority for the first time in the most recent census in 2010. Among the 197 million population, 82 million said they were pardu (mixed race), 15 million black, two million Asian and 0.5% indigenous.
Sylvio Ferreira, a psychology lecturer at the Federal University of Pernambuco, believes Anitta has won the hearts of the middle class by taking a rebellious sound and making it more acceptable to everyone.
Maycon de Mattos Batista, a financial analyst who worked with Anitta while she was an intern, said there had been a huge change in Anittas image, but not of her colour.
I dont believe its whitening; its more the way they are producing her with makeup, hairstylists and the way she dresses, he said. I dont think that was because of pressure they put on her. She always liked to show off, sing and dance. That was a natural thing for her. I believe that it is because of this naturalness that she is where she is today. | 1int
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Intermediate
It has mapped the worlds highest peaks, the ocean floor, the Amazon rainforest and even shown us a bit of North Korea. But Googles mission to map the world has mostly stayed away from the inhospitable Arctic.
Now, however, Google is starting what might be the most significant update to centuries of polar map making and one it hopes will help provide a better understanding of life on the permafrost for millions of web users. Google has flown a small team to Iqaluit, the largest town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. They have with them their warmest winter clothes, a stack of laptop computers and an 18kg telescopic camera that they can fix to their backpacks.
Helped by an Inuit mapping expert, and followed around by curious locals, the team spent four days collecting the images and information that will give the isolated community on Baffin Island what people across the globe who live in cities now take for granted.
The town of 7,000 people will go on display via Googles popular Street View application in July 2013.
Unlike more accessible parts of the world, which have been mapped using a special camera on a car roof, for Googles Iqaluit project mappers walked the towns snowpacked roads and crossed little-known trails, some of which are made of ice and disappear in the short summer months.
The team also walked along part of a 15km dead-end road known as the Road to Nowhere, despite warnings about the risk from polar bears and other wildlife.
John Graham, mayor of Iqaluit, understands the enthusiasm of the locals who followed Googles digital map makers while they worked. The Street View project, he said, follows in the footsteps of the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who in 1576 sailed into the bay where Iqaluit now is while searching for the Northwest Passage, and the 1941 flight of Captain Elliott Roosevelt, an officer and son of the US President, which led to the site being chosen for a military airbase. His exploration led to the founding of the modern town of Iqaluit.
What Google had already created on their existing map using satellite images was quite accurate, but they were missing one road that had been created in the past year.
One difficulty was how to situate many businesses and homeowners that have mail sent to the local post office, not delivered to their address. Putting the PO box addresses on the map would mean the map would show all the companies, banks and schools in the same place, around the Canada Post building in the centre of town.
About 30 Inuit elders, business people and high-school pupils came one night to help correct such problems. They were provided with a laptop computer and shown how to make sure their homes, shops and meeting places would show up accurately on the map.
The project is more than a novelty. Arif Sayani, the towns Director of Planning, said the town would be able to use the maps as a promotional tool for those thinking of visiting or moving to the area. It may also speed up planning decisions in Iqaluit.
The project leader for Google said he hoped to see the work continue in other northern towns. However, the high costs of moving people and equipment around the vast Arctic territory means they might have to use cheaper methods in the future, for example, sending equipment to the area and asking volunteers to complete the map. | 1int
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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. | 1int
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Intermediate
The huge fortunes made by the worlds richest 100 billionaires are increasing inequality and hindering the worlds ability to tackle poverty, according to Oxfam.
The charity said the accumulation of wealth and income often led to a reduction in secure jobs and decent wages for the poorest people. This made it more difficult for people who survive on aid or low wages to improve their situation and escape poverty.
Oxfam said the worlds poorest could be taken out of poverty several times over if the richest 100 billionaires would give away the money they made in 2012.
Without naming anyone, the charity argued that the $240bn made in 2012 by the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to end extreme poverty four times over.
It is unusual for charities to attack the wealthy, because they are usually seen as a source of money. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are among a group of 40 US billionaires who have said they will give much of their wealth to aid projects, but there is little detail about the level of their annual donations. Russian, Middle Eastern or Chinese billionaires have not promised to do the same.
In the report, The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All, published just before the World Economic Forum in Davos, the charity asks world leaders to commit to reducing inequality to at least 1990 levels.
