Imagine that you read a headline 'Fit in four minutes' in a health magazine. Would you believe it? Well, Dr Izumi Tabata’s training programme – 20 seconds of intensive effort, ten seconds of rest, repeat eight times – promises that it is possible to be fit with just 88 minutes of training a week.
Tabata remembers the first time he tested his training system on his university students in the early 1990s. “After four minutes’ hard exercise they were completely exhausted. They were almost dead! But after six weeks they saw the results and were surprised. We all were surprised.”
Tabata created his training programme after he watched Japan’s speed skating team in the early 1990s. He saw that short bursts of very hard exercise were as effective as hours of normal exercise. Tabata tried to prove this with a simple experiment. One group of students did an hour of cardiovascular exercise on an exercise bike five times a week. The other group did a ten-minute warm-up on the bike, then four minutes of Tabata training, four times a week – plus one 30-minute session of exercise with two minutes of Tabata.
The results were very surprising. After six weeks of testing, the group who did Tabata’s plan – exercising for just 88 minutes a week – increased their anaerobic capacity by 28% and their VO 2 max by 15%. The other group, who trained for five hours every week, also improved their VO 2 max, but only by 10%. But their training had no effect on their anaerobic capacity.
But you have to work very, very hard. You can’t sit on a machine, chewing gum and reading HELLO! magazine. You have to do intensive bursts of activity on an exercise bike or rowing machine, explosive bodyweight exercises, sprints and so on. Remember how you felt after doing a 100m sprint at school? Imagine doing eight sprints with only a ten-second break between them.
“Full effort at 170% of your VO 2 max is the basis of the programme,” says Tabata. “If you feel OK afterwards you’ve not done it properly. The first three repetitions will feel easy but the last two will feel impossible. In the original plan, we wanted eight repetitions, but some people could only do six or seven.”
One person on an online forum wrote: “Most people cannot do it correctly and they shouldn’t even try.” Tabata doesn’t completely agree. “Everyone can do it but beginners should start with educated trainers so that they don’t work too hard,” he explains. He also says that his programme burns an extra 150 calories in the 12 hours after exercise. Most people use it to get fit or to get even fitter, but the programme also burns fat.
So, it’s a little surprising that at the moment only serious athletes are doing the programme. This may change because Tabata says there will soon be Tabata instructors and a series of DVDs at the end of the year. “I decided to do this because I often go on YouTube and some people are doing it wrong because they don’t understand how hard they need to work,” says Tabata.
So, should we all start using Tabata in our fitness programmes? Richard Scrivener, a former rugby fitness coach, says that you should not stop your usual training; Tabata training is something extra. “Runners, for example, need to run a lot of miles in their training,” he says. “But they could do fewer long runs by introducing Tabata training. This will give their bodies the chance to rest and recover, especially if they have injuries.”
Gym fans can benefit by doing three strength sessions and three Tabatas a week. And the rest of us can slowly increase the number of sessions, but we know that it will never get easier because every session needs maximum effort. That’s the programme: it is hard – but it works.


Intermediate
Emmanuel Limal used online dating sites a lot but he was tired of meeting women who werent ready to start a family, or at least wouldnt admit that they were. The 43-yearold actor, originally from France, had spent 20 years living in Copenhagen and looking for love in the hope of raising children. He tried to find someone online but was dismayed by the results.
I got frustrated with everyone saying they were really active, always travelling or with a long list of hobbies, but no mention of children, Limal said. On some sites, there was an option to click saying: Id like kids someday, but you would read the persons profile and think: You will never have time! If someones going to the gym eight times a week and travelling every month, they are not putting a family first.
Limal has a six-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, but coming from a big family  his father is one of 11  he has always wanted more children. I couldnt seem to meet anyone willing to prioritize starting a family. He said it was difficult to know when to mention wanting kids when he met someone new. Its the ultimate dating taboo, he said. Then one day I read a profile from a 38-year-old who said she knew it was really bad to admit but she wanted children. And I just thought: You shouldnt be ashamed of this.
Limal borrowed money to pay for the setting up of Babyklar.nu  or baby-ready now in English. It works like a normal dating site but everyone is asked to be honest about their wish to start a family soon. We ask people if they are OK with someone who already has children and if they want another baby, Limal said. But we dont make them say how many children theyd like. That would be a bit too much like grocery shopping online.
He has had a very positive response to the site. We had 50 sign-ups an hour when we started in June and we are already hearing from couples who have met through the site and are now together. Im fully expecting the first Babyklar.nu baby by next summer. More men have signed up than women (53% to 47%), with comments such as Its so lovely to be able to say this out loud and I finally dare to be honest about what I want.
The site has come at the right time for the country of five million people. Danes are not having enough babies, according to a report from the Copenhagen hospital Rigshospitalet, and the current rate of 1.7 children per family is not enough to maintain Denmarks population. The usual reasons are given  women are leaving it too late and couples are living together without getting married and waiting to start families.
Now, I hope, men and women who want to start a family but havent met the right person yet will have another option, says Limal. He says that this isnt just about baby farming: I want this to be about children and love. My goal is to pair up people who really want a family and a partner  and wholl stay together. Im a romantic at heart.
There are plans to launch the site in France and the UK later in 2013, but for now it is the Danes who are benefitting from it. Danes have no problem having children before marriage so things can move fast and, because the countrys so small, a Jutlander can date a Copenhagener without too much travel, Limal said. Whats more, Limal has finally found love. Ive met a nice woman and she wants a baby too  so we shall see.


The Taliban sent a gunman to shoot Malala Yousafzai in October 2012 as she went home on a bus after school. They wanted to silence the teenager and end her campaign for girls’ education.
Nine months and many operations later, she stood up at the United Nations on her 16th birthday. “They thought that the bullet would silence us. But they failed,” she said.
It was an unusual 16th birthday. Malala didn’t blow out candles on a cake; she sat at the United Nation in the central seat where world leaders usually sit.
She listened quietly as Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, described her as “our hero, our champion”; and as the ex-British prime minister and now UN education envoy, Gordon Brown, said “the words the Taliban never wanted her to hear: happy 16th birthday, Malala ”.
The event was named Malala Day after the girl from Mingora in Pakistan. She became famous after she wrote a blog for the BBC Urdu service – in the blog, she described her difficult experiences of trying to get an education under the power of the Taliban.
When she was 11, she asked the US special representative to Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to help in her campaign against the Taliban, who wanted to stop education for girls. By 14, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, suggested her for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and, by 15, she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee in history.
Then she got death threats, and, on 9 October 2012, after a meeting of Pakistani Taliban leaders, the gunman came to kill her.
She has had many operations in Pakistan and the UK after the shooting on the bus. She now lives with her family in Birmingham, England, and does what the Taliban tried to stop her doing: she goes to school every day. “I am not against anyone,” she said.
And she doesn’t want “personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group.”
Malala replied to the violence of the Taliban with words against bullets. “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there was a gun in my hand and he stood in front of me, I would not shoot him.”
“The extremists are afraid of books and pens,” the teenager continued. “The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them.”
She talked about the attack in June on a hospital in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan, and killings of female teachers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “That is why they are blasting schools every day – because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society.” The “Stand with Malala” petition, that is asking for education for the 57 million children around the world who do not go to school, has got more than four million signatures – more than a million were added after Malala’s speech.
At the start of her speech, Malala said: “I don’t know where to begin my speech. I don’t know what people are expecting me to say.” She did not have to worry.


