Intermediate
The small space is set up to look like a classroom. On its corrugated iron walls are educational charts  letters of the alphabet and a map of Bangladesh.
But, it is hard to concentrate  there is the constant sound of hammering and chemicals in the air that stick in the back of the throat and irritate the eyes. However, the children who learn in this three-square-metre room are the lucky ones. They have escaped working in the factories opposite.
For 14 years, SOHAY, a grassroots nongovernmental organization (NGO) funded by the Global Fund for Children and Comic Relief, has been working in slum areas of Dhaka to get child labourers into school. It focuses on children working in hazardous conditions.
The classroom is one of 23 urban development centres that SOHAY has set up in the capital. The centres prepare children for primary school with classes that help them catch up on their education. Once they are in primary school, the children get help with their homework at the centres.
Alamin, ten, who used to work in a plastic factory, attends one of the centres. His father is a street seller and his mother a part-time domestic worker. They are all happy that hes now in school and away from hazardous work. His friend Rabi says he wants to forget his past in the factory. I like school, he says.
The urban development centres aim to make the communities more positive about education and change their cultural mindset towards the children, says SOHAYs programme manager, Mohammed Abdullah al-Mamun. SOHAY also has sessions for parents and employers to discourage child labour and offers skills training to increase family income.
Getting working children into formal education is really very difficult, says Mamun. They are not like other children. After they leave work, they sometimes find it difficult to make friends and adapt to school. It is also very difficult to make sure they stay in school  lots of these children dont finish school.
Seven-year-old Zhorna Akter Sumayya has two older brothers  they are both in work (one at a restaurant, one at a local club). But, after her introduction to education at one of SOHAYs centres, she now goes to a state primary school. Her family live in the slum and her parents cant survive without the money their sons earn. Her father works in a rickshaw garage and her mother is a domestic worker, but they wanted their daughter to go to school.
In 2015, SOHAY helped 1,540 children to leave hazardous work and 2,125 more children  those in danger of starting work  into school. About 780 more children are preparing to enter school in 2017. The organization is also helping 635 children who are working in hazardous conditions to know their rights.
The Labour Law of Bangladesh 2006 does not allow children under the age of 14 to work but, according to the UN childrens agency, UNICEF, 4.7 million children under that age are employed and 1.3 million aged five to 17 work in hazardous industries.
It was difficult to get them into school without any compensation for their time, says Sadia Nasrin, who runs Sonjag, another Dhaka grassroots NGO. To solve this problem, Sonjag started working closely with the community in the slums where the children live.
The organization talked to the community about why it was important for children to go to school. They chose community volunteers who wanted to change childrens lives and formed groups with social workers, community leaders, mothers, young volunteers and the local government.
The groups play a very important role  they motivate employers to let children leave for two to three hours a day to attend school and to make sure the workplace is safe for the children, says Nasrin.
When the children have missed starting school at five years old, it is a race against time to prevent them from growing up without an education. When they are older, it is really very difficult to get them to go to school, says Mamun. Children are just passing their time without education and waiting to do hazardous work. We are working to stop child labour.


Nelson Mandela, the most important person in Africa’s fight for freedom and a hero to millions of people around the world, has died at the age of 95.
South Africa’s first black president died with his family with him at home in Johannesburg after years of illness.
The news was told to the country by the current president, Jacob Zuma, who said Mandela died around 8.50pm local time and was at peace.
“This is the moment of our deepest sorrow,” Zuma said. “Our nation has lost its greatest son.
“South Africans, Nelson Mandela brought us together and it is together that we will say goodbye to him.”
Zuma said that Mandela would receive a state funeral.
Barack Obama called Mandela by his clan name – Madiba. The US president said: “Madiba transformed South Africa – and moved all of us.”
UK prime minister David Cameron said: “A great light has gone out in the world” and he described Mandela as “a hero of our time”.
FW de Klerk – the South African president who freed Mandela from prison and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993 – said the news was very sad for South Africa and the world.
“He was a great unifier,” De Klerk said.
In Soweto, people came together to sing and dance near the house where Mandela once lived. They sang songs from the anti-apartheid struggle. Some people were wearing South African flags and the green, yellow and black colours of Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC).
Mandela’s death sends South Africa deep into mourning nearly 20 years after he led the country from racial apartheid to democracy.
But his death will also be felt by people around the world who thought Mandela was one of history’s last great political leaders, similar to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. After spending 27 years in prison, including 18 years on Robben Island, Mandela won the country’s first multiracial election in 1994, with his party, the ANC.
Born with the name Rolihlahla Dalibhunga in a small village in the Eastern Cape on 18 July, 1918, a teacher at Mandela’s school gave him his English name, Nelson.
He joined the ANC in 1943. In 1952, he started South Africa’s first black law firm with his partner, Oliver Tambo.
When the ANC was banned in 1960, Mandela went underground. After the Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 black protesters were shot dead by police, he took the difficult decision to begin an armed struggle. He was arrested and sent to prison for life.
Finally, in 1990, FW de Klerk ended the ban on the ANC and Mandela was released from prison.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said: “He made people believe in Africa and Africans again.” Mandela’s 91st birthday was celebrated by the first annual “Mandela Day” in his honour. He was married three times and he had six children, 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.


The senior editor of The Atlantic magazine, James Hamblin, recently did an experiment. As part of his series, ‘If Our Bodies Could Talk’, Hamblin reduced the number of showers he had and did not use shampoo and soap when he had a shower.
He discovered what thousands of others have also discovered: the more we try to clean ourselves with soaps and body washes, the more our skin works to get back its balance. This means we have to begin the whole process again. Showering removes oil and bacteria from the skin. Many would say “That is the reason I shower!” But, it seems that this sometimes works too well, especially when you add hot water and soap products.
Our skin has millions of good bacteria. Showering destroys these bacteria. And when the bacteria return, they produce an odour – yes, showering too often may make you smell more. But, when you stop showering and using soap, your skin goes through a (probably gross) period of change. After this, the skin normally gets its balance back, it produces less oil and healthy bacteria flourish.
Hamblin realized that the human body, working on its own, is lovely. We will smell and look better – skin experts say that using less soap can improve skin problems. But, that’s not the only advantage – reducing the number of showers we have (and the number of cleansing products we use) can help the environment. The average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water. That’s 65 litres of clean, drinkable water that we fill with soap and wash down the drain each and every day – sometimes more than once.
The importance of clean water is becoming harder and harder to ignore – for example, there is another summer of drought in California. It’s becoming clear that clean water is one of the most valuable things in the world and we soon won’t have enough. There is also the environmental effect of all those body wash bottles. So, there are many very good reasons to shower less.
Perhaps you remember the last time you were close to people who already don’t shower enough but you can relax. Many people who shower less still use deodorant and hand-washing with soap is still a vital way to reduce the spread of many diseases.
You don’t need to give up showering completely, as James Hamblin did, but if you shower a lot, we have some simple advice: reduce. Shower less, put down the soap and let those lovely little bacteria flourish.


Intermediate
Insects are not usually seen as food except in a few regions of the world  but now they are crawling closer and closer to our plates. In spring 2013 there will be an effort to show people that eating insects is not disgusting and also an attempt to put insects on supermarket shelves.
In April, there will be a festival in London, Pestival 2013, where the consumption of creepy-crawlies will be discussed. The festival will include a restaurant by the Nordic Food Lab, the Scandinavian team behind the Danish restaurant Noma, which brought dishes that included ants to Claridges hotel in Mayfair in 2012, an event that was mostly sold out.
Noma has been named the worlds best restaurant by Restaurant magazine for three years. Its chef, Ren Redzepi, says that ants taste like lemon, and a pure of fermented grasshoppers and moth larvae tastes like a strong fish sauce. Bee larvae make a sweet mayonnaise used instead of eggs and scientists are constantly finding new ways to use insects.
In March, a BBC documentary will show food writer Stefan Gates looking for and eating deep-fried locusts and barbecued spiders. But, behind all the jokes there is a very serious message. Many experts believe there is a clear environmental benefit to humans eating insects.
The UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been funding projects since 2011 that aim to promote the eating and farming of insects in south-east Asia and Africa, where an estimated two billion people already eat insects and larvae as a regular part of their diet. In 2012, the FAO published a list of 1,909 edible species of insect and plans a major international conference on this valuable food source in 2013.
there are 40 tonnes of insects  so there is not too much chance that they will become endangered. I know its taboo to eat bugs in the western world, but why not?, Redzepi has said. You go to south-east Asia and this is a common thing. You read about it from all over the world, that people are eating insects. If you like mushrooms, youve eaten so many worms you cannot imagine. But also we eat honey, and honey is the vomit of a bee. Think of that next time you put it into your tea.
He said that the basic idea behind Nordic Food Lab was: Nothing is not edible.
Insects are critical to life on Earth and, with more than a million species, are the most diverse group of creatures on the planet, but they are misunderstood, hated and often killed by humans just because they are there.
Over the next 30 years, the planets human population will increase to nine billion. Already one billion people do not get enough food. The increase will put more pressure on agricultural land, water, forests, fisheries and resources, as well as nutrients and energy supplies.
The cost of meat is rising, not just in terms of money but also in terms of the amount of rainforest that is destroyed for fields or to grow food for cattle. There is also the issue of methane produced by cows. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the contribution by livestock farming is enormous  35% of the planets methane, 65% of its nitrous oxide and 9% of the carbon dioxide.
Edible insects produce fewer gases, contain high-quality protein, vitamins and amino acids, and need only a quarter of the food that sheep need, and half that of pigs and chickens, to produce the same amount of protein. They produce fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cows and can be grown on organic waste. China is already successfully setting up huge maggot farms. Zimbabwe has a thriving caterpillar industry and Laos was given nearly $500,000 by the FAO to develop an insect-harvesting project.
A study by FoodServiceWarehouse.com suggested that giving up pork and beef and eating crickets and locusts instead could help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95%. But perhaps the fairest thing about eating worms and insects comes when we are dead  then they get a chance to eat us.


