1 Flappy Bird
Be careful what you wish for, especially if you want to invent something new. Recently, Dong Nguyen, the designer of the mobile game Flappy Bird, pulled it from app stores, saying its success – it had been downloaded more than 50 million times, and was making him around £30,000 in advertising revenue each day – had ruined his simple life. He took to his Twitter account to say: “I cannot take this anymore.”
OK, so regretting making Flappy Bird isn’t quite the same as regretting making a riﬂe, but Nguyen is just the latest in a long line of inventors who wish they hadn’t created a monster.
2 The labradoodle
The labradoodle isn’t a monster – it’s adorable, obviously. But what’s monstrous is the way crossbreed dogs have been bred and marketed since the labradoodle’s inventor, Wally Conron, ﬁrst created the breed in the 1980s. “I’ve done a lot of damage,” he told the Associated Press. “I’ve created a lot of problems. There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there.” Conron came up with the labradoodle when he was working for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia to provide a dog for a blind woman whose husband was allergic to dog hair. What he didn’t expect was that the labradoodle – and its other poodle-cross variants, many of which have health problems – would become so popular.
3 The AK-47
Six months before his death in December 2013, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the assault riﬂe, wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church: “My spiritual torment is unbearable. One and the same question: if my ri ﬂ e killed people, does that mean that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, 93 years of age, the son of a peasant, Christian and Orthodox by faith, am responsible for people’s deaths, even if they were enemies?”
4 Electronic tagging
The electronic tag was originally conceived in the 1960s as a way of tracking former prisoners’ attendance at schools and workplaces, and rewarding them for good behaviour. Its inventors, Bob Gable and his brother Kirkland, were later horri ﬁ ed that the tag had become a form of control and punishment. “It’s not pleasant,” Kirkland Gable told the Guardian in 2010, “but I’m not in control of the universe. I have to realize there are some things out of my control.”
5 Pepper spray
After police sprayed peaceful protesters with pepper spray at a University of California campus in 2011, one of the scientists who helped develop it in the 80s denounced its use. “I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents,” Kamran Loghman told The New York Times.
6 The ofﬁce cubicle
In the late 60s, a new form of ofﬁce was launched, designed to give workers privacy and increase productivity by providing more work space. Instead, it became a way for companies to cram employees into tighter spaces, a visual shorthand for uniformity and soulless work. Its inventor, Bob Propst, said in 1997, “the cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.”


The last time she performed, we did not have mobile phones. Now, 35 years later, as she performs again, singer Kate Bush sees a very different world.
These days, most concerts are now lit up with phones and tablets, but Bush does not want her fans to watch her shows through a screen.
In August, before her concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Bush asked her fans to put down their mobile phones at her gigs.
Bush wrote on her website: “I have a request for all of you who are coming to the shows. We have chosen a theatre, not a large venue or stadium. Please do not take photos or videos during the shows.
“I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras.”
Bush is not the first singer or musician to say she doesn’t like phones at concerts. Roger Daltrey from The Who recently said it was “weird” that people looked at their screen and not the artist on stage.
He said: “I feel sorry for them, I really feel sorry for them. Looking at life through a screen and not being in the moment totally – if you’re doing that, you’re 50% there, right? It’s weird.”
In 2013, Beyoncé told a fan, “You can’t even sing because you’re too busy filming. Put that damn camera down!”
Recently, Dutch football fans at PSV Eindhoven protested against the introduction of wi-fi in their stadium. They held up banners that said “No wi-fi. Support the team,” and “You can sit at home.” Manchester United have also told fans to leave their “large electronic devices” at home.
Singer Jarvis Cocker said, “It seems stupid to have something happening in front of you and look at it on a screen that’s smaller than a cigarette packet.”
Even in the world of classical music, one of the world’s top pianists surprised the audience in June 2013 when he left the stage because a fan was filming his performance on a smartphone. Krystian Zimerman returned moments later and said: “The destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous.”
But Sam Watt says that filming at concerts makes the experience even better. He works for Vyclone, a phone app that puts together many videos uploaded by fans to create one long video of a show.
“Fans filming is now part of the concert experience – that is a just a fact. We take the videos that people are filming at concerts and mix them together with everybody else who was filming. The result is a really fantastic video,” he said.
“We think that filming at concerts adds to the experience, and I think that, if Kate Bush came round for a cup of tea, we could have a really interesting discussion about this,” he added. “People are going to film and they want those memories – you’ve got to accept it.”


Noise from ships may disturb animals such as killer whales and dolphins much more than we thought before. New research shows that underwater noise could stop these animals communicating and make it more difficult for them to find food. It is well known that noise from ships disturbs large whales. But, US researchers have found noise also disturbs smaller sea creatures such as killer whales, also known as orcas. Dolphins and porpoises may have the same problems.
“The main problem is that even a small increase in sound may make it more difficult for whales to find food using echo,” said Scott Veirs, who led the research. “That’s worrying because their food, a kind of salmon, is already quite scarce. Hearing a salmon’s click is probably one of the most difficult things a killer whale does. It is harder to hear that click if there’s a lot of noise around you.”
The researchers used underwater microphones to measure the noise made by about 1,600 ships as they passed through Haro Strait, in Washington State, USA. The two-year study recorded the sound made by 12 different types of ship, including cruise ships, container ships and military ships, that passed through the strait about 20 times a day.
Some ships are quieter than others but the average noise next to all the ships was 173 underwater decibels, the same as 111 decibels through the air – about the sound of a loud rock concert. Whales are not usually right next to ships and so would hear noise of about 60 to 90 decibels – around the level of a vacuum cleaner.
Veirs said scientists already knew about the effect of underwater noise on large whales. But, the new research shows the danger to smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises. “We think that ships make low-frequency noise, like the sound of lorries or trains,” he said. “Most noise is at that low frequency but there is more background noise in the high frequencies, too. This might be causing a big problem that we need to study more.”
Lots of underwater noise can cause many problems. Whales may have to stay closer together to hear each other. And, if they cannot find food easily, they will need to use their extra blubber. This is a problem because this blubber often contains manmade pollutants that are poisonous to whales if they get into their bodies.
Veirs said ships that pass near whales need to be quieter. “It should be easy to reduce noise pollution,” he said. “Military ships are much quieter and there could be simple ways of using that technology on normal ships. Another way to reduce noise is to slow down. Reducing speed by six knots could decrease noise by half.”
Some whale species are safer now because there is less whaling but other types of whale are still in danger for many different reasons. The US has recently protected nearly 40,000 square miles of the Atlantic to save a species of whale with just 500 individuals left.
In Europe, killer whales have dangerously high levels of illegal chemicals in their blubber. Scientists are still trying to find out if pollutants caused the deaths of five whales that were found on beaches on the east coast of Britain in January 2016. And, around the coast of Australia, whales are in danger from oil and gas drilling, as well as Japan’s recent decision to start whaling again in the seas of Antarctica.