The report found that the richest 1% had increased their incomes by 60% in the past 20 years. And the financial crisis has sped up, not slowed, the process.
Barbara Stocking, Oxfams Chief Executive, said studies show that countries suffer low levels of investment and growth as workers are forced to survive on a smaller share of total incomes.
She said: We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will benefit the many too often the reverse is true.
The report said the issue affected all parts of the world. In the UK, inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the nineteenth century. In China, the top 10% now earn nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth.
In the US, the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled since 1980 from 10 to 20%, the report says.
Members of the richest 1% are estimated to cause as much as 10,000 times more pollution than the average US citizen.
Oxfam said world leaders should learn from countries such as Brazil, which has grown rapidly while reducing inequality.
Stocking said: We need to reverse decades of increasing inequality. As a first step, world leaders should formally agree to reduce inequality to the levels seen in 1990.
She said closing tax havens, which hold as much as $31 trillion, or as much as a third of all global wealth, could collect $189bn in additional taxes. | 1int
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Intermediate
Back in 2005, when BlackBerry brought instant messaging to the mobile phone, the company was just entering its boom times. While the iPhone was still just an idea, BlackBerrys innovations ensured its smartphone was one of Canadas biggest exports.
Six years later, in the summer of 2011, when there were riots in London and other UK cities, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was so effective at mobilizing the rioters that politicians wanted the service to be temporarily shut down. But, two years later, it is the users themselves who are pulling the plug.
Demand for BlackBerry phones is falling. Dozens of alternatives have sprung up to take its place, from Facebooks and Apples instant messaging applications to independent apps such as WhatsApp and Kik (which is also Canadian). They are free to download and use, and they use the internet to swap text messages, pictures, voice clips, stickers and even videos between most types of phones.
In an attempt to keep its customers, BBM has been released on Android and Apple phones. Despite the competition from other apps, the response has been extraordinary, with more than 20 million downloads. But, despite this interest, many people believe BBMs wider release will not save the service. The move to bring BlackBerry to the iPhone is four or five years too late, says James Gooderson, an 18-year-old student who blogs on technology. WhatsApp has made BlackBerrys unnecessary for young people.
BBM says it has 80 million monthly users after its upgrade, but WhatsApp has 300 million. Other services show BBMs limitations: unlike Skype and Viber, it does not yet offer video or voice calls; unlike Path, it does not do location sharing; there is no video sharing, as on iMessage; and the stickers (a more sophisticated version of the smiley face), adored by kids all over the world, are also absent. Even the contacts and calendar sharing that BBM made possible on BlackBerry phones are not on the Apple and Android versions.
Messaging is moving from verbal to visual. Photos uploaded to Instagram get instant comments and Snapchats pictures, which selfdelete after ten seconds, have opened a world of other possibilities. Like BBM, all of these services are free for any phone with an internet connection. But as recently as 2011, BBM was so powerful it helped to start a revolution in Egypt; and at the time of the London riots, it was a more immediate source of news than the television screen.
We could see on our BlackBerry messages where the rioters were going next; TV news would catch up four hours later, said Jean- Pierre Moore, 28. He manages a youth club in Stockwell, south London, an area with some of the highest levels of crime and poverty in Britain. Moore mainly communicates on an iPad now. He does not agree with the idea that a shutdown of BBM would have stopped the looting. The social networking wasnt the reason, he says.
Nearly 80% of young smartphone owners regularly use a social networking application but two-thirds use more than one. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, 60% use Facebook every day, but 46% use alternatives. Its a much more complex, multifaceted environment, says Benedict Evans, a digital media specialist. All of these apps use your smartphone they plug into your phone book and your photo library. Apps rise and fall like fireworks. Some, like Instagram, last; others just disappear.
Thirteen-year-old Bennett has three phones. He keeps his BlackBerry for messaging, uses an iPhone to play games, and makes phone calls on an Android phone. His friends are still on BBM. At the touch of a few buttons, a single BlackBerry message can be sent to the phone owners entire contacts book several hundred people, in some cases; on WhatsApp, the limit for a broadcast message is 50. But, for Bennett, Instagram is now a major social network. Instagram is Facebook without parents, he says. Facebook has been taken over by the older generation. When I saw my mum on Facebook, I deleted my account.