From all across Rwanda, and even parts of neighbouring Burundi, people flock to the southern town of Butare to a little shop called Inzozi Nziza (Sweet Dreams). They come for a taste of the unknown, something most have never tasted – the sweet, cold, velvety embrace of ice cream.
Here, at the central African country’s first ice- cream parlour, customers can buy scoops in sweet cream, passion fruit, strawberry and pineapple flavours. Toppings include fresh fruit, honey, chocolate chips and granola. Black tea and coffee are also on sale.
The shop, which has “ice cream, coffee, dreams” across its signage, is milking local curiosity about the dessert – and “changing lives” in the process, says Inzozi Nziza’s manager, Louise Ingabire.
“Ice cream is important,” she says between mouthfuls of a honey-flavoured offering. “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.”
True to Inzozi Nziza’s motto, 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, which has 89,600 residents and is located 135km south of the capital, Kigali, is the home of the National University of Rwanda. Inzozi Nziza has become a hub for tired students looking to treat themselves to something cool and different.
“It’s something uniting people here,” Kalisa Migendo, a 24-year-old agriculture 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.”
Most of the ingredients are sourced locally and the milk comes from a depot in nearby Nyanza. The vanilla beans and cocoa are imported.
Inzozi Nziza was opened by the theatre director Odile Gakire Katese. She met Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas, co-founders of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, New York, and formed a partnership to open the shop in 2010.
“An ice-cream shop, Katese proposed, might help to put the human pieces back together by rebuilding spirits, hopes and family traditions,” Miesen says.
At the start, Miesen and Dundas owned the shop in partnership with its staff and had shares in the business, which is a cooperative and non-profit. They did not set financial targets, but waited for 18 months before they transferred their shares to the women, who had by then proved their business credentials.
The shop’s success is no exception, says Fatuma Ndangiza, deputy chief executive of the Rwanda Governance Board. “Small businesses are mostly managed by women but when it comes to big business where you have to compete for big tenders, very few women are there. Women are newcomers to big business,” she points out. “We have more women entrepreneurs. It’s an area where women are taking an interest, both in and outside Kigali.”
Though ice cream is somewhat new to Rwanda, Ndangiza is enthused by the idea of the shop. “I think it’s great. It requires a lot of skills and changing people’s mindsets because selling and eating ice cream is not part of our culture. I think being able to innovate and introduce this on the market, and the process of making it, is quite interesting.”
The Butare shop employs nine women, who spend their spare time practising with Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda’s first and only female drumming troupe, which was established by Katese ten years ago.
The musicians are Hutu and Tutsi women, some survivors of the 1994 genocide, during which almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.
Some members of Ingoma Nshya are widows, some orphans. Others have been affected by the massacre in different ways.
Historically, says Ingabire, Rwandan women were forbidden to drum and many people considered the drums too heavy for women to carry. “But it’s something which brings unity.”
Ingabire’s father, two siblings and many cousins were killed in the genocide. “Some of us are survivors; some know someone who was killed,” she says. “When I’m drumming with them, it gives me power because we’re still alive and survivors.”
The popular eatery features in a documentary by Rob and Lisa Fruchtman, sibling film-makers. Sweet Dreams, which tells the story of how the women have forged a promising post-genocide future, also includes the female drummers.
The film, which has been screened in more than a dozen countries, including the US, UK and several African states, premieres in Rwanda in 2014. “We feel the film is about resilience, hope, bravery, resourcefulness and the ability to change the course of your own life,” says Lisa Fruchtman, who won an Academy Award for film- editing in 1984.


Intermediate
Angry waiters are asking for public support in a battle to keep their tips. PizzaExpress branches are to be targeted by protesters, in an attempt to get the restaurant chain to stop taking a proportion of tips for staff that have been paid on credit and debit cards. Campaigners have also started an online petition in the hope that restaurant-goers will support their demands.
PizzaExpress keeps, as an admin fee, 8p out of every 1 paid when tips are given by card. This is a policy that has made some employees angry. The chain, which has 430 branches around the UK and is particularly popular with families, makes around 1m a year from the practice, according to the union Unite.
We believe this 8% fee is unfair and that, if the chain values its staff, it should be paying them the total tips they are given by customers, said Chantal Chegrinec of Unite. We are starting with PizzaExpress but they are not the only ones and we will turn our attention to other companies after this.
The protests are being organized by local branches of Unite. The  rst is taking place at the British Museum branch of PizzaExpress in London. The union has also written to the restaurant chains CEO. Unite began the campaign following a survey of its PizzaExpress members after the chain was sold to a Chinese company in 2014. One of the top issues was the 8% deduction from their tips.
One disgruntled PizzaExpress employee, who wants to remain anonymous, said that the admin fee was costing her 3 a night. I have worked at PizzaExpress for 15 years, she said in a letter to Unite. After all this time, Im still only paid the national minimum wage of 6.50 an hour. So you see my colleagues and I are very reliant on customer tips to top up our low wages. I work hard and am good at my job but, when PizzaExpress thinks it can get away with taking a percentage of our hard-earned tips left on a card, I get upset.
Ask and Zizzi, two other restaurant chains, also deduct 8% of the tips paid by card. But other chains deduct even more. Cafe_ Rouge, Bella Italia and Belgo deduct 10%; so do Strada and Giraffe.
A spokesperson for PizzaExpress said that its admin charge was to cover the cost of running a tronc  a pay arrangement used to distribute tips among staff. We made big efforts to set up this tronc system, which is run by staff. They independently decide how tips made by electronic card payment are distributed between the restaurant teams; it is a system run by employees for the employees, she said.
The chain, which sells 29m pizzas a year in its UK restaurants, denied that it pro ts 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 & Bennys, Chiquitos and Garfunkels used to charge 10% but they stopped doing this several years ago.
Unite recently targeted ten PizzaExpress restaurants in south London  they distributed lea ets to customers who were shocked and disgusted by the practice. PizzaExpress says the charge is mentioned in small print at the bottom of its menus. But the employee who wrote to Unite said that, when she mentioned the charge to customers, they were always surprised. Most customers would then pay the tip in cash. Almost 6,000 people have signed Unites online petition.
One waiter, who doesnt work for PizzaExpress but has worked for 11 years for another restaurant chain, said that at least a third of his income is from tips. He doesnt want to be identi ed because he is scared there will be reprisals. I work in a busy London branch and, on an average night, I serve 150 people and earn 40 to 50 in tips, he says. That might sound like a lot but that money is crucial to me because my basic pay is only 6.50 an hour.
Conservative MP Andrew Percy has asked for a change in the law that would give restaurant staff more control over tips. He said he plans to raise the issue in parliament.


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


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.