Intermediate
The tranquil sounds of the natural world might be lost to todays generation as people screen out the noises that surround them, a senior US researcher warns.
Rising levels of background noise in some areas threaten to make people oblivious to the uplifting sounds of birdsong, trickling water and trees rustling in the wind. These sounds can often be heard even in urban centres, said Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service.
The problem was made worse by people listening to music through their earphones instead of tuning in to the birds and other sounds of nature that can easily be drowned out by traf c, music and others noises, he said.
This learned deafness is a real problem, Fristrup told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose. We are training ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears.
This gift that we are born with  to hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds  might be lost, he said.
The danger is that we are exposed to noise for so long that we stop listening. We are also losing the ability to engage with the environment in the way we were built to, he added.
For the past ten years, the US National Park Service has recorded sound levels at more than 600 places across the US, including Yosemite in California, Yellowstone and Denali in Alaska. All the places were affected by some form of noise from human activity  aircraft, motorbikes, motorboats or tour buses.
Fristrups team combined the sound levels recorded from national parks with similar data from urban settings to create a model of noise levels across the US. They say that noise pollution more than doubles every 30 years.
Its not surprising people are putting on earphones or even noise cancelling headphones to try and create a quieter environment, he said.
As you raise background sound levels, it has the same effect on your hearing as fog would have on your vision. Instead of having this expansive experience of all the sounds around you, you are aware of only a small area around you, he said. Even in our cities, there are birds and things to appreciate in the environment but the ability to hear them is being lost.
People quickly become used to changes in their environments, including rising noise levels, and, over time, Fristrup fears that we will accept far worse environmental conditions than we should and forget how much quieter the world could be. If  nding peace and quiet becomes too dif cult, many, many children will grow up without the experience and I think its a very real problem, he said.
The warning came as other scientists reported health bene ts from listening to natural sounds. Speaking at the same meeting, Derrick Taff, a social scientist at Pennsylvania State University, described preliminary experiments which suggest that listening to recordings from national parks, of waterfalls, birdsong and wind, helped people recover from stressful events.
In one experiment, Taff told people who visited his lab to give an unplanned talk that would be judged by researchers standing behind a one-way mirror. Measurements of their heart rate and the stress hormone, cortisol, before and after the speech found that people calmed down faster when they listened to nature recordings than when the same soundtracks also contained noises from road traf c, aeroplanes and even normal conversation.
We know that natural sounds are very important to people. They are some of the main reasons people visit protected areas. They want to hear the natural quiet, the birdsong, and the wind and water, Taff said. We may be losing this as people are listening to their iPods all the time. My advice is to go to your protected areas and experience what you are missing.
Why natural sounds might be calming to people is unclear but Fristrup thinks that, over millions of years of evolution, we may have come to associate the more tranquil sounds of the natural world with safety. I suspect theres something about these sounds that reminds our brains of a place thats safe, he said.


The US Senate Intelligence Committee recently agreed a bill to allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to continue to collect US phone records. But it would also make the NSA’s activities more transparent.
The committee Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, introduced the bill. It allows the NSA to continue to collect the telephone metadata of millions of Americans. It also allows the government to keep the data. Eleven people voted for the bill and four people voted against it. The full Senate will now vote on the bill.
The bill allows analysts to search through the data if they believe that someone may be involved in international terrorism. The bill also allows the NSA to continue to watch foreigners who come to the US if they enter the country for less than 72 hours.
Senator Patrick Leahy introduced another bill (the USA Freedom Act). This bill would stop the collection of phone records in the US. Feinstein defended the NSA phone data collection programme, but said that people didn’t trust the NSA anymore. “The NSA programme is legal and I believe it makes us safer,” she said. “But we can, and should, do more to increase transparency and build public support for privacy protections.”
Feinstein said the bill would also make a number of improvements to transparency and checks on the NSA – for example, if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gets some data and then somebody looks at that data without permission, they could spend up to ten years in prison.
Feinstein says she strongly supports the NSA’s main US programme. “I think many people don’t understand this NSA database programme. It is very important and helps to protect this country,” she said. Independent legal experts said they were worried about the Intelligence Committee’s bill.
Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice said: “The Intelligence Committee bill and the USA Freedom Act are two opposing visions of the relationship between Americans who do not break the law and the national security state. The most important question is: should the government have some reason to suspect wrongdoing before collecting Americans’ most personal information? Leahy says yes; Feinstein says no.”
Democratic committee member Ron Wyden said that recent worries about NSA spying on foreign leaders took attention away from the more important problem of the NSA checking the data of people in the US. “My top priority is ending the collection of data on millions and millions of innocent Americans.”
Feinstein said that she completely disagreed with the foreign leader spying that the NSA does, for example on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But Feinstein agrees with the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records.
“Americans are making it clear, that they never – repeat, never – agreed to give up their freedom so that the country could appear to be safer,” Wyden said. “We’re just going to continue to fight this battle. It’s going to be a long battle.”


Barack Obama flew back to Washington and his desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday, hours after delivering an election victory speech in Chicago in which he called for the country to unite behind him.
“You voted for action, not politics as usual,” Obama said in his address, but there was little sign that his call would be answered, with the President facing the prospect of doing business with a hostile Republican-led House of Representatives for at least another two years and a looming showdown over spending and debt – the so-called “fiscal cliff”.
Unlike after his election in 2008, the President is unlikely to be given a honeymoon period.
Both the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, and the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, spoke about a need to work together to resolve the crisis, but it could turn into one of the biggest clashes yet between the White House and Congress under Obama’s presidency.
While Obama easily beat off the challenge from his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, holding swing state after swing state, the election provided yet another reminder of just how divided America remains.
While the inauguration is not until January, in effect Obama embarked on his second term on Wednesday. Having disappointed many supporters in his first term, he is looking now to establish a legacy that will transform him from a middling president into a great one.
As well as overseeing what he hopes will be continued economic recovery, he hopes to address issues ranging from immigration reform to investment in education and climate change, and, in foreign policy, from Iran to Israel-Palestine.
As well as comfortably winning more than the required 270 electoral college votes, he also secured a higher share of the popular vote.
Boehner, in a statement, sounded conciliatory. He cited “the need for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt”. Obama is reported to have phoned Boehner to begin negotiation.
Reid, so often at odds with Boehner, also sounded conciliatory, saying: “I look at the challenges that we have ahead of us and I reach out to my Republican colleagues in the Senate and the House. Let’s come together. We know what the issues are; let’s solve them.”
Obama, in an initially off-the-record interview during the campaign, expressed optimism of a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, one that eluded him in 2011. The trouble will come when talks move to detail, with the Republicans wanting to protect military spending while the Democrats seek cuts. Obama has called for tax increases on households earning more than $250,000; Boehner has rejected any tax increases.
Shares dropped on the Dow in anticipation of continued gridlock. By lunchtime, all the major US markets were down over 300 points.
The new House, which will be formed in January, will look much like the existing one, which has a huge Republican majority. The Senate too remained little changed, with the Democrats retaining their slim majority, gaining three and losing one.
In the presidential race, Romney won only one of the swing states, North Carolina, while Obama held New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Colorado.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama referred to the long queues to vote and said there was a need for electoral reform.
He returned to the soaring rhetoric that was his trademark during the 2008 election but which he dispensed with in 2012. Amid the disillusionment with his presidency and the tough economic conditions, his campaign team decided it was inappropriate.
But having won, he returned to famous lines from earlier speeches, reprising once again his 2008 slogan about “hope”.
Stepping up to the lectern to the upbeat sounds of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” Obama told the ecstatic crowd of supporters: “Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.” In a speech that lasted more than 25 minutes, after paying emotional tribute to his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha – as well as to his Vice-President, Joe Biden – Obama returned to the message that first brought him to national attention.
“We are not as divided as our politics suggests,” he said. “We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.”
Obama made clear he had an agenda in mind for his second term, citing changes in the tax code, immigration reform and, as he put it, an America “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet”.
Shortly beforehand, Romney had phoned the President to concede. In a gracious concession speech in Boston, Romney told his supporters: “The nation, as you know, is at a critical point. At a time like this, we can’t risk partisan bickering and political posturing. Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people’s work.”
He continued: “This is a time for great challenges for America and I pray the President will be successful in guiding our nation.”
The campaign almost throughout has been a referendum on Obama. Although there was widespread disillusionment with the slow pace of economy recovery and a high unemployment level, Americans decided to stick with him.
Historically, it would have been a disappointment for African Americans and many white liberals if the first black presidency had ended in failure, halted prematurely.