The brand and logo of Apple have been named the most valuable in the world – worth nearly $119bn, or more than the entire gross domestic product of Morocco, Ecuador or Oman.
The Silicon Valley firm, already the world’s biggest company – with a stock market valuation of $591bn – has seen its brand value increase by 21% in 12 months, according to the closely followed Interbrand Best Global Brands annual report.
Apple, which is recognized the world over by its simple “Apple with a bite missing” emblem, led a surge of technology companies in the 2014 report, which has pushed more traditionally valuable brands – such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Gillette – down the table.
Google’s brand value rose by 15% to $107bn to take second place, followed by Coca-Cola, up 3% to $81.5bn, IBM ($72.2bn) and Microsoft ($45.5bn).
Facebook is the biggest riser in the chart, increasing its brand value by 86% to $14.3bn and taking 29th place in the table, ahead of longstanding global corporate names such as Volkswagen, Kellogg’s and Ford.
Jez Frampton, chief executive of Interbrand, which is part of global advertising group Omnicom, said: “Benefitting immensely from the rise of digital and, later, mobile technology, savvy brands like Apple grew stronger. New category- killers like Google, Amazon and Facebook have reset customer expectations and significantly raised the bar for brand experiences.”
Apple, which former Chief Executive Steve Jobs founded in his Los Altos garage in 1976, only appeared in the top ten of the Interbrand annual study in 2011.
Its logo, created by advertising executive Rob Janoff in 1977, was designed with a bite taken out of it to avoid confusion with a cherry. “One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colours of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope and anarchy,” Janoff said.
Graham Hayles, Interbrand’s chief marketing officer, said it was “not out of kilter” that Apple’s brand could account for a fifth of the company’s entire market value. “Apple makes a lot of money because it has a very strong brand,” he said. “There is a very strong correlation between branding and profitability.”
Hayles said Interbrand, which has been carrying out the annual study since 2000, calculates brand value by examining companies’ financial performance, consumers’ “brand allegiance” and “brand-strength analysis ”.
While many technology companies rose up the chart, there were big fallers, too. Finnish mobile- phone company Nokia dropped 41 places to 98th at $4.1bn, just ahead of Nintendo in 100th place (down 33). “They’re both only just in the chart now,” Hayles said. “It shows the importance of getting innovation right. If you don’t keep pace, it is very penalizing.”
A Chinese company has made it into the top 100 for the first time, with mobile-phone and broadband firm Huawei entering the rankings in 94th place with a brand value of $4.3bn. Huawei has been partly banned by the US and Australian governments due to fears that its equipment could be used by the Chinese for cyber-espionage.
Most of the brands in the top 100 are US-owned, the highest-placed non-US brands being South Korea’s Samsung (6th), Japan’s Toyota (8th) and Germany’s Mercedes-Benz (10th). The highest- placed British brands are HSBC (33rd), Shell (65th) and Burberry (73rd).
Other fashion brands in the top 100 include Boss, Prada and Ralph Lauren. Designer label Louis Vuitton is the top-ranked fashion name, in 19th position, with a value of $23bn, just ahead of high-street clothing chain H&M, with a brand value of $21bn and ranked 21.
Sports brand Nike, ranked 22 with a brand valued at nearly $20bn, is rated way ahead of rival Adidas, at 59 in the top 100 with a value of $7bn.
Frampton said consumers’ ability to interact with and criticize brands on Twitter and other social media means companies must react faster to retain and improve their brands’ reputations.
“The customer, empowered by social media in the 'age of experience', now has more control than ever,” he said. “In this world of two-way conversations, advocacy, influence and engagement are the new rules for brand-building.
“Customers expect seamless interactions, responsiveness, 24/7 accessibility, customization options and high levels of personalization,” he said. “In a sense, they increasingly expect brands to know them.”


Intermediate
Coal will probably rival oil as the worlds biggest source of energy in the next five years, with possible disastrous consequences for the climate, says the worlds leading authority on energy economics.
One of the biggest factors behind the rise in coal use has been the massive increase in the use of shale gas in the US.
New research from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that coal consumption is increasing all over the world  even in countries and regions with carbon-cutting targets  except in the US, where shale gas is now more popular than coal. The decline of coal consumption in the US has helped to cut prices for coal globally. This has made it more attractive, even in Europe where coal use was supposed to be discouraged by the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of the IEA, said that coal consumption continues to grow each year and, if no changes are made, coal will catch oil within a decade.
Coal is available in large amounts and found in most regions of the world, unlike conventional oil and gas, and can be cheaply extracted. According to the IEA, China and India will drive world coal use in the coming five years, with India likely to overtake the US as the worlds second biggest consumer. China is the biggest coal importer, and Indonesia the biggest exporter.
According to the IEAs Medium-Term Coal Market Report the world will burn 1.2bn more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared with today.
With the highest carbon emissions of any major fossil fuel, coal is a huge contributor to climate change, particularly when burned in old-fashioned, inefficient power stations. When these are not equipped with special scrubbing equipment to remove chemicals, coal can also produce sulphur emissions  the leading cause of acid rain  and mercury and soot-particle pollution.
Van der Hoeven said that, without a high carbon price to discourage the growth in coal use and encourage cleaner technologies such as renewable power, only competition from lower-priced gas could reduce demand for coal. This has happened in the US, due to the extraordinary increase in the production of shale gas in that market in the past five years.
She said: The US experience suggests that a more efficient gas market can reduce coal use, carbon dioxide emissions and consumers electricity bills. Europe, China and other regions should take note.
If something isnt done, the world faces an increased risk of climate change as a result of this fast-increasing consumption of the highest carbon fossil fuel.


They are the darkness seekers – and they are growing in number. On Black Fell, looking down on Northumberland’s beautiful Kielder Water reservoir, a group of people wait in a car park next to a strange wooden building with a minimalist design beamed down from the future. This is Kielder Observatory, the centre of Britain’s nascent astrotourism industry. And those waiting outside were the lucky ones. Many more had applied for a night of stargazing at the observatory but numbers are strictly limited.
Inside, next to a woodburner and under dimmed lights, the observatory’s founder and lead astronomer, Gary Fildes, a former bricklayer with Tarzan hair, delivers a pep talk to his colleagues and volunteers. The team discusses the prospect of seeing the northern lights but Fildes is doubtful. Instead, they decide to train their powerful telescopes on Jupiter and Venus and later to pick out stars such as Capella and Betelgeuse. An additional attraction is the appearance of the International Space Station.
“Remember,” Fildes tells his team, “it’s about interaction, it’s about entertainment, it’s about inspiring people.” He puts on some music. Pink Floyd, the Jam, the Pogues. “By 9.30, the sky is going to be sexy,” Fildes says. “It’s going to be epic.”
Fildes, 49, is at the forefront of the UK’s burgeoning astrotourism industry. The pivotal moment for Northumberland came in 2013 when the entire national park housing Hadrian’s Wall, along with Kielder Water and Forest Park, some 1,500 sq km, was awarded Dark Sky Park status, the only one in England. Dark Sky Parks are rare. The 2013 Star Count revealed that only 5% of the UK population can see more than 31 stars on a good night.
The Tucson, Arizona-based International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) confers the status only on places that take major steps to avoid light pollution. Recipients must also prove their night skies are sufficiently dark. In Northumberland Dark Sky Park, as the area was rebadged, it is so dark that Venus casts a shadow on the Earth.
Duncan Wise, visitor development officer for the Northumberland National Park Authority, helped to spearhead the campaign for dark-sky status after the Council for the Protection of Rural England found it was one of Britain’s most tranquil places. “We tend to look at landscape as everything up to the horizon,” Wise said. “But what about what’s above it?” Wise and others spent years drawing up their submission to the IDA, collecting reams of light readings and forming an alliance of local councils, parks’ bodies and community groups to produce an exterior lighting master plan that influences the construction of new developments in the area.
Their efforts have been vindicated. Many of the 1.5 million who visit Northumberland each year are now aware of its Dark Sky status. “We get a lot of people coming here to see the sky now,” says the man at the car-hire firm in Newcastle. “They come in autumn and winter, when it’s darkest. Good for the B&Bs as they get business all year round now.” Local hoteliers now issue guests with night-vision torches and put out deckchairs at night. Those who have acquired some knowledge of astronomy can receive a badge confirming that their hotels are “Dark Sky Friendly”.
Wise acknowledges that Northumberland needs to do more to capitalize on its scarce resource and believes the region needs a couple more observatories to ensure that visitors will see what they came for. A £14m national landscape discovery centre, which he describes as the north’s answer to the Eden Project, will have an observatory when it is completed in a couple of years.
Fildes has grand designs. He is planning Britain’s first “astrovillage”, one that would house the largest public observatory in the world and boast a 100-seat auditorium, a 100-seat planetarium, a one-metre aperture telescope, and radiomagnetic and solar telescopes. The multimillion-pound project would feature a hotel and draw in 100,000 people a year, four times the number currently able to use the observatory. Fildes is cryptic about his backers but believes the astrovillage will be a reality by 2018.
However, Northumberland faces competition. Galloway Forest Park in Scotland also has Dark Sky Park status. Since Exmoor was designated Europe’s first International Dark Sky Reserve – one notch below Dark Sky Park – in 2011, a range of local businesses offering stargazing breaks and safaris has sprung up. The UK will have to go some way to eclipse northern Chile, which boasts more than a dozen tourist observatories and has some of the clearest skies in the world. The Teide National Park in Tenerife is also becoming a major astrotourism destination.
So, what is driving the desire to look upwards? The media have helped. TV presenters like Brian Cox have attracted a new generation of stargazers. “Brian Cox has made astronomy accessible,” says Wise. “It’s no longer seen as the province of professors in studies with brass telescopes.” Technology has also played a part. Apps such as Stellarium now turn smartphones into pocket-size planetariums. Ultimately, though, Fildes believes people are starting to appreciate what lies above. “If you had to build a visitor attraction from scratch, what could be better than the universe?”