Intermediate
Barack Obama flew back to Washington and his desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday, hours after delivering an election victory speech in Chicago in which he asked the country to unite behind him.
Unlike after his election in 2008, the President is unlikely to get a honeymoon period.
Both the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, and the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, spoke about a need to work together to resolve the economic crisis. But it could become one of the biggest battles yet between the White House and Congress under Obamas presidency.
While Obama easily beat his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, holding swing state after swing state, the election showed again how divided America remains.
While the inauguration is not until January, in effect Obama started his second term on Wednesday. Having disappointed many supporters in his first term, he now wants to establish a legacy that will transform him from a middling president into a great one.
As well as overseeing what he hopes will be continued economic recovery, he hopes to address issues from immigration reform to investment in education and climate change, and, in foreign policy, from Iran to Israel-Palestine.
He comfortably won more than the required 270 electoral college votes, and he also won a higher share of the popular vote.
Boehner, in a statement, sounded conciliatory. He talked about the need for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt.
Reid, also sounded conciliatory, saying: I look at the challenges that we have ahead of us and I reach out to my Republican colleagues in the Senate and the House. Lets come together. We know what the issues are; lets solve them.
The trouble will come when talks move to detail: the Republicans want to protect military spending while the Democrats want cuts. Obama wants tax increases on households earning more than $250,000; Boehner has rejected any tax increases.
In the presidential race, Romney won only one of the swing states, North Carolina, while Obama held New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Colorado.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama referred to the long queues to vote and said there was a need for electoral reform.
He returned to the soaring rhetoric that was his trademark during the 2008 election but which was not seen in 2012 because his campaign team decided it was inappropriate.
But now that he has won, he returned to famous lines from earlier speeches, such as his 2008 slogan about hope.
Obama told the ecstatic crowd of supporters: Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come. In a speech that lasted more than 25 minutes, Obama paid emotional tribute to his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha  as well as to his Vice-President, Joe Biden. Then he returned to the message that first brought him to national attention.
We are not as divided as our politics suggests, he said. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.
Obama made clear he had an agenda in mind for his second term. He mentioned changes in the tax code, immigration reform and, as he put it, an America that isnt threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.
Just before, Romney had phoned the President to concede. He said, This is a time for great challenges for America and I pray the President will be successful in guiding our nation.
The campaign almost throughout has been a referendum on Obama. Despite the slow economy recovery and a high unemployment level, Americans decided not to change presidents.
Historically, it would have been a disappointment for African Americans and many white liberals if the first black presidency had ended in failure.


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’.”


Intermediate
According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), 35.6% of all women around the world will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from a male partner. The report reveals the shocking extent of attacks on women from the men with whom they share their lives, with 30% of women being attacked by partners. It also finds that a large proportion of murders of women  38%  are carried out by their partners.
The highest levels of violence against women are in Africa, where nearly half of all women  45.6%  will suffer physical or sexual violence. In low- and middle-income Europe, the proportion is 27.2%. However, wealthier nations are not always safer for women  a third of women in high-income countries (32.7%) will experience violence at some stage in their lives. 42% of the women who experience violence suffer injuries, which can bring them to the attention of healthcare staff. That, says the report, is often the first opportunity for violence in the home to be discovered and for the woman to be offered help. Violence has a significant effect on womens health. Some arrive at hospital with broken bones, while others suffer pregnancy-related complications and mental illness.
The two reports from the WHO  one is on the extent of violence, the other offers guidelines to healthcare staff on helping women  are the work of Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno, lead specialist in gender, reproductive rights, sexual health and adolescence at WHO, and Professor Charlotte Watts, an epidemiologist who specializes in gender, violence and health, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
For the first time, we have compared data from all over the world on the extent of partner violence and sexual violence by non-partners and the impact of these sorts of violence on health, said Garcia-Moreno. These included HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, depression, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies and lowbirthweight babies.
There were variations in the rates of violence against women in different regions of the world but, said Garcia-Moreno, in whatever region we looked at, it is unacceptably high. Data from 81 countries shows that, even in high-income countries, 23.2% of women will suffer physical and/or sexual violence from a partner in their lives. The global figure for women attacked by partners was 30%.
More sexual assaults and rapes by acquaintances or strangers are reported in high-income countries than elsewhere  the report says that 12.6% of women in wealthy countries will be sexually attacked by a non-partner in their lives, which is higher than the African rate of 11.9%. But, the data on such crimes is not well collected in all regions.
The authors say that their previous research shows that better-educated women and working women are less likely to suffer violence, although not in all regions. There is a need to question social norms, said Watts. What is societys attitude concerning the acceptability of certain forms of violence against women? she asked. In some societies, it is not OK  but not all.
I think the numbers are a wake-up call for all of us to pay more attention to this issue, said Garcia-Moreno. Over the past ten years, there has been increasing recognition of the problem, she said, but we have to recognize that it is a complex problem. We dont have a vaccine or a pill.
The new WHO clinical and policy guidelines recommend healthcare staff should be trained to recognize the signs of domestic violence and sexual assault, but they do not recommend general screening  that is, asking every woman who arrives in a clinic whether she has been subjected to violence.
But, if you see a woman coming back several times with injuries she doesnt mention, you should ask about domestic violence, said Garcia-Moreno. When I was training in medical school, it wasnt something you learned or knew about. Years later, I was sometimes in a situation where I could tell there was something else wrong with the woman I was interviewing, but didnt know that domestic violence was the issue. Now, I think I would do the interview very differently.


More than a third of all women worldwide – 35.6% – will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from a male partner, according to the first comprehensive study of its kind from the World Health Organization (WHO). The report reveals the shocking extent of attacks on women from the men with whom they share their lives, with 30% of women being attacked by partners. It also finds that a large proportion of murders of women – 38% – are carried out by intimate partners.
“These findings send a powerful message that violence against women is a global health problem of epidemic proportions,” said Dr Margaret Chan, director general of the WHO. “We also see that the world’s health systems can and must do more for women who experience violence.”
The highest levels of violence against women are in Africa, where nearly half of all women – 45.6% – will suffer physical or sexual violence. In low- and middle-income Europe, the proportion is 27.2%. Yet, wealthier nations are not necessarily always safer for women – a third of women in high-income countries (32.7%) will experience violence at some stage in their lives. Of the women who suffer violence, 42% sustain injuries, which can bring them to the attention of healthcare staff. That, says the report, is often the first opportunity for violence in the home to be detected and for the woman to be offered help. Violence has a profound effect on women’s health. Some arrive at hospital with broken bones, while others suffer pregnancy-related complications and mental illness.
The two reports from the WHO – one on the prevalence of violence, the other offering guidelines to healthcare staff on helping women – are the work of Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno, lead specialist in gender, reproductive rights, sexual health and adolescence at WHO, and Professor Charlotte Watts, an epidemiologist who specializes in gender, violence and health, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“For the first time, we have compared data from all over the world on the magnitude of partner violence and sexual violence by non-partners and the impact of these sorts of violence on health,” said Garcia-Moreno. These included HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, depression, women turning to alcohol, unwanted pregnancies and low-birthweight babies.
There were variations in the rates of violence against women in different regions of the world but, said Garcia-Moreno, “in whatever region we looked at, it is unacceptably high”. Even in high-income countries, 23.2% of women will suffer physical and/or sexual violence from a partner in their lives, their data from 81 countries shows. The global figure for women attacked by partners was 30%.
More sexual assaults and rapes by acquaintances or strangers are reported in high-income countries than elsewhere – the report says that 12.6% of women in wealthy countries will be sexually attacked by a non-partner in their lives, which is higher than the African rate of 11.9%. But, the data on such crimes is not well collected in all regions.
The authors say that their previous research shows that better-educated women are less likely to suffer violence, as are those who have jobs, although not in all regions. There is a need to tackle social norms, said Watts. “What is society’s attitude concerning the acceptability of certain forms of violence against women?” she asked. “In some societies, it is not OK – but not all.”
“I think the numbers are a wake-up call for all of us to pay more attention to this issue,” said Garcia-Moreno. Over the past decade, there has been increasing recognition of the problem, she said, but “one has to recognize that it is a complex problem. We don’t have a vaccine or a pill ”.
The new WHO clinical and policy guidelines recommend training for healthcare staff in recognizing the signs of domestic violence and sexual assault, but they rule out general screening – there is not a case for asking every woman who arrives in a clinic whether she has been subjected to violence.
“But, if you see a woman coming back several times with undisclosed injuries, you should be asking about domestic violence,” said Garcia-Moreno. “When I was training in medical school, it wasn’t something you learned or knew about. Years later, I was sometimes in a situation where I could tell there was something else going on in the woman I was interviewing, but didn’t have any sense that domestic violence was the issue. Now, I think I would handle the interview very differently.”