Intermediate
Pope Benedict XVI arrived in 2005 as a simple, humble worker in Gods vineyard. And on a grey, cold, windy Monday in February, he resigned in the same way: like an elderly labourer who can no longer ignore the pains in his back; who can no longer rely on the strength of his arms. A traditional Pope, he made his excuses in Latin. The first German Pope in modern times gave an exact departure time. From 28 February 2013, at 20.00 hours, he told a group of cardinals in the Vatican, the see of Rome, the see of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a new pope will have to be elected.
Among those present was a Mexican cardinal, Monsignor Oscar Sanchz Barba, from Guadalajara. He was in Rome for an official meeting. We were all in the Sala del Concistoro  of the Apostolic Palace, he said. The pope took a sheet of paper and read from it.
We were all left   Sanchz Barba looked around him in St Peters Square, looking for the word; he was as speechless as the princes of the church who had just heard the man they believe to be Gods representative on earth give up the job. The cardinals were just looking at one another, Sanchz Barba said.
Angelo Sodano, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who must have known beforehand, gave a brief speech. Before going on to assure the Pope of the cardinals loyalty and devotion, he said he and the others present had listened to you with a sense of confusion, almost completely incredulous. At the end of his speech, the Pope blessed the people present, and left. It was so simple; the simplest thing imaginable, said Sanchz Barba. Then we all left in silence. There was absolute silence  and sadness.
John Thavis, who spent 30 years reporting on the Vatican and whose book, The Vatican Diaries, is soon to be published, said he had had a feeling the Pope might be about to resign and timed his return to Rome from the US accordingly. Thavis noted that in the long interview Benedict gave to a German journalist in 2010, he had made it clear he considered it would be right to go if he felt he could no longer do the job. I asked myself: if I were Pope and wanted to resign, when would I choose? He has completed his series of books and most of his projects. What is more, there were no dates in his calendar of events he personally had to attend. I thought the most likely date was 22 February but I got it wrong.
Within hours of the announcement, Vatican officials were saying that the Popes decision was a brave one. Thavis agreed: What I find particularly courageous is that he is prepared to say now, when he is not sick, that he is going; and that hes doing it because hes tired and not because hes particularly ill. But is that the whole story? Does he know more about his state of health than the Vatican has so far made public?
Benedicts own reasons make it clear that he took into account not only his physical, but also his psychological condition. He said that the position of pope required both strength of mind and strength of body, and in the last few months he felt that strength was gradually decreasing. There will no doubt be other theories in the days and weeks ahead, just as there were following the death of Pope John Paul I in 1978, 33 days after his election. Already there is speculation that some information was about to come out about Benedicts past. The Vatican will no doubt dismiss any such stories. But they are understandable, for the transcendental importance of what Benedict has done cannot be overstated.
Coming out of St Peters Basilica, Julia Rochester, from London, who described herself as a lapsed Catholic, was still considering the implications of the Popes resignation. If youre Gods chosen one, how do you choose not be chosen? she asked. It is a question many Catholics will be asking their priests in the weeks ahead.


It was a beautiful summer evening and I decided to go for a swim from Doolin Pier in County Clare, Ireland, where I moved in 2012. There was a woman in the water with Dusty, a dolphin who has a great relationship with a group of people she regularly swims with. Dusty arrived in Doolin in about 2008. Hundreds of people have swum with her, so everyone thinks that she’s totally tame.
That evening, the woman was tickling Dusty’s tummy and it looked so nice in the water. There were about 20 tourists and locals on the pier. They were looking at this lovely sight. Just after I got into the water, Dusty left the woman she was with and went crazy – I found out afterwards that she’s very territorial when she is with somebody. Her tail was flapping wildly and, at first, I thought it was a display but, then, I realized she was angry. I knew I had to get out of the water so I swam towards the pier. But, within seconds, Dusty crashed into me with her nose. It was very powerful and painful, and the speed was amazing.
All the people on the pier were staring at me with their mouths open. Dusty was still in the water beside me, her tail flapping crazily. That was the most frightening thing: I thought, if she hits me with her tail, I could go under the water and drown.
I was at the pier but I couldn’t get out because of my injuries. I was terrified. I shouted for help and a man put his arm in and pulled me out of the water. Then, another man appeared and said he was a doctor. I was so cold and very worried – I didn’t know how bad my injuries were and my biggest fear was internal bleeding. The doctor said he didn’t think I had internal bleeding but he thought I probably had broken bones. I found out later that I had six spinal fractures, three broken ribs and a damaged lung.
I was in hospital for five days and I couldn’t work for five months. I couldn’t move normally and I was in pain. Then, doctors told me I had post- traumatic stress. My near-death experience made me anxious about everything. I felt that people were looking at me in the wrong way, I began to have problems with loud noises and I suffered from memory loss. I could no longer work.
It was the hardest year ever but, now, things are better. I had therapy, osteopathy and massage. I work as an osteopath now. I understand how the patients feel because I have been a patient myself.
I am grateful that I am healthy. I really want to prevent other people being injured. We think dolphins are lovely and we have faith in them – who would think a dolphin would ever attack a person? If you see a dangerous animal coming towards you with big teeth, it’s scary, but dolphins have this lovely, wide smile.
I don’t have any anger towards Dusty. I respect her. But I was in her territory and she’s a wild, unpredictable animal. People need to know that. So many people come here to swim with her and they don’t understand how dangerous it can be. Several other people were injured that summer.
After the man pulled me out of the water, Dusty swam away but, then, she came back and looked at me. Our eyes met and I felt she was sorry for what she did to me. She was a totally different dolphin; the anger was gone. The people on the pier were amazed. When she had that little moment with me, that was the end of the terror. I forgave her.


Sweden is the best country for older people, Afghanistan the worst – but general affluence does not necessarily mean better conditions for the over-60s, according to the first global index on ageing. While Sweden’s top ranking – followed by Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada – may be predictable, the Global AgeWatch index throws up some surprising results.
The US, the world’s richest country, is down in eighth place, while the UK fails to make the top ten at number 13. Sri Lanka ranks 36, well above Pakistan at 89, despite similar levels of gross domestic product (GDP). Bolivia and Mauritius score higher than the size of their economies may suggest, while the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China are a mixed bag. Brazil and China rank relatively high on the index; India and Russia are much lower.
“This survey shows that history counts,” said Mark Gorman, director of the HelpAge International advocacy group. “The top-ranked countries are what you would expect, but Scandinavian countries were not wealthy when they introduced universal pensions. The older population in Sri Lanka today is benefiting from good basic education and health care – those countries made certain policy choices. Everybody faces scarce resources, but they should not forget that, when they make investment decisions, they should also address issues of old age.”
The index, developed with the UN Fund for Population and Development, spans 91 countries and 89% of the world’s older people. The survey comes amid a major demographic shift: by 2050, there are expected to be two billion people aged 60 and over, who will comprise more than a fifth of the world’s population.
Population ageing – when older people account for an increasingly large proportion of people – is happening fastest in developing countries.
More than two-thirds of older people live in poor countries; by 2050, this proportion is expected to be about four-fifths. While it took 115 years for the older population of France to double from 7% to 14% between 1865 and 1980, Brazil is likely to make the same shift between 2011 and 2032 – in just 21 years.
The index shows that the fastest ageing countries – Jordan, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Vietnam, where the number of older people is predicted to more than triple by 2050 – fall into the lower half of the ranking, suggesting that policymakers need to tackle ageing head-on if they are to adequately support their populations.
There are gender differences among ageing populations, with women generally outliving men. In 2012, for every 84 men aged 60 and over, there were 100 women. Lack of paid work (hence savings), less decision-making power in the family and vulnerability to violence contribute towards the disadvantage many women face in old age.
However, if appropriate measures are implemented, population ageing does not inevitably lead to significantly higher health care spending, according to the report, which highlights the importance of long-term investments in education and health care for older people. Bolivia, ranked 46, despite being one of the poorest countries, has introduced progressive policies for older people, with a national plan on ageing, free health care and a non-contributory universal pension. Nepal, ranked 77, introduced a basic pension in 1995 for people over the age of 70 without other pension income. Though limited in value and eligibility and with uneven coverage, it is an example of how a poor country has chosen to make a start in addressing poverty in old age.
Good basic health care introduced decades ago in Chile and Costa Rica has served the ageing populations of those countries. A good education system – basic literacy is crucial for older people as they deal with the pensions bureaucracy – is of great benefit later in life. In the Philippines, older people have benefited from the educational reforms introduced after independence in 1946, which made elementary and high school education compulsory. The same is true for Armenia, which, like other countries of the former Soviet Union, benefited from a robust education system. South Korea, a surprisingly low 67 on the ageing index, performed worse than similar countries on a GDP-per-head basis, partly because it introduced a pension only recently.
The ageing index is calculated using 13 indicators under four headings: income security, health care, employment and education, and an enabling environment. All indicators have equal weight, except for pension income coverage, life expectancy at 60, healthy life expectancy at 60 and psychological well-being. These categories were given increased weighting because of better data quality and countries were included only if there was sufficient data.
Professor Sir Richard Jolly, creator of the human development index, said: “This groundbreaking index broadens the way we understand the needs and opportunities of older people through its pioneering application of human development methodology. It challenges countries in every part of the world to raise their sights as to what is possible.”