Scientists have put a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment. They hopethe results of the experiment will help to explain why people “remember” things that never happened.
False memories are sometimes a problem with eyewitness statements in courts of law.
Eyewitnesses often give evidence that leads to guilty verdicts, but later those verdicts may be changed when DNA or some other evidence is used.
Susumu Tonagawa, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his team wanted to study how these false memories form in the human brain. They put memories in the brains of mice by changing individual neurons.
In the experiment, Tonagawa’s team put the mice in a box and allowed them to explore it.
As they explored it, their brain cells created a memory. The next day, they put the same mice in a second box and gave them a small electric shock. This scared the mice. At the same time, the researchers shone light into the mouse brains to bring back their memories of the first box. That way, the mice associated fear of the electric shock with the memory of the first box.
In the final part of the experiment, the team put the mice back in the first box. The mice froze because they were scared. However, they had not received the shock in the first box and had no reason to be afraid.
A similar thing may happen when powerful false memories are created in humans. “Humans are very imaginative animals,” said Tonagawa. “So, just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we have in our mind with bad or good events. In other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you.”
He added: “Our study showed that the false memory and the real memory use very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult to tell the difference between them. We hope our future experiments will show legal experts how unreliable memory can be.”
Chris French, of the University of London, is a researcher in false memories in people. He said that the results of the experiments were an important first step in understanding false memories. He added that memory researchers have always known that memory does not work like a video camera, recording all the details of anything we experience. Instead, we build a memory from small pieces of memory of the event, as well as information from other places.
He warned that the false memories created in the mice in the experiments were far simpler than the complex false memories people have, such as false memories of childhood sexual abuse, abduction by aliens, or “past lives”. These complex false memories involve many parts of the brain. French says that it will be a long time before we understand how our brains make these memories.
The mouse models created by the MIT team will help scientists ask more complex questions about memories in people. “Now that we can change the contents of memories in the brain, we can begin asking questions that used to be philosophical questions,” said Steve Ramirez, who works with Tonagawa at MIT. “Can we create false memories? What about false memories for more than just places – false memories for objects, food or other mice? These used to be sci-fi questions but we can now research them in the lab.”


Benjamin Carle is 96.9% made in France, right down to his underpants and socks. Unfortunately, six Ikea forks, a Chinese guitar and unsourced wall paint stopped him being declared a 100% economic patriot, but nobody is perfect.
Carle, 26, set out, in 2013, to see if it was possible to live using only French-made products for ten months as part of a television documentary.
The idea was triggered by the Minister for Economic Renewal Arnaud Montebourg’s call for the public to buy French to save the country’s industrial production sector.
The experiment cost Carle his smartphone, television, refrigerator (all made in China); his spectacles (Italian); his underpants (Moroccan); morning coffee (Guatemalan) and his adored David Bowie music (British).
Fortunately, his long-suffering girlfriend, Anaïs, and cat, Loon, (both French) stuck with him.
“Politicians say all sorts of things and expect us to go along with it. I wanted to see if it was possible and feasible to do what the minister was asking us to do; to hold him to account for his words,” Carle told the Guardian over a non-French coffee in a Parisian café after finishing his documentary.
He set just three rules: eat only foods produced in France, eliminate contact with foreign-made goods and do so on €1,800 a month (above the minimum wage of €1,430 to cover the extra expense of living in Paris).
The journalist was shocked to find out at the start of the experiment that only 4.5% of the contents of his flat were made nationally – and that the rest would have to go, including the lightbulbs (China) and green beans (Kenya).
The removal men left his home almost bare.
Left without a refrigerator (none are made in France) or nail clippers, he was forced to chill his food on the window ledge and saw at his toenails with a penknife.
His foreign-made clothes, down to his underwear, were replaced with more expensive alternatives: French-produced underpants (€26), socks (€9), polo shirt (€75), espadrille sandals ( €26), but no jeans as none are produced in France.
During the experiment, Carle scoured supermarket shelves for 100% French-made products, learned to cook seasonal fruit and vegetables grown in France, proudly brushed his teeth with the last toothbrush made in France by a company in Picardie employing 29 people and hand-washed his smalls until he found the last French-made washing machine (which, being top opening, would not fit under the kitchen counter).
Going out with friends was problematic – no American films, no Belgian beer, no sushi or pizza. Staying home, with no sofa for the first few months and no television, meant listening to crooner Michel Sardou and reading French novels. French wine was, of course, allowed and French-Canadian singer Céline Dion, but not, according to his advisers, French bands such as Daft Punk, who sing in English.
Unable to use his British-made bicycle or even a French car after discovering the only affordable Peugeot, Renault and Citroën models are mostly made overseas, he invested in a fug-emitting orange Mobylette moped.
The last things to go were the computer, replaced by a Qooq, a recipe tablet that connects – slowly – to the internet and the iPhone, swapped for an old Sagem mobile.
The documentary shows Carle – realizing he is addicted to his iPhone – smashing it with a brand-new French-made Tefal saucepan, while his girlfriend shrieks: “Are you crazy? Those are new pans!”
Carle tells viewers his aim is to “save the French economy. After all, I like Mission Impossible”. He admits the experiment was part serious and part jest. At one point, he consults a French language expert to check if he should be using “cool” and other Anglicisms – he was advised to swap it for the nearest French equivalent: “chouette”.
On discovering France makes no refrigerators (apart from wine coolers) or televisions, but is big in aeroplane seats and windmills, he sighs and says: “Great. Nothing that will fit into my apartment.”
At the end of the experiment, Carle takes out a bank loan to refurnish his home and clothe himself. A special “auditor” declares him 96.9% “made in France” and Montebourg visits to present him with a medal.
Carle’s conclusion: “It’s not entirely possible or even desirable to live 100% made in France, particularly in terms of new technology. But that wasn’t the point.
“This wasn’t about French nationalism or patriotism. It was trying to show that we should reflect about the way we consume and make different choices, and that applies in all countries. If we want to save jobs and industries, wherever we are, we might think about supporting them.
“A T-shirt is more expensive in France but I can be sure it has been produced by workers who are correctly paid and have good working conditions. I cannot be sure about a cheaper T-shirt produced in Asia or Morocco.”
He added: “It’s hypocrisy to go around blaming capitalists for a country’s economic decline when people could be doing more as consumers.”
Carle says he hopes to continue supporting French industry and producers, but not 100%. “It is a full-time job just finding the stuff,” he said.
The first thing he did when the experiment ended was invite his friends around for the evening to enjoy “a plate of cheese and listen to the David Bowie album Aladdin Sane”.
“It was difficult not being able to invite people around because there was nowhere to sit ... but I’d choose the Bowie over a sofa any day.”


The Virunga National Park, home to rare mountain gorillas but targeted for oil exploration by a British company, could earn trouble-torn DR Congo $400m a year from tourism, hydropower and carbon credits, said a WWF report.
But, if the UNESCO World Heritage Site that straddles the equator is exploited for oil, as the Congolese government and exploration firm SOCO International are hoping, it could lead to devastating pollution and permanent conflict in an already unstable region, says the conservation body.
SOCO International is the only company seeking to explore inside the boundaries of the Virunga park. SOCO insist that their operations in Congo would be confined to an area in the park known as Block V, and would not affect the gorillas.
SOCO Chairman Rui de Sousa said: “Despite the views of WWF, SOCO is extremely sensitive to the environmental significance of the Virunga National Park. It is irrefutable that oil companies still have a central role in today’s global energy supply and a successful oil project has the potential to transform the economic and social well-being of a whole country.”
He added: “The park has sadly been in decline for many years, officially falling below the standards required for a World Heritage Site. The potential for development just might be the catalyst that reverses this trend.”
However, Raymond Lumbuenamo, country director for WWF Democratic Republic of the Congo, based in Kinshassa, said that security in and around the park would deteriorate further if SOCO went ahead with its exploration plans.
“The security situation is already bad. The UN is involved with fighting units and the M23 rebel force is inside the park. Oil would be a curse. It always increases conflict. It would attract human sabotage. The park might become like the Niger Delta. Developing Virunga for oil will not make anything better.
“The population there is already very dense, with over 350 people per square kilometre. When you take part of the land (for oil), you put more pressure on the rest. Oil would not provide many jobs; people would flood in looking for work,” he said.
One fear is that the area is seismically active and another eruption of one of the volcanoes in the park could damage oil company infrastructure and lead to oil spills in the lakes. “Virunga’s rich natural resources are for the benefit of the Congolese people, not for foreign oil prospectors to drain away. Our country’s future depends on sustainable economic development,” said Lumbuenamo.
“For me, choosing the conservation option is the best option. Once you have started drilling for oil, there’s no turning back,” he said.
But Lumbuenamo accepted that, while the gorillas were safe at present, the chances of the park generating its potential of $400m a year were remote. “It would be difficult to make the kind of money that the report talks of. Virunga used to be a very peaceful place and can be again. The security situation right now is bad. The UN is involved with fighting units. It’s not as quiet as it used to be.”
According to the WWF report, ecosystems in the park could support hydropower generation, fishing and ecotourism, and play an important role in providing secure water supplies, regulating climate and preventing soil erosion.
The park, Africa’s oldest and most diverse, is home to over 3,000 different kinds of animals, but is now heavily populated with desperately poor people, many of whom fled there after the Rwanda massacre in 1994.
“In all, the park could support in the region of 45,000 permanent jobs. In addition, people around the world could get an immense value from simply knowing that the park is well managed and is safe for future generations,” says the report.
“Virunga represents a valuable asset to DR Congo and contributes to Africa’s heritage as the oldest and most biodiverse park on the continent,” the report continues. “Plans to explore for oil and exploit oil reserves put Virunga’s potential value at risk,” it says.
“This is where we draw the line. Oil companies are standing on the doorstep of one of the world’s most precious and fragile places, but we will not rest until Virunga is safe from this potential environmental disaster,” said Lasse Gustavsson, executive director of WWF International. “Virunga has snow fields and lava fields, but it should not have oil fields.”
The UNESCO World Heritage Committee called for the cancellation of all Virunga oil permits and appealed to concession holders Total SA and SOCO International plc not to undertake exploration in World Heritage Sites. Total has committed to respecting Virunga’s current boundary, leaving UK-based SOCO as the only oil company with plans to explore inside the park.