The controversial auction of a Banksy mural that disappeared from the wall of a north London shop in mysterious circumstances was dramatically halted just moments before it was due to go under the hammer.
Slave Labour, a spray-painted artwork depicting a child making Union Flag bunting and seen as a critical social commentary on last year’s diamond jubilee, was expected to sell for about $700,000 in a sale of street and contemporary art in Florida.
But auctioneer Frederic Thut, the owner of the Fine Arts Auction Miami art house, who had refused all week to divulge the identity of the seller or how it came to be listed for sale through his gallery, announced that the piece, along with a second work by the secretive British street artist, had been withdrawn.
He would not give a reason, but community leaders in Haringey, who led a vocal campaign to stop the sale of the artwork that was prised from the wall of a Poundland in Wood Green, were jubilant.
“One of our two demands was that it doesn’t sell and the other was that we get it back again, so we’re halfway there,” said Alan Strickland, a Haringey councillor.
“I will be writing to the auction house as a matter of urgency to clarify what happened and what will happen next, but for now we are really pleased that because of the pressure and the strong views of the people of Wood Green, a community campaign in London has had an impact in the US. It’s a real victory for the people.”
Claire Kober, Leader of Haringey Council, wrote to Arts Council England and the Mayor of Miami, Tomás Regalado, to ask them to intervene to stop the sale but it appears the decision to withdraw the item came from the gallery owners in consultation with their lawyers. The FBI refused to confirm reports they were asked to investigate.
Several hours after the conclusion of the auction, the auction house issued a brief statement claiming it had persuaded the owners of the two Banksys to pull them from the sale. “Although there are no legal issues whatsoever regarding the sale of lots six and seven by Banksy, FAAM convinced its sellers to withdraw these lots from the auction.”
About 30 potential buyers attended the sale of 106 lots listed in the catalogue for the modern, contemporary and street art sale in Miami’s trendy Wynwood neighbourhood. The three-hour auction continued with other early lots selling in excess of their asking prices.
Critics have accused the auction house of dealing in stolen property but Thut insisted earlier in the week that the seller, who he described as a “well known collector ”, was the rightful owner and that the sale was legal.
He added that his gallery had been inundated with emails and phone calls from the UK, saying that many of them were abusive or offensive, but said he supported the inclusion of the pieces in the sale because it would preserve them.
The second Banksy due to be auctioned, a 2007 artwork entitled Wet Dog that was removed from a Bethlehem wall and is estimated to be worth up to $800,000, disappeared from the auction house’s online catalogue at lunchtime on Saturday, but Slave Labour was still listed for sale right up to the 3pm start time.
Thut said the two pieces, supplied to him by separate owners, neither of them British, were important works in the street art scene and deserved buyers “whose first interest is in art and its preservation ”.
He said he would maintain the privacy of the collector who put it up for sale. “We respect our clients and their confidentiality. It’s not our decision to have [the Banksy] returned. We only sell it. We do not have control of it.”
A spokesperson for Poundland said it had no idea who removed the 4ft x 5ft slab from the side of the shop it rents in Turnpike Lane. Lawyers for the owner of the building, a company called Wood Green Investments Ltd, have refused to confirm if it had anything to do with the episode.
Banksy himself has not commented on the Slave Labour furore, but has previously condemned those who have tried to sell his artwork, speaking out before the proposed sale of five of his pieces at a 2011 auction in New York. None found a buyer.
Stephan Keszler, the dealer behind that auction, believes selling Banksy’s works without his permission is legitimate.
“He does something on other people’s property without asking. The owner of the property can do whatever they want with it,” Keszler said.


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.”


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.


The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have won the first part of their fight for privacy. A French magazine was told to stop selling or reusing photos of the royal couple. The pictures show the duchess sunbathing topless while on holiday in the south of France.
It is possible that the magazine editor and the photographer or photographers will also have to go to a criminal court.
The French magazine Closer was told to give digital files of the pictures to the couple within 24 hours.
Closer’s publisher, Mondadori Magazines France, was also told to pay €2,000 in legal costs. The magazine will have to pay €10,000 for every day it does not give the couple the files.
The court decided that every time Mondadori – the publishing company owned by the ex Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – publishes a photograph in the future in France, they will get €10,000 fine.
The couple welcome the judge’s decision. “They always believed the law was broken and that they had a right to their privacy.”
The royal couple are pleased with the decision, but they want to have a much more public criminal trial against the magazine and photographer or photographers.
Under French law, if you do not respect someone’s privacy, you may have to spend a maximum of one year in prison and pay a fine of €45,000.
This punishment would send a message to the world and, the couple hope, stop paparazzi taking photos like this in the future.
On Saturday the Irish Daily Star also published the photos. And the Italian celebrity magazine Chi published a special edition of 26 pages with the photos of the future queen.


Intermediate
It began with a bogus scallop, but a menu scandal that has affected some of Japans top hotels and department stores now threatens the international reputation of the countrys food.
Since one luxury hotel chain admitted lying about ingredients on its menus, Japanese media have written stories of similar incidents in restaurants run by well-known hotels and department stores
The story began when the Hankyu-Hanshin hotel chain, based in Osaka, admitted it had given false descriptions of dozens of menu items at some of its restaurants between 2006 and October 2013, which affected an estimated 78,000 diners.
One of the worst menu misdemeanours was a red salmon caviar dish that was actually the less luxurious eggs of the flying fish.
The hotel groups president, Hiroshi Desaki, went on television to announce a 20% pay cut for himself and 10% for other executives but this did not make consumers any less angry.
Days later, Desaki resigned, saying that the hotel group had betrayed our customers. One of the hotels head chefs later declined a medal of honour he was going to receive from the government.
The company has so far refunded 20 million yen to more than 10,000 consumers. The final bill is expected to reach 110 million yen.
Consumers who believed they had eaten expensive kuruma shrimps were told they had in fact eaten the much cheaper black tiger version.
The scandal started when a diner complained in a blogpost that a scallop dish he had ordered at the Prince Hotel in Tokyo contained a similar, but cheaper, type of shellfish.
The hotel started an investigation and as a result corrected more than 50 menu items at dozens of its restaurants. Its report scared Hankyu-Hanshin and other hoteliers into admitting that they, too, had hoodwinked diners who believed they were paying high prices for top ingredients.
The Hotel Okura chain  whose guests have included Barack Obama  said they had also injected beef with fat to make it juicier and incorrectly described tomatoes as organic.
We deeply apologize for betraying the expectations and confidence of our clients, it said in a statement.
The list of fraudulent ingredients continues to grow: orange juice from cartons sold as freshly squeezed; Mont Blanc desserts topped with Korean chestnuts instead of the promised French ones; shop-bought chocolate cream that the menu said was home-made; imported beef sold as expensive wagyu.
Even the governments top spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, commented on the scandal. This inappropriate labelling has resulted in the loss of trust among consumers, he told reporters.
The fraudulent menu scandal has exploded at just the wrong time. Japan is trying to persuade South Korea and other countries to lift a ban on food imports that began after the Fukushima nuclear accident. And UNESCO is considering a request to add Japanese cuisine to its cultural heritage list.
One local newspaper had the headline, Japans proud food culture in tears, while the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun said it was shocked by the industrys lack of morals.
Industry experts said the global financial crisis in 2008 had forced luxury hotels to cut costs while attempting to woo diners with detailed menu descriptions.
Menu descriptions were created to meet consumers preferences, and, when they couldnt get the ingredients on the menu, hotels just used food from different places, Hiroshi Tomozawa, a hotel and restaurant consultant, told Kyodo News.
The industrys biggest problem will come from Japans demanding consumers. In 2009, 72% of diners in Japan said that, when they were choosing from a menu, where the food is from was the most important thing for them, followed by the amount of calories and other nutritional details.