All six numbers match, so now you can buy that Audi, book the holiday in the US and look for a new house. That’s what most lottery millionaires do, says a study of what jackpot winners do with their money.
Since it started in 1994, the UK national lottery has created 3,000 millionaires. The 3,000 winners have won an average of £2.8 million each. That’s more than £8.5 billion in total. Together, they have created 3,780 more millionaires among their children, family and friends, according to the writers of the study, Oxford Economics.
Most winners (59%) give up work straight away, but 19% carry on working and 31% do unpaid voluntary work. The good news for the British economy is that 98% of the money that the winners spent stayed in the UK. Through their spending on property, vehicles and holidays, it is estimated that each winner keeps six people in a full-time job for a year.
Winners have contributed almost £750 million to the economy. Most of their money was spent on property, with £2.72 billion spent on winners’ main properties, and £170 million in paying off existing debt and mortgages.
£2.125 billion was spent on investments. £1.17 billion was given to family and friends, and £680 million was spent on cars and holidays.
It found that in total the 3,000 winners have bought 7,958 houses or flats in the UK, or 2.7 each, spending £3.3 billion. Most winners (82%) bought a new house, spending an average £900,000.
The new home is likely to have a hot tub, with almost a third (29%) putting that on their shopping list. 28% bought a walk-in wardrobe, almost a quarter (24%) bought a property behind electric gates, and 22% had a games room, with 7% installing a snooker table.
30% of winners employed a cleaner and 24% a gardener for their new houses. A small proportion (5%) employed a beautician.
Audis were the favourite cars of 16% of winners, with Range Rovers and BMWs also popular (11% each), as well as Mercedes (10%) and Land Rovers (5%). Winners spent £463 million on 17,190 cars.
Holidays were also important. Most (68%) choose five-star hotels overseas. The US was the preferred destination for 27%, followed by the Caribbean (9%). Over the past 18 years, 10% of millionaires have bought a caravan.
Some winners (15%) have started their own businesses, 9% have helped others to start a business, and 6% have invested in or bought other people’s businesses. Businesses started or supported by lottery winners employ 3,195 people, according to the study.


An international agreement to improve safety in Bangladesh’s clothes factories could face legal action. This is because factory owners are asking for compensation for the cost of closures and repair work. Some repairs may take months and factory owners say they cannot pay workers while factories are closed. Also, they cannot pay for big works to make buildings safe. The building repairs are happening after the Rana Plaza building in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, collapsed in 2013 and 1,138 people died.
The problems come as hundreds of Bangladeshi clothes factories are inspected every month for fire-safety and structural problems under the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. The Accord is supported by over 170 international companies, including Primark and Marks & Spencer, and international trade unions, including IndustriALL.
The owner of one Dhaka factory, Softex Cotton, said he will take legal action against the Accord because his factory was closed down as a result of structural problems. He wants around $100 million in compensation.
Another factory owner said that, when a factory closed, even for a few months, it would lose orders and close permanently: “There is no such thing as temporary closure,” he said. The factory owner said it was not clear in the Accord agreement who would pay for factory closures.
Jenny Holdcroft, policy director for IndustriALL, which has been closely involved in the Accord, said that the agreement made sure that factories would not lose orders during closure because companies agreed to continue orders with suppliers for two years.
The Accord has found12 factories that need a lot of work, but Holdcroft said many of those only needed partial closure and production could continue on other floors. The Accord also asks companies to make sure that workers receive pay during factory closures. She said that factory owners who could afford to pay for repairs and compensation for workers should make the payments.
“Companies don’t want to pay so that rich factory owners can continue to just take the profits and not spend on their factories for years. It is not surprising that there is disruption. If there was no disruption, there would be no change,” she said. A spokesman for the Accord said negotiations over payments and even legal action would not delay its work to improve safety in factories.
But there is now more pressure on the Accord to help pay workers when their factories close. A rival factory-safety group, supported by US retailers including Walmart and Gap, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, has given $5 million to help pay factory workers for up to two months while buildings are improved.
“The Alliance is sharing the workers’ salary with factory owners so now there is a big confusion. We had a big meeting with the Accord to make them understand they have to help or how will we help our workers?” said Shaidullah Azim, a director of the Bangladeshi Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.


Intermediate
The Chief Medical Officer for England has compared the problem of antibiotic resistance to the risks of international terrorism. But, in fact, each year the global number of deaths caused by bacterial resistance is far more than the number of deaths caused by terrorist attacks.
The World Health Organization estimates that, just for tuberculosis, multi-drug resistance kills more than 150,000 people each year. Antibiotic resistance is now a real risk: this is now a war.
In the past hundred years, our expectations of life and survival have changed beyond all recognition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, life expectancy in the UK was around 47 years of age for a man and 50 for a woman, a number heavily affected by the very high rate of infant mortality in those days. Around a third of all deaths were in children under the age of five, mostly because of infectious disease.
However, a child born in Britain today has more than a one in four chance of reaching their 100th birthday. For this we have public health systems, vaccination and antibiotics to thank. It is thanks to this  the prevention and treatment of illnesses caused by microorganisms  that the real war against disease is mainly won.
It is in intensive care, my specialist area, that antibiotic resistant organisms are most common. Here, powerful antibiotics, essential in the treatment of life-threatening illness, are used routinely. These drugs kill ordinary bacteria. But they leave behind strong bacteria that have begun to learn how to survive antibiotic drugs.
As a newly qualified doctor in the late 1990s, I learnt about Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus  the infamous MRSA  a bacterial species resistant to methicillin and all other penicillins. In the fight against it, there were a small number of drugs, like vancomycin and teicoplanin. These were supposed to be our defence, but antibiotic resistant bacteria became more and more common; bacteria with new kinds of resistance became more common too. Drugs we had previously hardly heard of became common. We got used to this; a slow increase in the arms race between us and the bacteria.
But the balance has been slowly moving. In our hospitals and our GP surgeries, we have abused the drugs that gave us such a huge advantage over infectious disease  we use them too often. And some of the worst abuses have happened outside of healthcare, with antibiotics introduced into the food chain, through agriculture and by putting antibacterial drugs into food for farm animals. We thought that antibiotic therapy was an advantage we could enjoy forever. We became complacent that the pharmaceutical industry would continue to stay ahead of the game.
But this is no longer the case. New, more resistant species have been found. The vancomycin that we used to treat MRSA infection no longer worked. Vancomycin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (VRSA) appeared in our hospitals. And other bacteria were learning resistance. Enterobacteria also became resistant to vancomycin. Today, infections with highly resistant organisms are common and the pharmaceutical industry is not keeping up. Fewer and fewer new antimicrobial drugs are produced. It is becoming more and more difficult to develop new drugs that work against resistant bacteria. For every method of attack the pharmaceutical companies invent, bacteria quickly form a defence. We have tried all of the simple approaches to the problem. Antibiotics have become drugs that are expensive to develop, that are only used in short courses and that quickly become ineffective due to the changes in bacterial resistance. As a result, the pharmaceutical industrys incentive to create new drugs that can fight them is low.
Antibiotics became common in the 1940s, and almost straight away we saw the first evidence of bacteria resistance. Today, this has become a normal part of medical life. Less than a century after the discovery of penicillin, we are beginning to lose the fight.
Since the first MRSA deaths in healthy children in the US in 1998, the number of deaths from MRSA infection in the US each year has increased to tens of thousands  far more than the number of deaths caused by AIDS. Bacterial resistance in hospitals is everywhere. This is a war different from any other. There needs to be change in the way doctors prescribe antibiotics and fewer antibiotics used in farming and agriculture. And we have to find a way to convince the pharmaceutical companies to develop these less profitable drugs.
If we are going to avoid a return to the pre-antibiotic time with all its excess mortality, we must make some big changes. To lose the advantage we have against microorganisms in the fight for life would be unthinkable.