Two mothers in South Africa have discovered they are raising each other’s daughters after they were mistakenly switched at birth in a hospital in 2010.
But, while one of the women wants to correct the error and reclaim her biological child, the other is refusing to give back the girl she has raised as her own, posing a huge legal dilemma.
Henk Strydom, a lawyer for one of the mothers, who cannot be identiﬁed because of a court order, described the inadvertent swap as a travesty and tragedy that is unlikely to have a happy ending.
Both mothers gave birth at the Tambo Memorial Hospital in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on the same day in 2010. “Nobody suspected anything,” Strydom said.
But, in 2013, one of the mothers, who is 33 and unemployed, sued her ex-partner for maintenance for her daughter. Strydom continued: “The man denied he was the father. A DNA test was done and it was found it was not his baby and not her baby. She was devastated. She didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, she met the other mother and, since December 2013, they have been attending joint counselling sessions, arranged by the hospital. This has included meeting their biological daughters.
Strydom said of his client: “She said there are resemblances to herself. She conveyed to me that it was traumatic. You can see it’s not easy for her. She has to care for a child that is not hers on her own while her child is with someone else.”
The woman reportedly became unhappy with the process and approached the children’s court in a bid to gain custody of her biological child, but the other mother refused. Strydom agreed to represent the woman, who has one elder child, pro bono.
“It’s a tragedy. She wants the baby back but it seems the other mother is reluctant. It’s four years later: you can understand she doesn’t want to give up her baby.”
The High Court in Pretoria has appointed the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Child Law to investigate what will now be in the best interests of the children, which is the guiding principle under South African law. It must report back within 90 days.
Strydom added: “Your guess is as good as mine what the court may decide. It’s a travesty. How do you rectify it after four years? The longer you wait, the more traumatic it will be. But, whatever happens, someone won’t be happy.”
He said at this point, he and his client do not want to sue the hospital or government health department, which is currently helping with the case and providing counselling.
The Centre for Child Law will now interview the mothers and fathers, as well as any other person with a “signiﬁcant relationship” with either of the girls. The children and mothers will undergo “full and thorough” clinical assessments and may be seen by a psychologist.
Karabo Ngidi, a lawyer with the centre, said “What’s going to happen must be in the best interests of the children. Biology is an important aspect but not the only one.”
The families are of Zulu ethnicity and so Zulu tradition, culture and customary law will be a factor, she added. It is also still possible the ex- partner of the mother taking legal action could be the biological father of the girl who was switched.
It is not the ﬁrst child-swap case to come to light in South Africa. In 1995, two mothers were awarded damages after their sons, born in 1989, were accidentally switched at the Johannesburg hospital where they were born.
In 2009, in Oregon in the United States, Dee Ann Angell and Kay Rene Reed discovered that they had been mistakenly mixed up at birth in 1953 when a nurse brought them back from bathing. In 2013, in Japan, a 60-year-old man swapped at birth from his rich parents to a poor family was given compensation. He grew up on welfare and became a truck driver, whereas his biological siblings – and the boy brought up in his place – attended private secondary schools and universities.
Bruce Laing, a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg, said the long-term effects of a baby swap could be “profound”, “terrifying” and “incredibly traumatizing”. He told The Times of South Africa: “An increasingly complicated situation is that some resentment towards a child that is not yours might occur. The parents might always be thinking 'What if?'”


In 2005, BlackBerry brought instant messaging to the mobile phone and the company was just entering its period of success. Then, the iPhone was still just an idea and BlackBerry’s innovations made its smartphone one of Canada’s biggest exports.
Six years later, in the summer of 2011, there were riots in London and other UK cities. Rioters used BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and politicians wanted the service to shut down. But, two years later, the users themselves are leaving BBM.
Fewer and fewer people want BlackBerry phones. There are now many alternative products, from Facebook’s and Apple’s instant messaging applications to independent apps such as WhatsApp and Kik (which is also Canadian). They are free to download and use, and they use the internet to swap text messages, pictures, voice clips, 'stickers' and even videos between most types of phones.
BBM is trying to keep its customers and you can now use it on Android and Apple phones. There are many other apps people can use, but lots of people want to use the BBM app – more than 20 million people downloaded it. But many people believe BBM will not survive. “The move to bring BlackBerry to the iPhone is four or five years too late,” says James Gooderson, a technology blogger. “WhatsApp has made BlackBerrys unnecessary for young people.”
BBM says it has 80 million monthly users after its upgrade, but WhatsApp has 300 million. Other services show BBM’s weaknesses: Skype and Viber have video or voice calls, but BBM doesn’t; Path does location sharing, but BBM doesn’t; there is no video sharing, as on iMessage; and the stickers (a more sophisticated version of the smiley face), that kids around the world adore, are also absent. Even the contacts and calendar sharing that BBM made possible on BlackBerry phones are not on the Apple and Android versions.
Messaging is now becoming visual. Photos that are uploaded to Instagram get instant comments and Snapchat’s pictures have opened a world of other possibilities. Like BBM, all of these services are free for any phone with an internet connection. But, in 2011, BBM was so powerful that it helped to start a revolution in Egypt; and at the time of the London riots, people used BBM, not their televisions, to find out quickly what was happening.
Nearly 80% of young smartphone owners regularly use a social networking application but two-thirds use more than one. 60% of 16- to 24-year-olds use Facebook every day, but 46% use alternatives. “It’s much more complex,” says Benedict Evans, a digital media specialist. “All of these apps use your smartphone. Apps rise and fall like fireworks. Some, like Instagram, last; others just disappear.”
Thirteen-year-old Bennett has three phones. He keeps his BlackBerry for messaging, he uses an iPhone to play games, and he makes phone calls on an Android phone. His friends are still on BBM. At the touch of a few buttons, you can send a single BlackBerry message to several hundred people; on WhatsApp, the limit is 50. But, for Bennett, Instagram is now a major social network. “Instagram is Facebook without parents,” he says. “Facebook is now for older people.” The low cost of buying and using a BlackBerry is still an advantage. Anyone with a second-hand phone and a £7-a-month deal from a telecoms company can use unlimited BBM messages. But people no longer trust the privacy of BBM. Business people, revolutionaries, demonstrators and rioters used to believe that their messages were secret. The arrests that followed the riots showed that wasn’t true.
In the rich London district of South Kensington, the older pupils at one school all have Apple phones. They all use WhatsApp. For many, BBM is a distant memory. “I still have a Blackberry, but I’m the only one,” says one teenager. And how does that make him feel? “Isolated,” he says.