The low cost of buying and communicating on a BlackBerry is still an advantage. Unlimited BBM messages are available to anyone with a secondhand was a belief that encrypted words sent over the companys secure servers could not be traced back to their writers. Arrests and prosecutions after the riots put an end to that belief. phone and a 7-a-month deal from a telecoms company. But people no longer trust the privacy of BBM. Part of the attraction to business people, revolutionaries, demonstrators and rioters
Across town from Stockwell, outside the gates of a private school in the rich district of South Kensington, the older pupils all have Apple logos on their phones. They all use WhatsApp. For many, BBM is a distant memory. I still have a Blackberry, but Im the only one, says a teenager standing with a circle of friends. And how does that make him feel? Isolated, he replies. | 1int
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Intermediate
The right of Bolivias indigenous Indian tribes to 1 chew coca leaves, the main ingredient in cocaine, has caused major international disagreement, which could have a significant effect on global drugs policy. Bolivia has received a special exemption from the 1961 Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which controls international drugs policy. The exemption allows Bolivias indigenous people to chew the leaves.
Bolivia had argued that the convention was in 2 opposition to its new constitution, adopted in 2009, which says it must protect native and ancestral coca as part of its cultural heritage and maintains that coca in its natural state is not a narcotic.
South American Indians have chewed coca 3 leaves for centuries. The leaves are said to provide energy and have medicinal qualities. Supporters of Bolivias position said that defending the rights of indigenous people was the right thing to do. The Bolivian move is inspirational and groundbreaking, said Danny Kushlick, of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which supports drug liberalization. It shows that any country that is fed up with the war on drugs can change its relations with the UN conventions.
However, the UNs International Narcotics Control 4 Board (INCB), which checks implementation of global drug treaties, says that Bolivia is threatening international drug controls. A number of countries including the UK, the US, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia opposed Bolivias demands.
The UK told the UN that it respects the cultural 5 importance of the coca leaf in Bolivia, but it adds: The United Kingdom is worried that the exemption could lead to increases in coca production and most importantly the amount of coca that goes into the cocaine trade. As a result, the exemption would weaken the global effort to tackle the drugs trade.
The right of indigenous people in South Americas 6 Andean region to chew coca leaf was removed in 1964 when Bolivia was under a dictatorship and it signed up to the convention. But Bolivia was given 25 years to implement the ban. This arrangement came to an end in 1989 and since then the issue has been under dispute.
In 2011, Bolivia whose President, Evo Morales, 7 is a former coca producer formally told the UN that it did not want to be in the convention any more. It has now signed up to the convention again, but with an exemption so that its indigenous people can continue chewing coca leaves.
The exemption is the first of its kind in the 8 history of UN drug-control treaties and has led to concerns that other countries may apply for exemptions. The Russian government has argued that the exemption will lead to an increase in illegal circulation of cocaine and warned that it also sets a dangerous precedent that could be used by other states in creating a more liberal drug-control regime.
The British parliament has recommended that 9 Bolivias request should be supported by the UK government. It argues that it is important that countries stay in the convention. Bolivias return could be blocked only if a third or more of the 184 countries that have signed up to the convention opposed its request. There are suspicions that the US and UK are trying to persuade other countries to block Bolivias request.
Nancie Prudhomme, of the International Centre 10 on Human Rights and Drug Policy, criticized the co-ordinated opposition to Bolivias demands. These objections are legally questionable, she said. They support an arbitrary and over-broad provision and apply international drug laws in a vacuum. This is not right. No state has paid any attention to decades of developing international norms on cultural and indigenous rights, which support Bolivias efforts.
The decision to ban coca chewing was based on 11 a 1950 report produced by the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Coca Leaf, which supporters of drug liberalization say was not based on evidence. The growing of coca leaves is legal and licensed in Bolivia. Some believe this has led to a fall in cocaine production in the country. For this reason, some experts see Bolivia as a model for other countries. | 1int
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Intermediate
Male bosses are paid bonuses double the size of those given to female colleagues in identical jobs. This means that men get salary top-ups of 141,500 more than women over their working lives.