Why do people want to be a football referee? The top referees of the future smile when you ask them this question. This season, more people are criticizing referees. For this reason, some former referees have started to complain about standards. That is quite significant because, when you talk to referees, it is obvious that they always support each other.
So why do they do want to be referees? Why do referees spend hundreds of hours driving around the country? Why do they work so hard to get the chance to make decisions on television in front of millions of people who criticize them and their ability with the help of many cameras and slow-motion replays?
You might get an answer from Lee Swabey’s face. He looks really happy after he blows the final whistle of a 2–1 win for Grimsby against Woking, a match at level 5 of the English league system. He gets what all referees want every time they referee a match. “Twenty-two handshakes, ” he explains afterwards, proudly. “The buzz,” as he calls it, of a game that goes well, is something he loves. “I wouldn’t spend so much time away from my family if this wasn’t so important to me.”
Swabey is one of a group of new referees that the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) thinks is really good. So Swabey knew they were watching him at that match. PGMOL’s chief, Mike Riley, was there, and also his colleague Steve Dunn, watching every move the officials made.
A few weeks earlier, Riley, Dunn and another former referee, Peter Jones, went to another level-5 match to check another young referee – John Brooks. “I hope to have the opportunity to work in the Premier League and referee at some of the top games in this country,” Brooks says.
Unfortunately, the PGMOL only saw Brooks cancelling the match because of a frozen pitch. It is all part of the experience Brooks needs to have before he can referee at more important games. Brooks phoned his coach for advice and made the difficult but correct decision. A little later, the football club secretary arrived to pay the officials for their time – the match fee at level 5 is £95 so it is clear that these men do not do it for the money.
Brooks, like Swabey, has clear ambitions to progress. He knows lots of people will criticize him. How does he feel when he watches football on TV and a referee is attacked? “Erm … I don’t feel great,” he admits. “I do sometimes wish people understood the time and effort we put in. It is very easy to criticize a decision but we do everything to try to get these decisions right. In certain situations, you are going to be unpopular but, if you are uncomfortable with that, you are probably in the wrong job.”
The former referees agree that the backup, education and tools that today’s referees have is very different from what they experienced in the past. Riley, as a young referee, bought himself books on psychology and nutrition because there was no information on offer to him at all.
Things are very different for Brooks – he has his own coach. They talk every week, discuss how his games have gone, study film of key decisions and discuss how to improve. He also has the support of a sports psychologist and an exercise regime to help him run 11km during a game.
The three former referees all agree that new technology in the sport is great. “It makes the referee’s job better and makes them more effective on the field of play,” says Riley. A bad decision can stay with you for a while. “The rest of your life,” says Jones with a laugh.


Clay Cockrell is sitting in his office at Columbus Circle, across the street from 1 Central Park West, which houses Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.
Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker turned therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a confidant and counsellor to some of New York’s wealthiest people.
“I shifted towards it naturally,” he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. “Many of the extremely wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”
So, what issues are America’s 1% struggling with? “There is guilt over being rich in the first place,” he said. “There is the feeling that they have to hide the fact that they are rich. And, then, there is the isolation – being in the 1%, it turns out, can be lonely.” It seems F Scott Fitzgerald was right: the very rich “are different from you and me”.
Counsellors argue things have become worse since the financial crisis and the debate over income inequality that has been spurred on by movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 fair wage campaign.
“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. The media, she said, is partly to blame for making the rich “feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed”.
“Sometimes, I am shocked by things that people say. You would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealth holders.”
“It’s really isolating to have a lot of money. People’s reactions to you can be scary,” said Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. “We are all taught not to talk about money. It’s not polite to talk about money. Ironically, it’s harder to talk about having money than it is to talk about not having money. It’s much more socially acceptable to say 'I am broke. Things are hard.' You can’t say 'I have a ton of money.' You have to keep a lot of your life private.”
As a result, Cockrell points out, the rich tend to hang out with other rich Americans, not out of snobbery but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems.
The growing gap between the rich and poor is a global phenomenon. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014 and are on track to own more than the other 99% by 2016.
In the US, over the last three decades, the wealth owned by the top 0.1% households increased from 7% to 22% even as the wealth of the bottom 90% of households declined.
The number of extremely wealthy people has also been climbing. According to research from Spectrem Group, in 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more in assets – excluding the value of their primary home – increased by 500,000 to 10.1m. In 2007, that number was 9.2m. Households worth $5m or more reached 1.3m and 142,000 households are now worth $25m or more.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the income gap has expanded and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money.
“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell. “As the gap has widened, the rich have become more and more isolated.”
These are real fears faced by the richest of the rich. In 2007, the Gates Foundation teamed up with Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy to document what it felt like to be in America’s 1%. For the next four years, researchers surveyed 165 of America’s richest households – 120 of those households have at least $25m in assets. The average net worth of those surveyed was $78m. The resulting study, The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth, was 500 pages long and seemed to prove the old adage that money can’t buy happiness.
“Wealth can be a barrier to connecting with other people,” confessed a spouse of a tech entrepreneur who made about $80m. Some Americans have taken to keeping their wealth secret. “We talk about it as stealth wealth. There are a lot of people that are hiding their wealth because they are concerned about negative judgment,” said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about the unique challenges that come with their wealth, people often dismiss their experience.
“People say 'Oh, poor you.' There is not a lot of sympathy there,” she said. “Wealth is still one of our last taboos.”
Speaking in his soft, soothing voice that makes you want to spill all your worries, Cockrell said that a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make is letting their money define them.
“I don’t think it’s healthy to discount your problems. If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems and they are legitimate to you. Even when you say, 'I don’t have to struggle for money', there are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing that defines you,” he said. “Your problems are legitimate.”


The problem with Google Glasses, says Takahito Iguchi, is that they’re not cool. He has a point. There’s already a website dedicated to people wearing them looking either ridiculous or smug or, more often, both. It possibly wasn’t Google’s smartest move to release the first 10,000 pairs to software developers rather than, say, supermodels or Scarlett Johansson. Search Google Images and one of the first hits is a picture of a large, naked man wearing them in the shower. And it’s this that Iguchi, a Japanese entrepreneur, hopes may be Google’s Achilles’ heel. He is launching a competitor that is a bit more stylized. A bit more Blade Runner. A bit more Japanese.
Iguchi’s augmented reality glasses, which aren’t really glasses so much as a single piece of metal with a camera and a micro-projector, are called Telepathy One, and, after unveiling them at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, they have attracted $5m of venture capital. Like Glass, Telepathy One is due to launch in 2014.
It’s a stripped-down, simplified version of Google Glass. Whereas Glass is, he says, “an egotistical device” with a range of uses – you can surf the net, read emails, take photographs, do unspecified things with as yet unspecified apps – Telepathy will be “more of a communication device”. Connected via Bluetooth to your phone, it will focus on real- time visual and audio sharing. You’ll be able to post photos and videos from your line of vision on Facebook or send them as an email. Or see and speak to a floating video image of a friend.
“It will help bring you close to your friends and family. We are very focused on the communication and sharing possibilities,” says Iguchi, who has worked in the Japanese tech industry for 20 years, most recently developing a location-based phone app called Sekai Camera.
Of course, not everyone wants to get closer to the man in the futuristic headset, I point out. Iguchi shakes his head. “I’m a visionary. I have a dream that people will understand other people. When I go to London, I am a stranger. Sometimes I feel fear. But I believe that everyone wants to be understood and to understand each other. And, with this device, you can know more information about people before you even speak to them.”
Compared to the likes of Google, of course, Telepathy is a minnow. Not that this seems to daunt Takahito Iguchi. In his shared office space in San Francisco – a cool, converted warehouse in the heart of startup land, filled with twentysomethings – he quotes Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and points out that even tiny armies can sometimes beat mighty forces. When he was growing up, Japanese technology ruled the world: the Sony Walkman was the iPhone of its day. Now, to compete, he’s had to quit Tokyo for Silicon Valley.
“Tokyo is very rich in fashion and culture but it’s still an island. It’s isolated. There is not any way to expand. Whereas, in Silicon Valley, everyone is from everywhere. It’s where you come to connect globally.” The hardware will be made in Japan, while he is putting together a team of software engineers in the US to develop its applications. On the day I meet him, he’s being shadowed by a news crew from Japan who are interested in the new wave of Japanese entrepreneurs being forced to leave their homeland.
“We are losing our confidence,” the correspondent, Takashi Yanagisawa, tells me. “And we need to find a way to regain our power. Iguchi is kind of like the new frontier. We hope he might be a new solution.” Building the prototype of Telepathy One was easy, Iguchi says. “We have every sort of technology in Tokyo. It is presenting it to the world that is the challenge.” The leading manufacturers are lining up to work with him, he says, because they have the technology, they just struggle to sell it. “There needs to be a story to the product. Like Apple did with the iPod – 1,000 songs in your pocket. And the way they positioned themselves against Microsoft and IBM, it was like the story of David and Goliath. And Steve Jobs was inspired by Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, and he inspired me, so maybe it will come in a circle.”
Maybe. He certainly has the confidence of Jobs, although, with a thick Japanese accent, he sometimes struggles to make himself understood, a fact that may have contributed to Telepathy One’s conception. When he went to London to present the headset at the prestigious Founders Forum, he stayed in an Airbnb. “The house owner was not my friend but I talked with him for three hours, and now he is my friend. That is how long it takes to understand each other, to share our feelings, and background, and career. Maybe Telepathy makes that shorter. If you are getting info from the cloud and social networks, that will happen more easily. And this man is involved in getting investment from UK to Africa, and he was very excited about Telepathy, that it would be a way of educating people about Africa, of showing them other people’s point of view.”
This is Iguchi’s fondest hope – that seeing somebody else’s literal point of view will help you to see their metaphorical point of view. As a student, he explains, he studied philosophy by day and taught himself how to code by night. “And, one day, I opened the door of my apartment and I suddenly realized that everything is code. That was my enlightenment. Everything is coded and is shareable between humans. And everything can be encoded and decoded. And, if code is exchangeable between humans, that will end all war against each other.”