An atmosphere of melancholy and changing times pervades the opening to the final series of Downton Abbey. The year is 1925 and there are already the first rumblings of the economic storms that will blight the end of the decade. The neighbours are selling up their own stately home, while Lord Grantham seeks to cut back on servants after declaring that under-butlers are no longer affordable.
But at the real Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle – a stately home owned by George “Geordie” Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon – the financial outlook has rarely been brighter. According to Lady Fiona Carnarvon, the huge global success of Downton has funded a rolling programme of building repairs aimed at safeguarding Highclere for the next generation.
“It’s been an amazing magic carpet ride for all of us,” she said. “It’s given us a wonderful marketing platform, an international profile. I’m hugely grateful. My husband and I love the house, and the people here. Now, without doubt, it is loved by millions of other people.”
Currently, only the ground and first floors of Highclere, on the borders of Hampshire, are used. But, a restoration project of derelict tower rooms has begun that will eventually allow visitors to climb up into the tower to an exhibition showcasing the work of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Sir Charles Barry, who rebuilt the house between 1839 and 1842.
When the Downton Abbey producers first approached Highclere in 2009, the family faced a near £12m repair bill, with urgent work priced at £1.8m. But, by 2012, the Downton effect had begun to take the pressure off. Lord Carnarvon said then: “It was just after the banking crisis and it was gloom in all directions. We had been doing corporate functions but it all became pretty sparse after that. Then, Downton came along and it became a major tourist attraction.”
Visitor numbers doubled, to 1,200 a day, as Downton Abbey, scripted by Julian Fellowes, came to be screened around the world after becoming a hit in the UK in 2010 and, then, in the US. It is now broadcast in 250 countries. The formerly somewhat basic ticketing policy has become a computerized advance booking system, helping to guarantee foreign visitors admission. The accounts of Highclere Enterprises for 2014-15 show current assets have almost trebled to around £1m since 2012. Gareth Neame, the executive producer for the series, said: “I think Downton Abbey secured Highclere’s future.”
Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television, recalls the moment when Highclere was booked. “I thought, 'So what?', because I had never heard of Highclere Castle. One stately home looks much the same as another. How wrong I was. The castle has been one enormous character as well.”
The Downton tourists are part of a growing phenomenon. VisitBritain estimates that nearly 30% of foreign visitors, or nearly nine million people, include castles and historic houses on their itineraries. Almost half of potential visitors to Britain now say they want to indulge in “set jetting ”, visiting places featured in films or on TV. More than a million embark on a tour of historic buildings each year, spending in excess of £1bn. From the biggest emerging tourist markets, 51% of Brazilians, 42% of Russians and Chinese, and 35% of Indian visitors are likely to include a visit to a site of interest in their trips. VisitBritain’s director, Patricia Yates, said: “The links between tourism, films and TV are potent ones.” She added that period dramas have also raised the popularity of regions outside of London.
Neame is now an ambassador for the GREAT Britain campaign, which is backed by government departments and the British Council, using it to promote the UK around the world. Events include special Downton -themed receptions at British embassies.
Neame said: “They approached me because of the reach. A lot of people here think of it as soapy entertainment. In other parts of the world, people revere our actors, our writing and production talent. It is something I am passionate about; I am a really strong believer in soft power. We are not nearly as proud of our achievements as we should be.
“Downton Abbey is iconic for expressing Britishness. Really, it is a fantasy world, based in a particular time in history. It’s the first TV period drama that has really leapt out of the screen and become part of popular culture.”
Lady Carnarvon is still keen to emphasize that the long-term future of Highclere is not necessarily secure. “The bottom line is quite thin,” she said. “The programme has allowed us to spend faster on the buildings, have the follies restored.”
In the pipeline is a Tutankhamun centenary event in 2022, 100 years after the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, together with Howard Carter, discovered the tomb that revolutionized our understanding of Egyptology. Another opportunity to keep Highclere in the public mind is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed the grounds.
“What you do is never sit on your laurels. Every single day, don’t take anything for granted,” said Lady Carnarvon. “For all these great houses, you have to invest in them. And, there has been a deficit since the 1930s. Perhaps, in the past, an estate and house defined and supported the family and their lifestyle but, today, it is quite the reverse: the challenge is how Geordie and I seek to support and look after Highclere.
“From my point of view, I’ve tried to persuade people it is fun and have specific events they can engage with, not just a wander around a dusty house. We have to compete with attractions like the London Dungeon.”


Intermediate
The High Court in London has ruled that three elderly Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion have the right to sue. Now the British government is afraid that thousands of legal claims may follow, from people who were imprisoned and who say they were treated badly during the final days of the British Empire.
The governments lawyers said that too much time had passed since the seven-year insurgency in the 1950s and it was no longer possible to hold a fair trial, but the court rejected these claims. In 2011 the same judge rejected the governments claim that the three claimants should sue the Kenyan government because it had inherited Britains legal responsibilities on independence in 1963.
Human rights activists in Kenya estimate more than 5,000 of the 70,000 people detained by the British colonial authorities are still alive. Many may bring claims against the British government. The ruling may also make it possible for victims of colonial atrocities in other parts of the world to sue.
The Foreign Office said that the ruling had potentially significant legal implications, and said it was planning to appeal. The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is three to six years, a spokesman said. In this case, that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision makers are dead and unable to give their view of what happened.
The historic victory for Paulo Muoka Nzili, 85, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, 84, and Jane Muthoni Mara, 73, was the result of a three-year battle in the courts. Their lawyers said they had suffered unspeakable acts of brutality. In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, Nyingi and Mara, heard the news by mobile phone. They had been sitting silently with their supporters in a garden and reacted with joy when the word came, hugging, dancing and raising their hands to the sky to pray.
Nyingi, who was detained for about nine years, beaten unconscious and still has the scars, said: For me  I just wanted the truth to be out. Even the children of my children should know what happened. What should happen is that people should be compensated so they can begin to forgive the British government. Mara said: Im very happy and my heart is clean. When she was asked what she would tell her four children, she said simply: I will tell them I won.
The judge said in 2011 that there was ample evidence  that there may have been systematic torture of detainees. On Friday he ruled that a fair trial was possible, and highlighted the fact that thousands of secret files from the colonial era appeared in 2011.
The British governments lawyers tried to have the claims rejected but they accepted that all three of the elderly Kenyans were tortured by the colonial authorities. The claimants lawyer said: The British government has admitted that these three Kenyans were brutally tortured but they have been trying to avoid any legal responsibility. There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care.
A number of veterans of the insurgency in Cyprus in the 1950s watched the case closely. One has already met the Mau Mau claimants lawyers. Any Cypriot claimants could rely not only on British documents, but also on the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Those files are kept secret for 40 years, and then opened to public examination. The Red Cross documented hundreds of torture cases in Cyprus.
There may also be claims from Malaysia, where large numbers of people were detained during the 12-year war with communist insurgents and their supporters that began in 1948. Relatives of 24 unarmed rubber plantation workers who were killed by British troops are currently fighting through the British courts for a public inquiry. Many former prisoners of the British in Aden may also have claims against the British government, although Aden is now part of Yemen, and British lawyers may have problems making contact with possible clients there.


Health warnings covering nearly two-thirds of cigarette packs and a ban on menthol cigarettes across the EU have come a step nearer following a vote in the European Parliament. Menthol and other flavours will be banned from 2022, but, in a blow to the UK government, MEPs decided that most electronic cigarettes, increasingly popular as alternatives to tobacco products, need not be regulated in the same way as medicines.
Health officials and the e-cigarette industry in Britain are seeking to clarify what this mean – for instance, whether companies in the fast-expanding market face the same bans on sponsorship and promotion at sports events as tobacco firms.
The Department of Health would not comment on the advertising issue until officials had studied the MEPs’ decisions. But, in a statement, the DH said: “We are very pleased to see the move towards tougher action on tobacco, with Europe-wide controls banning flavoured cigarettes and the introduction of stricter rules on front-of-pack health warnings. “However, we are disappointed with the decision to reject the proposal to regulate nicotine-containing products (NCPs), including e-cigarettes, as medicines. We believe these products need to be regulated as medicines and will continue to make this point during further negotiations.
“Figures show smoking levels in England are at their lowest since records began – 19.5 per cent – but we are determined to further reduce rates of smoking and believe this important step will help.”
The UK e-cigarette industry, which broadly welcomed the parliament’s vote, said it was already in talks with the Advertising Standards Authority, but added that it would not be “sensible, proportionate, reasonable or useful” to ban all advertising.
MEPs decided e-cigarettes should only be regulated as medical products if manufacturers claimed they could prevent tobacco smoking – a decision criticized by the government’s main medicines regulator.
They want to put the products, used by an estimated 1.3 million people in Britain by 2014, on the same legal basis as gums, patches and mouth sprays aimed at helping smokers to quit, but the industry says the expensive process of licensing would help force alternatives to tobacco off the shelves.
The MEPs voted to put health warnings on 65% of each cigarette pack, as opposed to a proposed 75%. At present, the warnings cover at least 30% on the front and 40% on the back. The UK government has delayed a decision on whether to follow Australia by introducing standardized packaging until there is evidence that such measures cut tobacco use.
The MEPs’ votes in the first reading of the draft tobacco directive, which could become law in 2014, will be followed by negotiations with the EU Council of Ministers.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority had already invited manufacturers to cooperate by opting for voluntary regulation in June 2013 in advance of what it still hopes will be compulsory across Europe. “The legislative process is still not complete and there will be further negotiation. The UK continues to believe that medicinal regulation of NCPs is the best way to deliver a benefit to public health,” said a spokesman.
Linda McAvan, Labour MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and spokesperson on tobacco issues for the parliament’s Socialists & Democrats group, said: “We know that it is children, not adults, who start smoking. And, despite the downward trend in most member states of adult smokers, the World Health Organization figures show worrying upward trends in a number of our member states of young smokers.
“We need to stop tobacco companies targeting young people with an array of gimmicky products and we need to make sure that cigarette packs carry effective warnings.”
Martin Callanan, the Conservative MEP for North East England, said: “Forcing e-cigs off the shelves would have been totally crazy. These are products that have helped countless people stop smoking more harmful cigarettes and yet some MEPs wanted to make them harder to manufacture than ordinary tobacco.”
Katherine Devlin, president of ECITA, the e-cigarette industry association, said “the really important” decision by MEPs not to support medicines regulation meant that was now off the table.
British American Tobacco claimed the larger health warnings demanded by MEPs went “well beyond” what was needed to inform consumers of health risks from smoking, while a ban on mentholated cigarettes would increase demand for black-market goods.