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.


Intermediate
Thousands of people protested on Australias beaches against a shark cull that is being carried out in Western Australia. They called on the states prime minister to end the policy, and RSPCA Australia and Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson spoke out against it. The catching and killing of sharks longer than three metres began after what the state government called an unprecedented number of shark attacks on Western Australias coast. A 35-year-old surfer, killed in November 2013, was the sixth person to die from a shark attack in two years.
However, the whole of Australia has had an average of just one shark-related death a year for the last 50 years. Kate Faehrmann, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said from a protest in the state capital, Perth: Weve always said that this policy wont work. Drumlines used to catch the sharks kill sharks whether theyre one, two, three metres or more, as well as dolphins, turtles and other things. Thats why the community doesnt want it.
Thousands of people protested on beaches in the cities of Perth, Sydney and Adelaide, and at beaches in Victoria and Queensland. Faehrmann said the protests had shown that Australians wanted sharks protected: Whats amazing is so many people in Australia love sharks. This has demonstrated something about the national psyche; that, despite all the fear, thousands of people are coming out across the country to say, Thats their ocean. We respect them, we love them and we dont want them killed. Anthony Joyce, a surfer who once had his foot caught in a sharks mouth, said: The number of sharks they are going to kill is going to make no difference.
The state government has refused to say how many sharks have been killed, though there have been reports of sharks smaller than three metres being released after getting caught on drumlines,  oating drums  xed to the sea bed with bait hanging on hooks underneath them. Conservationists say there is no evidence the cull will reduce the number of shark attacks on humans, because no previous cull has only used drumlines. Researchers at the University of Western Australia say the increased number of shark attacks in the state is probably because the state has the fastest-growing population in Australia, not because of a rising number of sharks.
Richard Peirce, of the UK-based conservation charity, the Shark Trust, said that the cull would be ineffective and could bring more predators towards the coast. The activity in Western Australia is compounding the human tragedy of shark attacks. It is very sad that a government has ignored the best advice and chosen an approach that is ineffective and counterproductive, he said. People often dont consider that that drumlines are indiscriminate  even if monitored through the day, leaving the lines in at night has the potential to attract other predators into the area, attracted by those sharks and other species hooked and injured.
Worldwide, in 2012, there were 80 attacks by sharks, seven of which were fatal, compared to nearly 100m sharks killed by humans each year. RSPCA Australia said in a statement that it believes the cull is unjusti ed. There is no evidence that the increase in attacks is a result of increasing shark numbers. Instead, it is consistent with a changing population and human behaviour; that is, there are greater numbers of people in the water, it said.
Richard Branson said the policy was not working. Im sure one of the reasons Western Australia Premier, Colin Barnett, did it was because he was thinking it would encourage tourism. Its going to do quite the reverse, I think. Youre advertising a problem that doesnt exist in a major way and youre deterring people from coming to Perth and your beautiful countryside around it. All youre going to achieve, I think, is to worry people unnecessarily.


Throughout a momentous day at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral for the families of the 96 people who died so needlessly at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough football ground, one phrase dominated above all else: the truth. These were the words most infamously abused by a headline in The Sun newspaper, above stories which we now know, in extraordinarily shocking detail, were fed by the South Yorkshire Police to deflect their own culpability for the disaster on to the innocent victims.
Margaret Aspinall, whose son James, then 18, died at what should have been a joyful day out, an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, said the families had been forced to fight, for 23 years, for just that: the truth. Aspinall, Chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, said that, although the families’ loss would never fade, she was “delighted” at the unequivocal, “profound” apology given for Hillsborough’s savage failings by David Cameron.
The Hillsborough Independent Panel had inspected 450,000 documents generated by the police, Sheffield Wednesday and all other bodies responsible, and delivered its remarkable 395- page report indicting official failings and vindicating the victims and football supporters.
Some of what happened to cause the disaster, and the police’s subsequent blame-shifting, has been exposed before. But the depth of what the families call a cover-up, in particular the deliberate police campaign to avoid its own responsibilities and falsely blame the supporters, was still startling.
In a concerted campaign – led, the panel found, by the Chief Constable, Peter Wright – the South Yorkshire Police put out their story that drunken supporters or those without tickets had caused the disaster. The victims had their blood tested for alcohol levels. This was “an exceptional decision ”, the panel said, for which it found “no rationale ”. When victims had alcohol in their blood, the police then checked to find if they had criminal records.
The report, substantially authored by Professor Phil Scraton of Queen’s University, Belfast, and unanimously agreed by the panel of eight experts, found there was “no evidence … to verify the serious allegations of exceptional levels of drunkenness, ticketlessness or violence among Liverpool fans ”.
The report found that even as the nightmare began for the families of the victims, Wright was meeting his police federation in a Sheffield restaurant to prepare “a defence” and “a rock- solid story ”. The Secretary of the South Yorkshire Police Federation branch, Constable Paul Middup, told the restaurant meeting before Wright turned up: “The Chief Constable had said the truth could not come from him, but had given the secretary a totally free hand and supported him,” as had many senior officers.
The meeting was held just four days after the disaster. It was the day that The Sun splashed its headline “The Truth” over lies fed to it by four senior South Yorkshire police officers. Middup was encouraged to continue this police campaign of defaming Liverpool supporters for supposed drunkenness and misbehaviour and “to get the message – togetherness – across to the force ”.
The panel’s report sustained the allegation made in parliament that the orchestrated changing of junior officers’ statements by senior South Yorkshire police officers amounted to a “black propaganda unit ”. The officers’ statements, presented as official police accounts to the subsequent inquiry, were changed to delete criticism of the police themselves on the day, and, largely, emphasize misbehaviour by supporters. The panel found that 116 of 164 statements were amended “to remove or alter comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire police ”.
The police had claimed this was done only to remove “conjecture” and “opinion” from the statements, but the panel had no doubt the operation, to craft a case rather than deliver truthful police accounts, went further. “It was done to remove criticism of the police,” Scraton said.
This propaganda did not convince the original inquiry, which ruled as quickly as August 1989 that the police stories of fan drunkenness and misbehaviour were false, and criticized the police for making the claims. The report revealed that Sheffield Wednesday’s football ground was unsafe in crucial respects, that the Football Association had selected it as the venue for the match without even checking if Hillsborough had a valid safety certificate, which it did not.
In that landscape of neglect, it was the mismanagement of the crowd by the police, commanded by an inexperienced Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, that was “the prime cause” of the disaster. The police lost control outside the ground, where 24,000 Liverpool fans had to be funnelled through just 23 turnstiles, so Duckenfield ordered a large exit gate to be opened and a large number of people to be allowed in. His “blunder of the first magnitude ”, according to the inquiry, was the failure to close off the tunnel that led to the already overcrowded central section of the Leppings Lane terrace.
The inquiry report established this but the police, undaunted, repeated their claims to the subsequent inquest. Its procedure was marked by the coroner’s decision not to take evidence of what happened after 3.15pm on the day of the disaster, thereby excluding an emergency response the panel found to have been chaotic. The finding that 41 of the 96 who died could possibly have been saved had the police and ambulance service done their jobs decently is damning of those bodies and, Aspinall said, difficult for the families to contemplate.
In the light of the panel’s report, the Attorney General will now consider whether to apply to the High Court for the inquest verdict of accidental death to be quashed and a new inquest held. There may be prosecutions too, after all these years, of Sheffield Wednesday, South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield City Council, which failed in its duty to oversee the safety of the football ground. Trevor Hicks, the President of the HFSG, both of whose teenage daughters, Sarah and Victoria, died in the crush, said: “The truth is out today. Tomorrow is for justice.”