SeaWorld’s profits fell by 84% and customers are staying away from the water theme park company because a film claimed that it mistreated orca whales.
The company teaches dolphins and killer whales to do tricks in front of large crowds of people.
It says fewer people are going to its parks and profits have reduced.
SeaWorld has been in the news since the 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which said that SeaWorld mistreated orca whales – this made the whales act violently and caused the deaths of three people.
Animal rights organizations say that orcas kept in tanks die at a younger age than wild whales. SeaWorld started a national marketing campaign to show this isn’t true.
SeaWorld has reduced ticket prices and spent $10m on a marketing campaign. But SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby said that the company still finds it difficult to convince people that it treats its whales well.
“We realize we have much work to do,” Manby said. Talking about the company’s reputation, he said, “Early feedback on our marketing campaign has been positive.”
“We will continue to fight with the facts because the facts are on our side,” he said.
Manby joined the company as CEO in 2015 to help the company recover. He will give a presentation about his ideas for the future of the company on 6 November.
There are already plans for a new shark exhibition in Orlando and an attraction in San Antonio that will allow customers to swim with dolphins.
The company’s financial report from 6 August showed that their profit in the second quarter dropped from $37.4 million in 2014 to $5.8 million in 2015. This is an 84% decrease. At the same time, the number of visitors dropped by more than 100,000 from 6.58 million to 6.48 million.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that is against SeaWorld. Jared Goodman from PETA said: “SeaWorld has lots of problems. Animals are dying in its tanks and tens of thousands of people do not want it to build a new orca prison. Families don’t want to buy tickets to see orcas going insane inside tiny tanks and SeaWorld’s profits won’t increase until it closes its parks and builds sanctuaries by the coast.”
SeaWorld’s shares, which were worth $39 in 2013, fell to just under $18 in August 2015.”


Piles of digitized material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned. Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
Cerf called for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are. “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he said. “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added.
What is 'bit rot' and is Vint Cerf right to be worried? Being able to access digital content in the coming decades could be less of an issue than one of the 'fathers of the internet' has implied. The warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitized in the hope of ensuring their long-term survival. But, while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.
“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them but what we don’t understand is that, unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitized,” Cerf says. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets or rolled papyrus scrolls needed only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware, too.
The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks, upload Jet Set Willy from cassette to the ZX spectrum, slaughter aliens with a Quickfire II joystick and have Atari games cartridges in the attic. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is now mostly found only in museums.
The rise of gaming has its own place in the story of digital culture but Cerf warns that important political and historical documents will also be lost to bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, describing how Lincoln hired those who ran against him for presidency. She went to libraries around the US, found the physical letters of the people involved and reconstructed their conversations. “In today’s world, those letters would be emails and the chances of finding them will be vanishingly small one hundred years from now,” said Cerf.
He concedes that historians will take steps to preserve material considered important by today’s standards but argues that the significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later. Historians have learned how the greatest mathematician of antiquity considered the concept of infinity and anticipated calculus in 3BC after the Archimedes palimpsest was found hidden under the words of a Byzantine prayer book from the thirteenth century. “We’ve been surprised by what we’ve learned from objects that have been preserved purely by chance that give us insights into an earlier civilization,” he said.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have made headway towards a solution to bit rot, or at least a partial one. There, Mahadev Satyanarayanan takes digital snapshots of computer hard drives while they run different software programs. These can then be uploaded to a computer that mimics the one the software ran on. The result is a computer that can read otherwise defunct files. Under a project called Olive, the researchers have archived Mystery House, the original 1982 graphic adventure game for the Apple II, an early version of WordPerfect, and Doom, the original 1993 first person shooter game.
Inventing new technology is only half the battle, though. More difficult still could be navigating the legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies. When IT companies go out of business, or stop supporting their products, they may sell the rights on, making it a nightmarish task to get approval. “To do this properly, the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing. We’re talking about preserving them for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Cerf.


Scientists have taken DNA from the tooth of a European hunter-gatherer and have found out what modern humans looked like before they started farming. The Mesolithic man, who lived in Spain about 7,000 years ago, had an unusual mix of blue eyes, black or brown hair and dark skin.
He was probably lactose intolerant and could not digest starchy foods easily.
The invention of farming brought humans and animals much closer and humans probably developed stronger immune systems to ﬁght infections from the animals. But the change to humans’ immue systems may not be as big as scientists thought – tests on the hunter-gatherer ’s DNA found that he already had genes that made his immune system strong. Some of these genes still exist in modern Europeans today. “Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to ﬁnd,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, who led the study at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. “Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong.”
The Spanish team started their work after a group of cave explorers found two skeletons in a deep cave high up in the Cantabrian Mountains of northwest Spain in 2006. The skeletons, which belonged to two men in their early 30s, had been very well preserved in the cool cave.
Carbon dating showed the skeletons are around 7,000 years old, from the time before farming arrived in Europe from the Middle East. Other things were found in the cave, including reindeer teeth that were hung from the people’s clothing.
The DNA brought some surprises. When Lalueza-Fox looked at it, he found that the man had genes for dark skin. “This guy was darker than any modern European, but we don’t know how dark,” the scientist said. Another surprise was that the man had blue eyes. The results suggest that blue eyes came ﬁrst in Europe and that the change to lighter skin happened later in Mesolithic times.
This discovery is important for science. It is also important to artists who will have to draw Mesolithic people in a new way. “You see a lot of pictures of these people hunting and gathering and they look like modern Europeans with light skin. You never see a picture of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer with dark skin and blue eyes,” Lalueza-Fox said.
The Spanish team compared the hunter-gatherer to modern Europeans from different regions to see how they might be related. They found that the ancient DNA was most closely related to the DNA of people living in northern Europe, in particular Sweden and Finland.