Intermediate
What surprised researchers was not how hard people found the challenge but how far they would go to avoid it. The task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
Some found it so unbearable that they took the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks to break the tedium.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button that gave them a painful shock during a 15-minute period of solitude.
Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The difference, scientists suspect, is that men are typically more sensation-seeking than women.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities tries to answer the question of why most of us  nd it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount of time they spent on smartphones or social media.
Timothy Wilson, who led the work, said the  ndings were not necessarily due to the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant need to do something rather than nothing.
In the  rst experiments, students were taken  alone, without phones, books or anything to write with  into a room and told to think. The only rules were that they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. They were told that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned when the time was up. On average, they did not enjoy the experience. They struggled to concentrate. Their minds wandered even with nothing to distract them.
In case the unfamiliar setting reduced the ability to think, the researchers did the experiment again with people at home.
They got similar results. In fact, people found the experience even more miserable and cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
To see if the effect was found only in students, the scientists tested more than 100 other people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers market. They also disliked being left to their thoughts.
But, the most surprising result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of giving themselves a mild electric shock.
They had been asked earlier to say how unpleasant the shocks were, compared to other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.
All the students chosen for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks.
To the researchers surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks and six of 24 women did the same.
The scientists said that the most surprising thing was that being alone with their thoughts was so hard for many people that they gave themselves an electric shock  something the participants had earlier said they would pay to avoid.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably give themselves an electric shock to cheer up a tedious lecture. But, she says we need to know more about the motivation of the shockers in Wilsons study.
Imagine  a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will deliver a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there with their thoughts, she said.
As they sit there, their mind starts to wander and it naturally goes to that shock  was it really that bad?


It is hard to tell exactly where the noise is coming from, but impossible to miss it from anywhere in Damascus: all day and night you can hear the dull thud and boom of artillery, rockets or planes pounding rebel positions – the sound of war getting closer to Syria’s capital. But just over two years into the Syrian crisis – the longest and bloodiest of the Arab uprisings – ignoring the sound of death and destruction nearby has become the new normal for Damascenes.
Over the weekend, men could be seen puffing on water pipes in a palm-shaded park, children playing between the flowerbeds and couples chatting on benches as the unmistakable thunderclap of high explosive could be heard a few miles away – smoke rising between the minarets of a nearby Ottoman-era mosque. No one seemed to notice.
“Actually you do get used to it after a while,” said George, an IT technician from a village on the coast. “But you never know exactly what they are hitting.” That usually becomes clear later from video clips posted by opposition media outlets on YouTube.
The sinister background noise is doubly disturbing because the government tries so hard to preserve a jaunty air of business as usual. “As you can see, everything here is fine but we have to hit the terrorists, these extremists,” an army officer announced. An official, whose route home has come under attack from rebels in Daraya, said: “If I was afraid, I would just shut my door and stay inside. I have to work and I am not afraid. If I don’t defend my country, who will?”
Ordinary citizens, in private conversation, are less defiant. In the centre of town, a shopkeeper complained sadly that his baby daughter cries at the sound of shelling. Zeina, a twenty-something student, fears becoming desensitized to suffering – and perhaps to danger too. “In the beginning, when there started to be explosions, I used to have nightmares,” she reflected. “Now I can sleep through anything.”
And, the risks are multiplying even closer to home. In Sabaa Bahrat Square, in what was supposed to be the safest part of Damascus, a car bomb detonated, leaving a blackened concrete facade, broken windows and mangled metal as well as blast damage to the imposing structure of the Syrian Central Bank next door. Mourning notices for two of the 15 victims – Muhammad al-Sufi and Manal al-Tahan – are stuck to the wall opposite. Scruffy, machine-gun toting militiamen mill around the square, often used for televised pro-regime rallies with civil servants bussed in en masse to chant slogans under giant banners of President Bashar al-Assad.
That bombing was not the worst Damascus has experienced as the situation has deteriorated. In February, 80 people, including schoolchildren, reportedly died near the ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters in Mazraa. The crater is still visible, marked by an enormous patch of fresh asphalt on the main road going north. “I live nearby but luckily I wasn’t there,” recalled Munir, a university lecturer.
Mortar bombs, fired from rebel-held areas now within easy range of the city, have become an ominous novelty. The bombs killed 15 students in a university cafeteria on 28 March. The intended target is thought to have been a government building.
Security measures have intensified since the devastating bombing of the national security crisis cell in July 2012, when four of Assad’s most senior aides were killed. Concrete blast barriers – often painted in the Syrian flag’s black, red and white – now protect official premises, not just the military or defence installations that are obvious targets. The Iranian Embassy in Mezze, its turquoise mosaic front giving an exotic glimpse of Isfahan or Shiraz, looks like a fortress. “The regime did manage to set up a ring of steel round Damascus,” a foreign diplomat said. “But for whatever reason the perimeter is starting to be punctured and that brings home the reality of the war.”
All this means that moving around has become difficult, unpredictable and time-consuming – another aspect of the new normal across an understandably nervous city. Checkpoints on main roads funnel traffic for ID checks and baggage searches with handheld explosive detectors – vital to stop future bombers. Only drivers with an official security clearance can use special fast lanes to avoid the wait.
It is hard, however, to avoid the question on everyone’s mind: will there be a battle for Damascus – the world’s oldest continually inhabited city, as the guidebooks say – like the one that has so damaged Aleppo? Parts of the city already feel like a war zone: its ritziest hotel is eerily deserted though many rooms are being used as offices by international agencies drawn by the deepening crisis – blue helmets and flak jackets piled up on Persian carpets in an ornate reception room, white UN vehicles parked behind the blast barriers outside. The streets empty soon after 9pm.
One view is that the fight for Syria’s capital is coming, but not quite yet – in the summer perhaps, some predict, when the rebels have consolidated their gains in the south. Others argue that outright victory by either side is unlikely and hope for a political solution imposed from abroad. But few here seem to expect things to get any better.


Police and intelligence agencies around the world have, for almost 100 years, used the polygraph, a lie-detector test, to help catch criminals and spies.
But, now, researchers in Britain and the Netherlands have developed a new method, which is correct (in tests) over 70% of the time. Police stations around the world might begin using this new method within ten years. It doesn’t monitor movements in the face, talking too much or waving arms – all signs that someone is lying. The new method monitors movements in the whole body, which can show that the person is feeling guilty.
The polygraph is often used in the US in criminal cases and by the FBI and CIA but is much less popular in Europe. Many people do not believe that it is reliable.
The basic idea behind the new method is that liars fidget more and that an all-body motion suit – the kind used in films to create computer-generated characters – will record this.
The new method is over 70% reliable – the polygraph is only 55% reliable. In some tests, the success rate of the new method was more than 80%.
Ross Anderson, one of the research team, said: “Guilty people fidget more and we can now measure this.”
The polygraph was created in 1921 by policeman John Larson. It records changes in pulse, blood pressure, sweating and breathing to find out if someone is lying.
In movies, the polygraph is always correct but, in 1998, the US Supreme Court decided that there was no agreement that the polygraph was reliable. The US National Academy of Scientists said the same thing in 2003.
The tests Anderson and his colleagues did involved 180 students and employees at Lancaster University. Half of the people were told to tell the truth and half to lie.
The researchers interviewed some of the people about a computer game called Never End that they played for seven minutes. Others lied about playing it.
The second test involved a lost wallet with £5 inside. Some people had to bring the wallet to a lost-and-found box. Others hid it and lied about it.
The new body-suit method was correct 82.2% of the time. Researchers monitored how much the people moved their arms and legs, to decide if they were telling the truth or lying.
All-body suits are expensive – they cost about £30,000 – and they can be uncomfortable, so Anderson and his colleagues are now looking at cheaper alternatives. These include using motion-sensing technology from computer games, such as the Kinect devices developed by Microsoft for the Xbox console.