The figures, released by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), reveal that men in UK management roles earned average bonuses of 6,442 in 2012 compared with 3,029 for women.
In the most senior roles, female directors received bonuses of 36,270 over the past 12 months, compared with 63,700 awarded to male directors.
The latest figures show that pay in British business is still not equal. This has led to calls for action from campaigners on workplace equality.
Ann Francke, the CMIs chief executive said: Its time to move this issue into the mainstream management agenda.
This is about changing our approach to management. There should be greater flexibility, less masculine cultures, more emphasis on outcomes rather than time in the office and greater transparency around performance and rewards.
In solving this issue, we would actually raise the performance of organizations and the well-being of individuals at work. What are we waiting for?
While some of the data may be affected by factors such as women doing jobs where there is less of a culture of bonus payments, the differences in the sizes of bonuses do appear to make Britains pay gap worse. The government says the pay gap is closing but that full-time male employees still earn 10% more than women.
Maria Miller, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said: The CMI figures are another example from the world of work showing that women still lose out to their male counterparts.
Changes in the workplace are happening and its good that the pay gap is closing but there is still more to do before we see full equality in the workplace.
The government is playing its part. We have signed up 120 companies to our Think, Act, Report scheme, which encourages companies to improve the way they recruit, promote and pay women.
Weve also looked at other pay gap causes, such as having to juggle work and family responsibilities. We have introduced shared parental leave and the right to request flexible working to all employees.
Large companies such as Tesco, BT, Unilever and the international law firm Eversheds are among those signed up to Think, Act, Report. The scheme has only attracted 120 supporters in nearly two years of existence.
However, the CMIs data did provide some evidence to support Millers statement that the overall pay gap is narrowing: the difference between the average salaries earned by male and female bosses appeared to shrink from 2012.
A sub-set of 17,000 individual managers, whose salaries and bonuses have been followed over a number of years, showed that male managers earnings are rising faster than womens for the first time in five years. Mens earnings increased by 3.2% compared with a 2.8% increase for women, when salaries and bonuses are combined.
At the most senior level, male directors earnings rose by 5.3% over the past 12 months, compared with just 1.1% for female directors. | 1int
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Intermediate
Brazil experienced one of its biggest nights of protest in decades as more than 100,000 people took to the streets to express their frustration at aggressive policing, poor public services and high costs for the World Cup.
The major demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, Brasilia, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and elsewhere started peacefully, but several led to clashes with police and arson attacks on cars and buses.
People complained, during previous, smaller protests against bus price increases, that police responded disproportionately with rubber bullets, tear gas and violent beatings.
The rallies came at the same time as the start of the football Confederations Cup. The rallies brought together people who are frustrated with the rising costs and poor quality of public services, large amounts of money being spent on international sporting events, low standards of health care and wider unease about inequality and corruption.
The vast majority of demonstrations were peaceful, but several police were injured, at least one car was overturned and burned, and windows were smashed.
The unrest increased during the night as a large crowd set several fires outside a government office, smashed the buildings windows and painted graffiti on the walls that said Revolution, Down with Paes, down with Cabral [the mayor and state governor] and Hate police. Police inside responded with pepper spray.
The reasons people were protesting varied widely. We are here because we hate the government. They do nothing for us, said Oscar Jos Santos, a 19 year old.
Im an architect but I have been unemployed for six months. There must be something wrong with this country, said Nadia al Husin.
At a far smaller rally in Brasilia, demonstrators broke through police lines to enter the high-security area of the national congress. Several climbed onto the roof.
In Belo Horizonte, police clashed with protesters who tried to get into a football stadium, which was hosting a Confederations Cup match between Nigeria and Tahiti.
In Porto Alegre, demonstrators set fire to a bus and, in Curitiba, protesters tried to force their way into the office of the state governor. There were also rallies in Belem, Salvador and elsewhere.
In So Paulo, large crowds gathered but reports said the marches were peaceful.
Most protesters were young and, for many, it was their first experience of such a giant rally. My generation has never experienced this, said Thiago Firbida, a student. Since the dictatorship, Brazilians never bothered to demonstrate like this. They did not believe they had a reason to. But now Brazil is once again in crisis, with a constant rise in prices, so people are finally reacting.