A day that began with a fresh round of dawn raids on the Baur Au Lac hotel in Zurich ended with 16 football officials being indicted on corruption charges in the US, including five current or former members of FIFA’s executive committee. They included the notorious former Brazilian federation chief Ricardo Teixeira and his successor, Marco Polo Del Nero, who has recently stepped down from the FIFA executive committee.
They were among 16 individuals accused of fraud and other offences by the US Department of Justice as it set out a series of kickback schemes in a new 240-page indictment that superseded the previous one in May 2015. It takes to 27 the number of defendants charged by the US with a further 24 unnamed 'co-conspirators' including former FIFA executive committee members. “The betrayal of trust set forth here is outrageous,” the US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, said. “The scale of corruption alleged herein is completely unacceptable.”
On a day when FIFA’s executive committee had hoped to present new reforms in the midst of an ongoing corruption crisis, Swiss police led away the president of the South American football confederation, the Paraguayan Juan Ángel Napout, and Alfredo Hawit, the head of the North and Central American and Caribbean governing body. Hawit only succeeded Jeffrey Webb in May 2015, after Webb was arrested as part of the US operation that threw FIFA into crisis and precipitated the downfall of Sepp Blatter. Webb’s predecessor, the controversial Jack Warner, was also seized in May.
The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said of the latest arrests: “They are being held in custody pending their extradition. According to the US arrest requests, they are suspected of accepting bribes of millions of dollars”. Webb and the Colombian former executive committee member Luis Bedoya were among those whose guilty pleas were entered in the US. Lynch said that eight individuals, five of them unnamed in the original indictment, had come forward with guilty pleas since May.
Eleven current and former members of FIFA’s executive committee have now been charged in the investigation, which alleges $200m in bribes, mainly as kickbacks from TV and marketing contracts but also FIFA’s development programmes. The last three presidents of the regional bodies CONCACAF and Conmebol have all been indicted.
“The message from this announcement should be clear to every culpable individual who remains in the shadows, hoping to evade our investigation: you will not escape our focus,” said Lynch. Teixeira, the former son-in-law of the longstanding FIFA president João Havelange, was charged alongside Del Nero and his predecessor, José Maria Marin, who was charged in May.
Fourteen men had been charged in May 2015, when four additional guilty pleas were entered. Days later, Blatter won a fifth term as president but later agreed to step down as the crisis grew. He was then provisionally suspended alongside the UEFA President, Michel Platini, over an alleged £1.3m “disloyal payment” to the Frenchman. Both men face possible life bans when their case is heard by the FIFA ethics committee in December if they are found guilty of the charges.
Among those also charged on Thursday were Rafael Salguero, a Guatemalan who left the executive committee in May; the former South American Confederation Secretary General, Eduardo Deluca; Peru’s former football federation president, Manuel Burga; and Bolivia’s football president, Carlos Chaves, already jailed in his own country.
Lynch said: “The Department of Justice is committed to ending the rampant corruption we have described amidst the leadership of international football – not only because of the scale of the schemes alleged earlier and today, or the breadth of the operation required to sustain such corruption, but also because of the affront to international principles that this behaviour represents.”
The acting FIFA President, Issa Hayatou, refused to comment on the detail of the latest arrests. But he maintained neither he nor the organization was corrupt. Appearing for the first time before the media since taking the role in September 2015, when Blatter was suspended, Hayatou responded in a similar way to his predecessors in improbably claiming the current crisis was down to a handful of errant individuals.
“FIFA is not corrupt. We have individuals that have shown negative behaviour. Do not generalize the situation,” said Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football for more than 25 years. “There are lots of people who have been in FIFA for more than 20 or 30 years that have not been accused of anything.”


Not sleeping very much used to be a sign that you were busy and important. Sleep was for wimps. But now, Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution, a book that says we need to sleep more and promises to change your life, is a New York Times best-seller.
Businesses have realized that they can make money from the sleep revolution. A whole range of businesses are interested in where, when and how we sleep and, also, how much we will pay for it. Luxury hotels give people “sleep retreats”; more than $1,000 gets you dinner and a movie about sleep. And, if you’re staying home, you can improve your bedroom with a mattress cover with a sensor that monitors your sleep ($249) or a sleeping mask that monitors your brainwaves and lets you sleep more efficiently ($299).
Sleep has not only become big business – it has also changed companies. Many companies already have sleeping areas and Huffington says that nap rooms in offices will become “as common as conference rooms” in the next two years. So, how did this happen? How did sleep suddenly become so fashionable?
Many people these days find it normal to pay $10 for green juice and $34 for an indoor cycle class. And these people have made getting enough sleep a part of their lifestyle. Our bodies have become machines that we monitor for better efficiency and sleep is now another set of data for us to follow.
Huffington does not say that sleep rests you; she says it restores you. Sleep is now an important status symbol for some people. But, it is not always easy to get enough sleep; you have to go to bed in the right neighbourhood and in the right body. Many studies show that you’re more likely to sleep badly if you’re poor. It’s hard to sleep if you’re worried about your safety or haven’t had enough to eat. It’s hard to sleep if you’re one of the 15 million Americans who work irregular hours. Research has also found that there’s a black/white sleep gap. One study shows that white people sleep an average of 6.85 hours but African Americans only sleep an average of 6.05 hours. They also have a lower quality of sleep.
Do you know who gets the most sleep and the best quality of sleep in America? Rich white women. And, they are probably the people Huffington wrote her book for. Huffington describes her ideas about sleep as a “revolution” but, in fact, it’s a rebranding. The real problem with sleep isn’t that a few rich people think it’s a waste of time; the problem is that 99% can’t afford to spend time sleeping.
Sleep may make you perform better but it’s an inefficient way to improve your performance. The real prize is finding a way that humans can work on less sleep. It is no surprise that the US military is researching this. In 2008, the Pentagon published a report called “Human Performance” which examined the possibility of a future in which soldiers could perform at their best with only a couple of hours’ sleep. “Imagine that you could make a human who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per night). This would reduce the number of deaths and injuries. An enemy would need 40% more soldiers to be able to fight us.”
One day, humans will find a way to remove the need to sleep completely. Spending a third of your life asleep won’t be a luxury anymore; it will be something only the poor will have to do. Then, we may need a whole new sort of sleep revolution.


Tea, baked beans on toast and fish and chips have always been popular in Britain. But, things are changing, according to data published recently in the National Food Survey.
Everyone knows that the British love tea but they drink more than 50% less tea than in the 1970s – 68g of tea per person per week compared to only 25g. Britons are now drinking on average only eight cups of tea a week – they drank 23 cups in 1974. Tea is still the most popular hot drink in the UK but people now spend more money on coffee.
The data comes from 150,000 families who took part in the survey between 1974 and 2000, combined with information from 2000 to 2014. It shows a move towards healthier food in recent years – people have changed to low-calorie soft drinks, from whole to skimmed milk and they eat more fresh fruit. But, the amount of chips, pizza, crisps and ready meals they eat each week has increased a lot.
There has also been an enormous change from white to brown bread. The survey also shows the amount of bread people eat has fallen from 25 to 15 slices a week over the past forty years. The amount of baked beans people eat has reduced by 20%. But, there has been an increase in other types of convenience food, particularly Italian dishes. Adults in the UK now eat an average of 75g of pizza every week compared with none in 1974. The amount of pasta they eat has almost tripled over the same period.
Fresh potatoes are also becoming less popular with a 67% decrease from 1974, when adults ate around 188g every day. People eat more of other vegetables such as cucumbers, courgettes, aubergines and mushrooms. The amount of takeaway food they eat has almost doubled since 1974, from 80g per person per week to 150g. Around 33g of this amount is chips and 56g is meat, with kebabs (10g), chicken (7g), burgers (5g) and “meat-based meals” (32g) particularly popular.
It seems that British people are now more careful about what they eat – the amount of fruit has increased by 50% since 1974. In 2014, UK adults ate an average of 157g of fruit per day. Bananas have been the most popular fruit in the UK since 1996 – adults ate 221g per adult per week in 2014, much more than apples (131g) and oranges (48g). Half of all soft drinks British people drink are now low-calorie soft drinks. Britons also spend a smaller percentage of their salaries on food today – 11%, compared with 24% in 1974.
The UK Environment Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, said: “Food is the heart of our society. This data shows what we were eating 40 years ago but, also, how a change in culture has led to a food revolution. People care more about where their food comes from than before, we can order quality food on the internet, fashionable restaurants give us the latest trends and exciting global cuisines are now as common as fish and chips.”
She added that this data can show us more than what, where or how older generations ate. It can also show us when our habits changed. The National Food Survey can tell us a lot and help us to predict new food trends. “I look forward to seeing how we can use this data to learn more about our past and grow our world-leading food and farming industry in the future,” she said.