1 Passing clouds
One of the pleasures of flying is seeing clouds close up. Even though they seem insubstantial they carry a considerable weight of water – around 500 tonnes in a small cumulus cloud. And water is denser than air. So why don’t clouds fall out of the sky like rain? They do. But the droplets take a long time to sink. An average cloud would take a year to fall one metre.
2 On cloud nine
Most of us are happy to label clouds “fluffy ones” or “nasty black ones ”, but meteorologists identify more than 50 cloud types based on shape and altitude. These fit into categories given numbers from one to nine. Cloud nine is the vast, towering cumulonimbus, so to be “on cloud nine” implies being on top of the world.
3 Around the rainbow
There’s no better place to see a rainbow than from a plane. Rainbows are produced when sunlight hits raindrops. We see a bow because the Earth gets in the way, but, from a plane, a rainbow is a complete circle. When passing over clouds, the plane’s shadow appears neatly in the centre of the effect.
4 Mr blue sky
Sunlight is white, containing all the colours of the spectrum but, as it passes through air, some of the light is scattered when it interacts with the gas molecules. Blue light scatters more than the lower-energy colours, so the blue appears to come from the sky.
5 There’s life out there
Apart from clouds and other planes, we don’t expect to see much directly outside a flying aircraft’s window, but the air is seething with bacterial life – as many as 1,800 different types of bacteria have been detected over cities and they can reach twice the cruising height of a plane.
6 Turbulence terror
Even the most experienced flyer can be turned green by turbulence. The outcome can be anything from repeated bumping to sudden, dramatic plunges. The good news for nervous flyers is that no modern airliner has ever been brought down by turbulence. People have been injured and occasionally killed when they are not strapped in, or get struck by poorly secured luggage – but the plane is not going to be knocked out of the sky.
7 In-flight radiation
When body scanners were introduced at airports there were radiation scares but the level produced is the same as passengers receive in one minute of flight. The Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, natural radiation from space that has more impact at altitude.
8 You can’t cure jet lag
The world is divided into time zones. The result is that long-haul travel results in a difference between local time and your body’s time, causing jet lag. However, its effects can be minimized by keeping food bland for 24 hours before travel, drinking plenty of fluids and living on your destination time from the moment you reach the aircraft.
9 Supersonic 747s
Many of us have travelled faster than sound. There are a number of jet streams in the upper atmosphere, notably on the journey from the US to Europe, where a temperature inversion causes a corridor of air to move as fast as 250mph. If an airliner with an airspeed of 550mph enters a jet stream, the result can be to fly at 800mph, above sound’s 740mph.
10 Flying through time
Time zones provide an artificial journey through time – but special relativity means that a flight involves actual time travel. It’s so minimal, though, that crossing the Atlantic weekly for 40 years would only move you 1/1,000th of a second into the future.
11 Terrible tea
Don’t blame the cabin attendant if your tea isn’t great. Water should be just under 100°C when it is poured on to tea leaves – but that isn’t possible on a plane. It’s impossible to get water beyond 90°C during flight – so choose coffee.
12 I can’t hear my food
Airline food has a reputation for being bland and tasteless. Some of the problem may not be poor catering, though. A plane is a noisy environment and there is evidence that food loses some of its savour when we are exposed to loud noises.
13 Needle in a haystack
With modern technology, it seems strange that Malaysian flight MH370 could disappear without a trace – yet, finding a missing aircraft is a needle- in-a-haystack problem. The plane knows its location, both from GPS and inertial tracking, but this information is not relayed elsewhere in real time. That would be perfectly possible. Ocean- going ships have had tracking since the 1980s – the limitation is not technology but a lack of legislation requiring it.
14 Volcanic fallout
Air travel can be cancelled by volcanic activity. Glass-like ash particles melt in the heat of the engine, then solidify on the rotors. A clear-skies policy in an ash cloud may be inconvenient – but the risks of ignoring the ash are clear.
15 The wing myth
For many years, we taught the wrong explanation for the way wings keep planes in the air. In fact, almost all a plane’s lift comes from Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The wing is shaped to push air downwards. As the air is pushed down, the wing gets an equal and opposite push upwards, lifting the plane.
16 Forget electric planes
When we see ultra-light, experimental, electric planes, it’s easy to assume there will soon be clean, green, electric airliners, but it won’t happen any time soon. Aircraft fuel packs in a remarkable amount of energy. Batteries are much less efficient. To provide the same energy as a tonne of fuel would take 100 tonnes of batteries – and a 747 uses 150 to 200 tonnes of fuel. Unless battery technology is made vastly more efficient, electric airliners won’t get off the ground.
17 Beware the vortex
Pilots often wait a long time to get clearance. This is to allow the air to settle after a previous take-off, as a plane’s wingtips generate vortices in the air, which can take two or three minutes to disperse. If the following aircraft set off immediately, the rapidly moving air would make the plane difficult to handle. The delay gives the air time to recover from the miniature whirlwinds caused by the preceding plane.
18 The doors aren’t locked
In practice, the doors on a plane don’t need to be locked. If you watch an aircraft door being opened, it swings in an unusual way. It first has to be opened inwards before manoeuvring it out of the way. Once the plane has taken off, a significant pressure difference soon builds up between the inside of the plane and the outside. This differential forces the door into place. To open it, you would have to pull against the air pressure, well beyond the capabilities of human muscles.


When the Taliban sent a gunman to shoot Malala Yousafzai in October 2012 as she rode home on a bus after school, they made clear their intention: to silence the teenager and kill off her campaign for girls’ education.
Nine months and countless surgical operations later, she stood up at the United Nations on her 16th birthday on Friday to deliver a defiant riposte. “They thought that the bullet would silence us. But they failed,” she said.
As 16th birthdays go, it was among the more unusual. Instead of blowing out candles on a cake, Malala sat in one of the main council chambers at the United Nations in the central seat usually reserved for world leaders.
She listened quietly as Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, described her as “our hero, our champion”; and as the former British prime minister and now UN education envoy, Gordon Brown, uttered what he called “the words the Taliban never wanted her to hear: happy 16th birthday, Malala ”.
The event, dubbed Malala Day, was the culmination of an extraordinary four years for the girl from Mingora, in the troubled Swat valley of Pakistan. She was thrust into the public glare after she wrote a blog for the BBC Urdu service describing her experiences struggling to get an education under the rising power of Taliban militants.
By 11, she was showing exceptional determination, calling personally on the US special representative to Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to use his influence to combat the Taliban’s drive against education for girls. By 14, she was on the radar of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who put her forward for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and, by 15, she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee in history.
But such dizzying global attention came at a price. Death threats followed her growing recognition, and, on 9 October 2012, following a meeting of Pakistani Taliban leaders, the gunman was dispatched to remove what they called the “symbol of infidels and obscenity ”.
Multiple operations in Pakistan and the UK followed the attack on the bus, including the fitting of a titanium plate on her left forehead and a cochlear implant to restore her hearing. She now lives with her family in Birmingham and does what the Taliban tried to stop her doing: goes to school every day. “I am not against anyone,” she said in the UN chamber, having taken this day out from the classroom. “Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group.”
Malala responded to the violence of the Taliban with her own countervailing force: words against bullets. “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him.”
She spoke confidently, with only an injured eye and a slightly drooping left side of her face to hint at such fresh traumas. There was one other unstated allusion to the horror of her past: she wore a white shawl belonging to a woman who was also targeted by extremists but who, unlike Malala, did not survive to tell the tale: Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan.
“The extremists are afraid of books and pens,” the teenager continued. “The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them.”
She cited the attack in June on a hospital in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan, and killings of female teachers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “That is why they are blasting schools every day – because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society.”
And she gave her own opposing interpretation of Islam to the Taliban’s. “They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to hell just because of going to school. The terrorists are misusing the name of Islam and Pashtun society for their own personal benefits. Islam is a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood. Islam says that it is not only each child’s right to get education, rather it is their duty and responsibility.”
Such ability to articulate what normally remains unarticulated – to give voice to young people normally silenced – has generated its own response. The “Stand with Malala” petition, calling for education for the 57 million children around the world who do not go to school, has attracted more than four million signatures – more than a million having been added shortly after Malala’s speech.
At the start of her speech, Malala said: “I don’t know where to begin my speech. I don’t know what people would be expecting me to say.” She need not have worried.