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.


Facebook has lost millions of users per month in its biggest markets, independent data suggests, as alternative social networks attract the attention of those looking for fresh online playgrounds.
As Facebook prepares to update investors on its performance in the first three months of the year, with analysts forecasting revenues up 36% on last year, studies suggest that its expansion in the US, UK and other major European countries has peaked. In the last month, the world’s largest social network has lost 6m US visitors, a 4% fall, according to analysis firm Socialbakers. In the UK, 1.4m fewer users checked in in March, a fall of 4.5%. The declines are sustained. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK.
Users are also switching off in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan, where Facebook has some of its biggest followings. A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment.
“The problem is that, in the US and UK, most people who want to sign up for Facebook have already done it,” said new media specialist Ian Maude at Enders Analysis. “There is a boredom factor where people like to try something new. Is Facebook going to go the way of MySpace? The risk is relatively small, but that is not to say it isn’t there.” Alternative social networks such as Instagram, the photo-sharing site that won 30m users in 18 months before Facebook acquired the business, have seen surges in popularity with younger age groups.
Path, the mobile phone-based social network founded by former Facebook employee Dave Morin, which restricts its users to 150 friends, is gaining 1m users a week. It has recently topped 9m users, with 500,000 Venezuelans downloading the app in a single weekend.
Facebook is still growing fast in South America. Monthly visitors in Brazil were up 6% in the last month to 70m, according to Socialbakers, whose information is used by Facebook advertisers. India has seen a 4% rise to 64m – still a fraction of the country’s population, leaving room for further growth.
But in developed markets, other Facebook trackers are reporting declines. Analysts at Jefferies bank have developed an algorithm that interfaces directly with Facebook software and it “suggests user levels in [the first quarter] may have declined from peak”.
Jefferies saw global numbers peak at 1.05bn a month in January, before falling by 20m in February. Numbers rose again in April. The network has now lost nearly 2m visitors in the UK since December, according to research firm Nielsen, with its 27m total flat on a year before.
The number of minutes Americans spend on Facebook appears to be falling, too. The total was 121 billion minutes in December 2012, but that fell to 115 billion minutes in February, according to comScore.
As Facebook itself has warned, the time spent on its pages from those sitting in front of personal computers is declining rapidly because we are switching our screen time to smartphones and tablets.
While smartphone minutes have doubled in a year, to 69 a month, that growth is not guaranteed to compensate for dwindling desktop usage.
Facebook is the most authoritative source on its own user numbers, and the firm will update investors on its performance for the quarter. Wall Street expects revenues of about $1.44bn, up from $1.06bn in 2012.
Shareholders will be particularly keen to learn how fast Facebook’s mobile user base is growing, and whether advertising revenues are increasing at the same rate.
Mobile usage represented nearly a quarter of Facebook’s advertising income at the end of 2012, and the network had 680m mobile users a month in December.
The company warned in recent stockmarket filings that it might be losing “younger users” to “other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook”.
Wary of competition from services that were invented for the mobile phone rather than the PC, founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently driven through a series of new initiatives designed to appeal to smartphone users. The most significant is Facebook Home, software that can be downloaded onto certain Android phones to feed news and photos from friends – and advertising – directly to the owner’s locked home screen.


Vienna is the world’s best city to live in, Baghdad is the worst and London, Paris and New York do not even make it into the top 35, according to international research into quality of life.
German-speaking cities dominate the rankings in the 18th Mercer Quality of Life study, with Vienna joined by Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt in the top seven.
Paris has tumbled down the league, falling ten places to 37th, just ahead of London at 39th, almost entirely because of the city’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks.
The study examined social and economic conditions, health, education, housing and the environment, and is used by big companies to assess where they should locate and how much they should pay staff.
Viennese-born Helena Hartlauer, 32, said she was not surprised at her city’s top position. The municipality’s social democratic government has a long tradition of investing in high-quality social housing, making Vienna almost uniquely affordable among major cities.
“I live in a 100sq-metre turn-of-the-century apartment in a good area about 20 minutes’ walk from the city centre. But my rent is just €800 (£625) a month.” An equivalent apartment in London would cost upwards of £2,000 and even more in New York, ranked 44th in the table.
US cities perform relatively poorly in the study, largely because of issues around personal safety and crime. The highest ranking city in the US is San Francisco, at 28th; Boston is 34th. Canadian cities, led by Vancouver, far outrank their US rivals in the table.
“You don’t realize how safe Vienna is until you head abroad,” said Hartlauer. “We also have terrific public transport, with the underground working 24 hours at weekends, and it only costs €1 per trip.”
Vienna benefited enormously from the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming the gateway to Eastern European countries that often have historic ties to the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
“Our big USP is our geographical location,” said Martin Eichtinger, Austrian ambassdaor to London, who lived in Vienna for 20 years. “The fall of the Berlin Wall helped define Vienna as the hub for companies wanting to do business in Central Europe.”
According to the World Bank, Austria has one of the highest figures for GDP per head in the world, just behind the US and ahead of Germany and Britain, although quite some way below neighbouring Switzerland.
Zurich in Switzerland is named by Mercer as having the world’s second highest quality of life but the Viennese say their city is far more fun. “There are more students in Vienna than any other German-speaking city,” said Hartlauer. “It’s a very fast growing, young and lively city,” she added – though she conceded she works for the city’s tourist board.
Vienna has long been overlooked by British weekend city break tourists, who instead flock to Barcelona or Berlin and tend to think of Austria as somewhere for skiing, lakes and mountains. But, after an increase in budget flights from regional British cities such as Manchester and Edinburgh, Vienna is fast catching up as a popular destination. In 2015, there were 588,000 British visitors to Vienna, up 18% on the year before. The flow is both ways; Eichtinger said London has become the number one city destination for Austrian visitors.
“Vienna has ranked top in the last seven published rankings,” said Mercer. “It scores highly in a number of categories; it provides a safe and stable environment to live in, a high level of public utilities and transport facilities and good recreational facilities.”
The European migrant crisis, which has seen large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers pass through Vienna en route to Germany, has had little impact on the city of nearly 1.8 million people, said Eichtinger. “We have managed to accommodate 90,000 refugees in Austria but the numbers have slowed in recent months.” London has never been in the quality-of-life top ten, says Mercer, damaged by its poor scores for air pollution, traffic congestion and climate. After London, Edinburgh is the next-ranking British city, in 46th place.
Paris has suffered the biggest fall in the most recent rankings. “Paris remained stable for several years but has, this year, dropped ten places in the overall ranking,” said Mercer.
“The drop was essentially due to the terrorist attacks in 2015. However, it is important to highlight that safety issues are a very highly weighted factor within the ’basket’ so any small adjustments can have a big impact on the ranking.”
Auckland in New Zealand was the highest ranking English-speaking city in the survey, in third place, followed by Vancouver in fifth. Australian cities also perform very highly in the survey, with Sydney 10th and Melbourne 15th. The Economist has consistently ranked Melbourne as the world’s most liveable city, although its survey has been criticized as too Anglocentric.
War and political unrest are behind all the worst-ranked cities in the world. Surprisingly, Damascus is named as only the seventh worst, ranked better than not just Baghdad but also Bangui in Central African Republic, Sana’a in Yemen, Port-au-Prince in Haiti, Khartoum in Sudan and N’Djamena in Chad.