How long can you hold your breath? I’m trying it right now. The first 30 seconds are easy. I’m ready to give up at 45 seconds but I push on through and it seems to get easier for a while. But, as the second hand ticks past a minute, I know I’m on borrowed time. My heart is pounding. I let out a tiny breath and this helps. Eventually, I give in, expelling the spent air in my lungs and taking a huge gasp. (And continue to gasp for a few more breaths, prompting my husband to ask what on earth I’m doing.) I manage one minute and 12 seconds. I’m quite impressed with myself.
Breath-holding ability becomes extremely important in some sports, particularly freediving. In 2006, I was filming a programme about the anatomy and physiology of the lungs for a BBC series called, slightly oddly, Don’t Die Young. I was lucky enough to meet Sam Amps, who was captain of the UK freedive team. At a pool in Bristol, she taught me some simple exercises to help me hold my breath for longer while swimming underwater. By the end of the session, I think I’d managed a prodigious 90 seconds of breath-holding, enough to let me swim a width. Sam swam three widths with ease. She could hold her breath for five minutes, while swimming. Five!
I asked how she did it: very slow breathing for several minutes prior to each dive, then a big, deep breath before diving in. She also said training helped her resist the urge to breathe for far longer than most people.
Some have suggested that the ability to voluntarily hold your breath is evidence of a watery episode in human evolution. It’s even been said that humans have an ability to lower heart rate and metabolic rate in order to breath-hold for even longer. Other anatomical and physiological bits and bobs – our hairlessness, the distribution of our subcutaneous fat and even our tendency to walk on two legs – have been linked to an aquatic phase of evolutionary development. Unfortunately, the cobbled-together “aquatic ape hypothesis” fails to hold water. It’s a romantic notion that may appeal to us but, with the cold light of day falling on the scientific evidence, it’s revealed to be nothing more than a fiction.
Looking at voluntary breath-holding, it turns out that we’re certainly not unique among non-aquatic mammals in being able to hold our breath. (Having said that, it’s a difficult thing to investigate in other mammals as, unlike humans, they tend not to comply when you ask them to breath-hold.) And experimental evidence shows that heart rate doesn’t drop during breath-holding. At least, it doesn’t if you’re breath-holding on land. When you’re submerged in cold water it’s a different story: cooling the face does lead to a slower heart rate in most people. But, once again, this isn’t evidence of an aquatic ape ancestry, as it turns out to be a very general characteristic of air-breathing vertebrates. This reduction in heart rate is just one of the physiological responses that are sometimes described together as the “mammalian diving reflex”. But physiological responses that could be useful in diving are also – and, perhaps, even more importantly – useful for not drowning.
While our ability to breath-hold may not be all that special, when we compare ourselves with other animals, it’s now proving very useful in one particular area of medicine. Radiotherapy for breast cancer involves directing radiation, very precisely, at the tumour. This may require several minutes’ worth of radiation and, so, it’s usually done in short bursts, between breaths. But, if the patient can keep her chest perfectly still for several minutes, it means that the entire dose can be delivered, in the right place, in one go. The problem, of course, is that most people, just like me, struggle to hold their breath for much longer than a minute. But doctors at University Hospital Birmingham have recently performed careful experiments that show that, if patients are ventilated with oxygen-rich air before attempting a breath- hold, they can manage to hold their breath for an impressive five-and-a-half minutes.
Surprisingly, the trick seems to lie not in fooling the body’s usual sensors for low oxygen or high carbon dioxide levels in the blood but in fooling the diaphragm. When you breathe in, you’re contracting the muscle of your diaphragm, pulling it flat so that the volume of your chest increases – and air is drawn into your lungs. When you hold your breath, you keep your diaphragm in this contracted state. Artificially raising oxygen levels and reducing carbon dioxide levels before a breath-hold, as in the Birmingham radiotherapy experiments, may work by delaying fatigue in the diaphragm. And – not so useful if you’re trying to keep your chest perfectly still – breathing out a little air lets the diaphragm relax a little, and helps you to prolong a breath-hold, exactly as I found when attempting my breath-hold.
And, so, it’s your diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing, that is also in charge when it comes to reaching the breakpoint of your breath-hold. Eventually, even if you’ve fooled it for a while, the signals from the diaphragm are just too strong and you have to give in – and take a breath.


The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge won the first round in their battle for privacy on Tuesday when a French magazine was banned from selling or reusing images taken of the couple at a private chateau in Provence.
But the war is far from over as French prosecutors must now decide if criminal proceedings are to be brought against the magazine editor and the photographer or photographers responsible for taking pictures of the duchess sunbathing topless while on holiday in the south of France.
The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Nanterre, Paris granted an injunction ordering the gossip magazine Closer to hand over digital files of the pictures within 24 hours and preventing it disseminating them any further, including on its website and tablet app.
The four-page ruling, which only affects Mondadori Magazines France, Closer’s publisher, also ordered it to pay €2,000 in legal costs. The magazine faces a €10,000 fine for every day it fails to comply with the order. No damages were sought by the couple.
“These snapshots, which showed the intimacy of a couple, partially naked on the terrace of a private home, surrounded by a park several hundred metres from a public road, and being able to legitimately assume that they are protected from passersby, are by nature particularly intrusive,” it said.
The magistrates ruled that every photograph published in France by Mondadori, the publishing company owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in future would carry a fine, also of €10,000 per breach.
But the ruling refers only to the 14 pictures that have already been published. Closer’s editor has hinted she has other, more intimate pictures.
St James’s Palace said the couple “welcome the judge’s ruling”. A source said: “They always believed the law was broken and that they were entitled to their privacy.” Maud Sobel, a lawyer for the royal couple in Paris, described it as “a wonderful decision,” adding: “We’ve been vindicated.”
Though pleased their civil action has succeeded, the couple have taken the rare step of seeking to have a much more public criminal prosecution for breach of privacy brought against the magazine and photographer or photographers responsible.
The prosecutor will have to decide the targets for any criminal proceedings and the complaint cites “persons unknown”. But it is understood the couple want proceedings brought against the editor of Closer, which published the photos on Friday, and whoever took the images of the couple sunbathing at the chateau, which belongs to Lord Linley, son of the late Princess Margaret.
A preliminary investigation was launched on Tuesday by the Paris police. Under French law breach of privacy carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a fine of €45,000.
This is the legal action that will truly lay down a marker, and by pursuing it the couple indicate a determination to convey a wider message to the world and, they hope, deter paparazzi in the future.
Their lawyers had not asked for copies of Closer magazine to be removed from shelves.
On Saturday the Irish Daily Star published the photos, leading to the editor being suspended on Monday night pending the outcome of an internal investigation. Also on Monday, the Mondadori-owned Italian celebrity magazine Chi rushed out a special edition with 26 pages devoted to the candid photos of the future queen.
The couple’s lawyer, Aurélien Hamelle, had told the Paris court it was necessary to block the “highly intimate” images of the duchess without her bikini top as she was a “young woman, not an object”.
But Delphine Pando, defending Closer, said the action was a “disproportionate response” to publication of the photographs. She added that the magazine could not control their resale as it did not own the original images.
Copies of Closer magazine were doing brisk business on online auction site eBay, with one selling for £31.01, until the site removed all listings following “strong feedback” from its community.


Intermediate
As soon as the children at one primary school in Stirling, Scotland, hear the words daily mile, they put down their pencils and leave the classroom to start running around the school  eld. For three-and-a-half years, all the pupils at St Ninians Primary School have walked or run a mile each day. They do it at different times during the day and, despite the rise in childhood obesity across the UK, none of the children at the school are overweight.
The daily mile has done so much to improve these childrens  tness, behaviour and concentration in lessons that many other British schools are doing the same. They are getting pupils to get up from their desks and take 15 minutes to walk or run round the school or local park.
Elaine Wyllie, headteacher of St Ninians, said: I get at least two emails a day from other schools and local authorities asking how we do it. The thought of children across the country running every day because of something weve done is phenomenal.
One in ten children are obese when they start school at the age of four or  ve, according to the Health & Social Care Information Centre, and, in the summer of 2015, a study found that schoolchildren in England are the least  t they have ever been. Primary schools therefore accept the bene ts of the daily mile. It has been introduced in schools in various parts of the UK and other schools are planning to launch the initiative during the 2015-16 academic year. In Stirling alone, 30 schools have already started or will soon start the daily mile.
Its a common-sense approach to childrens  tness, which is free and easy. The most important thing is that the children really enjoy it; otherwise, you couldnt sustain it. They come back inside bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, how children used to look, said Wyllie. At St Ninians, teachers take their pupils out of lessons to a specially built circuit around the schools playing  eld for their daily mile whenever it best suits that days timetable. Only ice or very heavy rain stop them.
The extent of the bene ts isnt known yet but researchers from Stirling University have launched a comparative study to look for evidence of the physical, cognitive and emotional bene ts of the daily mile. Dr Colin Moran, who is leading the study, said: The children dont seem to have problems with obesity; they seem happier and staff say they settle into lessons faster so we designed a study that would test all of these things. St Ninians pupils will be compared with children from another school in Stirling that hasnt yet started the scheme.
Kevin Clelland, a primary school teacher from Leeds, visited St Ninians and, then, convinced his colleagues it was a great idea. He said: Its such a simple thing to do but seems to have such an amazing impact. Were really committed to improving the  tness of our pupils. His school is now building a track.
Active Cheshire, a sports and  tness organization in Cheshire, is taking a group of senior people from the local authority up to Scotland to assess the results of the daily mile. The hope is to introduce it across the 450 schools in their region if a pilot programme is successful.
Paralympian, Tanni Grey-Thompson, chair of ukactive, a health organization for physical activity, said: All children need to achieve 60 active minutes every day, whether in a lesson, on the walk to school or in the playground. Its fantastic to see initiatives like the daily mile, showing real leadership from the education sector to improve childrens  tness levels and their cognitive behaviour, and make a real difference to schools, teachers, parents and young peoples lives. We know sitting still kills; not sitting still helps children build skills that will stay with them for life.
The Scottish government also supports the initiative. A spokesperson said: Learning in PE is enhanced by initiatives like the daily mile, which can encourage and support parents in fostering healthy habits with their children from a young age. We are pleased to see so many Scottish schools are taking part or planning to do so.