Comparisons have been drawn with rallies in Turkey and elsewhere. You could see another global link in the demonstrators who wore Guy Fawkes masks, associated with Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Brazils demonstrations are being referred to as the vinegar revolution (after police arrested people for carrying vinegar to fight the effects of tear gas), as well as the 20-cent revolution (due to the bus price rise) and the Passe Livre (after the demand for free public transport).
Some said the protests felt un-Brazilian but liberating. Our politicians need to see the strength we have as one people. Brazilians are too nice sometimes they enjoy partying rather than protesting but something is changing, said Deli Borsari, a 53-year-old yoga instructor
After people heard about the costs of new and refurbished stadiums on the news, the Confederations Cup football tournament has been one of the focuses of the protests. Before Saturdays opening match in Brasilia, crowds of demonstrators were dispersed by riot police. Footage showed frightened Japanese supporters rushing from the area holding their children, as they heard the sound of shots perhaps rubber bullets or tear gas.
Another protest march, near Rios Maracana Stadium, also had a heavy police response.
President Dilma Rousseff believes peaceful protests are legitimate and proper for a democracy and that it is natural for young people to demonstrate.
However, the president was booed at the opening ceremony for the Confederations Cup. She faces a serious political challenge, both now and in 2014, when Brazil will not only host the World Cup but also have a presidential election. | 1int
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Intermediate
Health warnings that cover nearly two-thirds of cigarette packs and a ban on menthol cigarettes in the EU have come a step nearer after a vote in the European Parliament.
Menthol and other flavours will be banned from 2022, and MEPs also decided that most electronic cigarettes, which are increasingly popular as alternatives to tobacco products, do not need to be regulated in the same way as medicines.
Health officials and the e-cigarette industry in Britain want to clarify what this means for instance, whether e-cigarette companies will have the same bans on sponsorship and promotion at sports events as tobacco firms.
The Department of Health would not comment on the advertising issue until officials had studied the MEPs decisions. But, in a statement, the DH said: We are very pleased to see tougher action on tobacco, with European controls banning flavoured cigarettes and the introduction of stricter rules on front-of-pack health warnings.
However, we are disappointed with the decision not to regulate nicotine-containing products (NCPs), including e-cigarettes, as medicines. We believe these products need to be regulated as medicines and will continue to make this point during further negotiations.
Smoking levels in England are at their lowest since records began 19.5 per cent but we are determined to further reduce rates of smoking and believe this important step will help.
The UK e-cigarette industry, which welcomed the parliaments vote, said it was already in talks with the Advertising Standards Authority but added that it would not be sensible, reasonable or useful to ban all advertising.
MEPs decided e-cigarettes should only be regulated as medical products if manufacturers claimed they could prevent the smoking of tobacco a decision criticized by the governments main medicines regulator.
They want to put the e-cigarettes, used by an estimated 1.3 million people in Britain, on the same legal basis as gums, patches and mouth sprays, which help smokers to quit, but the industry says that licensing is expensive and this would force alternatives to tobacco off the shelves.
The MEPs voted to put health warnings on 65% of each cigarette pack. At present, the warnings cover at least 30% on the front and 40% on the back. The UK government has delayed a decision on whether to follow Australia by introducing standardized packaging until there is evidence that this will reduce tobacco use.
The MEPs decision, which could become law in 2014, will be followed by negotiations with the EU Council of Ministers.
The UK continues to believe that medicinal regulation of NCPs is the best way to improve public health, said a spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority.
Linda McAvan, Labour MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and spokesperson on tobacco issues for the parliaments Socialists & Democrats group, said: We know that it is children, not adults, who start smoking. And, although there are fewer and fewer adult smokers in most member states, the World Health Organization figures show an increase in a number of our member states of young smokers.
We need to stop tobacco companies targeting young people with gimmicky products and we need to make sure that cigarette packs have effective warnings.
Martin Callanan, the Conservative MEP for North East England, said: Forcing e-cigarettes off the shelves would have been totally crazy. These are products that have helped many people stop smoking more harmful cigarettes and yet some MEPs wanted to make them harder to manufacture than ordinary tobacco.
British American Tobacco said the larger health warnings demanded by MEPs were not necessary and that a ban on mentholated cigarettes would increase demand for black-market products. | 1int
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