Chemists have waited a long time to find a new element and, now, researchers in Japan, Russia and the US have discovered four. The four new elements will be added to the periodic table. They are the first elements to be added since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were included. The new elements, all very radioactive, complete the seventh row of the periodic table.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is the global organization that controls chemical names. IUPAC confirmed the new elements on 30 December, 2015. The scientists who found them must now think of formal names for the elements, which have the atomic numbers, 113, 115, 117, and 118. The atomic number is the number of protons in an element’s atomic nucleus.
IUPAC said that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had discovered elements 115, 117 and 118. The organization said a team of scientists from the RIKEN Institute in Japan discovered element 113. The decision means Japan becomes the first Asian country to name an element. Under IUPAC rules, new elements can be named after mythological concepts, minerals, a place or country, or a scientist.
In 2012, scientists chose the formal name flerovium for element 114, after the Flerov Lab at Dubna’s Joint Institute of Research. And they chose the formal name livermorium for element 116, after the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the US.
The elements were discovered there. Kosuke Morita, who led the research at RIKEN, said his team now planned to “look to element 119 and beyond”. Jan Reedijk of IUPAC said: “Chemists want to see the periodic table finally completed down to the seventh row.”
The Japanese team is considering three names for element 113: japonium, rikenium and nishinarium, after the Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, where they found the element. Polly Arnold, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh University, said, “This is very difficult and slow work. The work helps us understand radioactive decay. If we understand it better, hopefully we can find a better way to deal with nuclear waste and things that are important in the real world. And, when they build the equipment to make these discoveries, it also leads to fantastic improvements in technology.”
Scientists must find new names for the elements but, also, they must suggest two-letter symbols for the elements. When IUPAC has received the researchers’ suggestions, they will tell the public so that people can comment on the names. That allows scientists and others to find any problems with the names. In 1996, someone suggested the symbol Cp for copernicium, or element 112, but it was changed to Cn, when scientists complained that Cp was already the symbol for another substance.
To discover the elements, researchers at the three labs crashed lighter nuclei into one another and looked for the radioactive decays that should come from the new elements. 113 and 115 are probably metals. 117 could be a metalloid – a material with some metallic characteristics. The fourth element, 118, may be a gas.
Paul Karol, chair of the IUPAC panel that checked the elements, said: “It will be a long time before we can find practical uses for the new elements.”


The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara Desert and at the centre of the North African country’s “Ouallywood” film industry, it has played host to big-budget location shots in Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones.
Now, the trading city, nicknamed the “door of the desert”, is the location for another blockbuster – a complex of four linked solar mega-plants, which, alongside hydro and wind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco’s electricity from renewables by 2020 with, it is hoped, some spare to export to Europe. The project is a key plank in Morocco’s ambitions to use its untapped deserts to become a global solar superpower.
When the full complex is complete, it will be the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world and the first phase, called Noor 1, will go live in November 2015. The mirror technology it uses is less widespread and more expensive than the photovoltaic panels that are now familiar on roofs the world over but it will have the advantage of being able to continue producing power even after the sun goes down.
The potential for solar power from the desert has been known for decades. In the days after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the German particle physicist Gerhard Knies calculated that the world’s deserts receive enough energy in a few hours to provide for humanity’s power needs for a whole year. The challenge, though, has been capturing that energy and transporting it to the population centres where it is required.
As engineers put the finishing touches to Noor 1, its 500,000 crescent-shaped solar mirrors glitter across the desert skyline. The 800 rows follow the sun as it tracks across the heavens, whirring quietly every few minutes as their shadows slip further east.
When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580 mega-watts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW.
Morocco’s Environment Minister, Hakima el-Haite, believes that solar energy could have the same impact on the region this century that oil production had in the last. But the $9bn project to make her country’s deserts boom was triggered by more immediate concerns, she said.
“We are not an oil producer. We import 94% of our energy as fossil fuels from abroad and that has big consequences for our state budget,” el-Haite told the Guardian. “We also used to subsidize fossil fuels, which have a heavy cost, so when we heard about the potential of solar energy, we thought, 'Why not?'”
Solar energy will make up a third of Morocco’s renewable energy supply by 2020, with wind and hydro taking the same share each.
“We are very proud of this project,” el-Haite said. “I think it is the most important solar plant in the world.”
Each parabolic mirror is 12 metres high and focused on a steel pipeline carrying a 'heat transfer solution' (HTF) that is warmed to 393C as it snakes along the trough before coiling into a heat engine. There, it is mixed with water to create steam that turns energy- generating turbines.
The HTF is made up of a synthetic thermal oil solution that is pumped towards a heat tank containing molten sands that can store heat energy for three hours, allowing the plant to power homes into the night. The mirrors are spaced in tier formations to minimize damage from sand blown up by desert winds.
Technicians say that the Noor 2 and 3 plants, due to open in 2017, will store energy for up to eight hours – opening the prospect of 24/7 solar energy in the Sahara and the surrounding region.
“The biggest challenge we faced was being able to finish the project on time with the performance level we needed to achieve,” said Rashid al-Bayad, the project director.
But, even as the first phase of the project nears completion, Morocco is eyeing grander international ambitions. “We are already involved in high tension transportation lines to cover the full south of Morocco and Mauritania as a first step,” says Ahmed Baroudi, manager of Société d’Investissements Energétiques, the national renewable energy investment firm. But he says the project’s ultimate impact will go far wider – even as far as the Middle East. “The ultimate objective given by his majesty the king is Mecca.”
Whether that ambition is achieved remains to be seen but exporting solar energy could have stabilizing effects within and between countries, according to the Moroccan solar energy agency (Masen). Talks are ongoing with Tunisia and energy exports northwards across the Mediterranean remain a key goal.
“We believe that it’s possible to export energy to Europe but, first, we would have to build the interconnectors which don’t yet exist,” said Maha el-Kadiri, a Masen spokeswoman. “Specifically, we would have to build interconnections, which would not go through the existing one in Spain, and, then, start exporting.”
Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France. The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020.
In the meantime, Morocco is focused on using solar to meet its own needs for resource independence. This could, one day, include water desalination, in a country that is increasingly being hit by drought as the climate warms. Officials are keenly aware of the running they are making in what is the most advanced renewable energy programme in the Middle East and North African region. “We are at the avante-garde of solar,” el-Kadiri says.
About $9bn has been invested in the Noor Complex, much of it from international institutions such as the European Investment Bank and World Bank and backed by Moroccan government guarantees. Undisclosed energy subsidies from Morocco’s unelected ruler, King Mohammed VI, have prevented the cost from being transferred to energy consumers.
One month before launch, over a thousand, mostly Moroccan, workers are still racing to fix electric wires, take down scaffolding and wrap rockwool insulation around steel pipelines. They bustle past in yellow and orange bibs, working 12-hour shifts against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. Harnesses with hammers and gloves strapped to their belts swing by their sides. Ubiquitous hard hats, safety shoes and ear plugs give the scene an air of theatrical camp.
For Hajar Lakhael, a 25-year-old environment and security manager from Meknes, rehearsals are almost over and the blockbuster production is nearly ready for action.
“We’ve done the construction and, now, we will see how these projects look when they start,” she says. “It is exactly like the preparation for a grand performance.”
A global audience will be watching with interest.


“I got a Dyson vacuum cleaner but I don’t even know if I want it,” said 56-year-old Louise Haggerty, as she left the Black Friday sales at one o’clock in the morning. “It was crazy in there. It was absolutely disgusting, disgusting.”
Haggerty went with a friend to a 24-hour Sainsbury’s supermarket in north-east London. She hoped to buy a bargain flat-screen TV. “But so many people pushed in the queue that we didn’t have a chance,” she said. “The poor woman who was second in the queue was pushed out by a crowd of youths. She didn’t get anything. People were behaving like animals – it was horrible,” she said. “I only saw two security guards.”
Haggerty was frustrated when she was unable to buy a TV, which was reduced from £299.99 to £149.99, so rushed to pick up a vacuum cleaner, which was reduced from £319.99 to £159.99. “I don’t even know how much it costs. I don’t know even know if I’m going to buy it. I just wanted something,” she said. “There are young men in there with three, four, five tellies. It’s not fair.”
One of those young men was Andy Blackett, who had two trolleys full of bargains. “I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo,” he said. “I don’t know the prices but I know they’re bargains.” But his friend Henry Fischer wasn’t as successful. “Someone snatched my telly from me – it’s because I’m the smaller one.”
More than 12 police officers attended a Tesco store in another part of London because fights started between eager and frustrated shoppers. Tesco delayed the sale of its most popular sale items – TVs – for almost an hour until police brought the situation under control. One police officer said the manager did not provide enough security and suggested the sale should be stopped completely.
Police were called to several other stores just before the doors opened at midnight. Manchester Police said they arrested at least two people at Black Friday sales events. South Wales Police also said they received calls from staff at Tesco stores because so many people came to the sales that they became worried.
One of the first people to buy a flat-screen TV, when TV sales began just before 1am, was James Alled. He bought two and was already trying to sell one of them to someone further down the queue. “I bought them for £250 each. I’ll sell it to you for £350, £300 cash,” he said. Further back in the queue, Christine Ball, 62, wasn’t impressed. “I got here at 10.15pm and I’m further back now than when I got here” she said. “These people don’t know what a queue is.”
Ball had not heard of the Black Friday sales, which come from the US, until now. She came out especially to buy her grandson a TV for Christmas. “Not one of those massive ones; just a normal one at £100 or so,” she said.
Mel Mehmet, 23, went to Black Friday sales in 2013 so she knew there would be queues. But she said the atmosphere in Tesco scared her this time. “It’s crazy to have a sale at midnight – the police have more important things to do at night than come to sales. We’re going to PC World in the morning – their sale starts at 8am.”


Intermediate
In the Arctic regions of Canada, the summer sun shines for more than 20 hours a day. For some, its a welcome change from the constant darkness of winter. But, for the small but growing Muslim community of Iqaluit, Nunavut, life in the land of the midnight sun is a real challenge during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims typically fast from sunrise to sunset.
I havent fainted once, said 29-year-old Abdul Karim, one of the few in the area who has carefully timed his Ramadan fast to the Arctic sun since moving from Ottawa in 2011. This year, that means eating at about 1.30am before the sun rises and breaking his fast at about 11pm when the sun sets. The only reason to stop would be if it hurts my health, Karim said.
It is nearly the end of Ramadan for Muslims around the world. Fasting is important but, during the holy month, in every Muslim community, there is also a focus on community work, prayer and reflection. But, in Iqaluit and the other Muslim communities in the Arctic, the long days have forced a change in how they fast.
Most Muslims in Iqaluit follow the timetable followed by Muslims in Ottawa, about 1,300 miles south  this follows the advice of Muslim scholars who have said Muslims in the far north should observe Ramadan using the timetable of Mecca or the nearest Muslim city. It still means fasting for around 18 hours a day, said Atif Jilani, who moved to Iqaluit from Toronto. The days are long, but its more manageable.
Many in the community of 100 people break their fast together  they gather in the citys brand new mosque for nightly suppers. As they tuck into traditional food such as dates and goat or lamb curries, the sun shines brightly through the windows.
Its a similar situation across Canadas most northern mosques during Ramadan, as Muslims deal with the countrys unique geography. In recent years, much of the community has chosen to follow the Ramadan timetable of Edmonton, in Alberta. Some follow the timings of Mecca, for example Awan, a father of two young children, including a 12-year-old who recently started fasting. He hopes to encourage his son with the more manageable timetable of about 15 hours of fasting compared with about 18 hours in Edmonton. If I fast Edmonton times, my son might say, Papa, you are really insane. What are you doing? he said.
For the 100 or so Muslims in Inuvik, a small town 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it is impossible to follow the local movements of the sun. They have also been following Edmontons timetable. We currently have 24 hours a day of sun, said Ahmad Alkhalaf. Theres no sunrise or sunset.
They were already following the Edmonton schedule in 2001 when he moved from Toronto to the small northern community of 3,500 people. My first Ramadan here was in December. Theres no sun at that time; its dark all day and night. So we used Edmonton time.
At times, it can be difficult to follow the clock rather than what is happening outside, Alkhalaf said. Youre supposed to break your fast when its dusk but we eat when the sun is up. Its not usual to have iftar [the meal that breaks the fast] when the sun is up, he said.
In Inuvik, where most of the population is Inuit, the Muslim community has tried to strike a balance between Ramadan and the local culture and traditions. The iftar meal includes dates and curries  as well as local game such as reindeer. We make a soup or curry, but instead of using beef, we use reindeer.
In Iqaluit, as the Muslim community prepares to mark the end of Ramadan, some reflect that 2016s timing  stretching across some of the longest days of the year  has made it one of the more difficult of recent years. Its particularly true for those like Karim who have followed the local sunrise and sunset carefully. But, his efforts will be rewarded in future years, said Karim, thanks to the lunar calendar. Ramadan will eventually fall during winter and, in Iqaluit, the sun will rise and set within a few hours each day. Ill follow those hours, too, he said with a laugh. Oh yes, definitely.