It was not so much how hard people found the challenge but how far they would go to avoid it that left researchers gobsmacked. The task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
So unbearable did some find it that they took up the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks in an attempt to break the tedium.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button to deliver a painful jolt during a 15-minute spell of solitude.
Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The difference, scientists suspect, is that men tend to be more sensation-seeking than women.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities is one of a surprising few to tackle the question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount of time they spent using smartphones or social media.
Timothy Wilson, who led the work, said the findings were not necessarily a reflection of the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant urge to do something rather than nothing.
The first run of experiments began with students being ushered – alone, without phones, books or anything to write with – into an unadorned room and told to think. The only rules were they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. They were informed – specifically or vaguely – that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned when the time was up. On average, they did not enjoy the experience. They struggled to concentrate. Their minds wandered even with nothing to distract them. Even giving them time to think about what to think about did not help.
In case the unfamiliar setting hampered the ability to think, the researchers ran the experiment again with people at home.
They got much the same results, only people found the experience even more miserable and cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
To see if the effect was found only in students, the scientists recruited more than 100 people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers’ market. They, too, disliked being left to their thoughts.
But, the most staggering result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of administering a mild electric shock.
They had been asked earlier to rate how unpleasant the shocks were, alongside other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.
All the students picked for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks after receiving a demonstration.
To the researchers’ surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks, as did six of 24 women.
“What is striking is that simply being alone with their thoughts was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid,” the scientists write in Science
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably zap themselves to cheer up a tedious lecture. But, she says more needs to be known about the motivation of the shockers in Wilson’s study.
“Imagine the setup – a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will deliver a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there and entertain themselves with their thoughts,” she said.
“As they sit there, strapped to this machine, their mind starts to wander and it naturally goes to that shock – was it really that bad?
“What are the experimenters really interested in? Perhaps this is a case where curiosity killed the cat.”


Intermediate
The day began with more police dawn raids on the Baur Au Lac hotel in Zurich and ended with 16 football officials being charged with corruption in the US, including five current or former members of FIFAs executive committee. They included the former Brazilian federation chief Ricardo Teixeira and his successor, Marco Polo Del Nero, who 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 gave details of a series of kickback schemes in a new 240-page indictment. Twentyseven defendants have now been charged by the US, including former FIFA executive committee members. The betrayal of trust here is outrageous, the US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, said. The scale of corruption is completely unacceptable.
Swiss police arrested the president of the South American football confederation, the Paraguayan Juan ngel 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 led to the downfall of Sepp Blatter. Webbs predecessor, the controversial Jack Warner, was also arrested in May.
The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said of the latest arrests: They are 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.
Eleven current and former members of FIFAs executive committee have now been charged in the investigation, which alleges $200m in bribes, mainly as kickbacks from TV and marketing contracts but also FIFAs development programmes.
The message from this announcement should be clear to every 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 FIFA ex-president Joo Havelange, was charged alongside Del Nero and his predecessor Jos Maria Marin, who was charged in May.
Fourteen men had been charged in May 2015. Days later, Blatter won a fifth term as president but then agreed to step down as the crisis grew. He was then provisionally suspended together with the UEFA President, Michel Platini, over an alleged 1.3m 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.
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; the former Peruvian football federation president, Manuel Burga; and Bolivias 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 in 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 insult 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 said 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 predecessor when he claimed the current crisis was the fault of a few bad 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.


The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon is going to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man. He was born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564 and died there 400 years ago.
Stratford was important to Shakespeare all his life, says Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “People often think Shakespeare left Stratford and his family, went to London to earn his fortune and only came back to die,” he said. “But Stratford is where he bought land and houses, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.” The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be celebrated across Britain and the world. There will be performances of Macbeth in Singapore and Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeare’s Globe is completing the first world tour in the history of theatre. During the tour, it has taken Hamlet to every country except North Korea. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to show each of Shakespeare’s plays.
The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and almost every other theatre production company in the country will celebrate the anniversary. There will be traditional and experimental performances of the plays. There will also be hundreds of lectures, international conferences, films, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
Shakespeare was famous in his own lifetime but there is little documentary evidence about Shakespeare’s life and times. His plays survived because his friends and actors collected together every bit of every play they could find and made the First Folio, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
The actor Mark Rylance has called the First Folio his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those that belong to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious documents will be shown in an exhibition in London.
The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, documents from the time when Shakespeare and other actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and details of payments for performances for James I and Queen Anne. The director of the Globe Theatre recently said as a joke that Shakespeare was a true London man. But people in Stratford believe that the town made and educated Shakespeare. They are rebuilding his old school room and will open it as a visitor attraction. Shakespeare bought New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died in 1616 on 23 April, the same day as his birth. “You don’t buy a house like New Place and not live there,” Paul Edmondson said. “The general public and many academics have underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare. ”
Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there. He says the late plays were planned in his library and probably written there.
Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago. Another house was built in the same place. That house was destroyed in 1759 by a bad- tempered priest, Francis Gastrell, in an argument about taxes. He also cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer sat and worked, because he didn’t like all the tourists looking into his garden.
The house has never been rebuilt but they have found Shakespeare’s kitchen in the cellars. The area where the house was will be on display for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored. “Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “there would have been no Shakespeare. ”


Intermediate
Some people call it the hotel of mum and dad. A fifth of young adults are staying in the family home until they are at least 26 and the same proportion are not paying a penny towards their keep. A recent survey found that the proportion of adults living at home varied around the country, from just under 9% in the East Midlands to more than double that in London, where house prices and rents are highest. While many around the country contributed financially, it found that 20% were paying nothing at all.
Young adults are squeezed by low wages and high rents, while those who want to buy a property are finding the monthly cost of renting is preventing them from saving enough to get on the housing ladder. Recent research showed half of tenants were unable to save a penny towards a deposit, while a quarter could only save 100 or less each month. Mortgages are cheaper than ever before thanks to record low interest rates but the best deals are still only given to people with large deposits.
As a result of this, young adults are increasingly returning to the family home to save money and parents who cannot afford to offer their children a large sum of money seem happy to help. The survey found that 28% of adults were living at home because they were trying to save for a deposit. However, it also found that 30% were not saving any money.
Michael Day, 30, who lives with his parents in Bristol, says he has been caught between paying high rents and saving for a mortgage deposit. Rents for a one-bedroom home in the city are between 500 and 800 a month, while buying a similar property would cost about 130,000. I dont really want to move out to rent as its more than a mortgage but you need such a big deposit to get a mortgage so its a vicious circle.
He does not want to share with strangers so his options are limited. At home, he pays a nominal rent to cover bills and is able to keep the rest of his earnings from his job. He admits that, instead of saving, he spends his spare money on golf and holidays. You need so much money that I will have to save for the foreseeable future, he said. Because its been so difficult, Ive been going on holiday and enjoying it.
Sue Green, of Saga, a business that sells insurance to people over 50, said the majority of parents may not have planned to have their children living with them in their 20s or 30s. Most will be more than happy to have them in the family home rent-free because it might help their kids get on the property ladder sooner, she said. Children who dont pay rent may contribute in other ways like buying groceries, family takeaways or doing odd jobs around the home.
Angus Hanton, of the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, said older generations were the architects of the housing crisis and children should not be blamed for staying at home. The under-30s have suffered a reduction in average incomes of about 20% since the 2008 downturn. Rents and car insurance have never been so high and mortgage lending rules are now stricter for the young but not for older buy-to-let investors, who squeeze out the young, he said. Many jobs on offer  zero-hour and short-term contracts  are turning younger workers into second-class citizens. Rather than blaming the young, we should help them so they can afford to build lives of their own.
Jenna Gavin, 29, lives in Southport, Merseyside, in the family home where she grew up. She works as a medical receptionist nearby so she wants to stay in the area. But renting a one-bedroom flat would cost more than 420 a month not including bills, which would use a lot of her earnings. I dont want to rent  I dont want to spend all that money and have nothing at the end, she said. Ive looked at buying and seen mortgage advisers but I just cant borrow enough to get on the property ladder.
Gavin is trying to save for a deposit. Its difficult to save enough money  even a 5% deposit is such a lot of money and I would like to have a bigger deposit, she said. Her parents are happy not to charge her rent. They want me to try to save up and I contribute in other ways  I buy food and I do things around the house.
Gavin gets on with her parents and has her own space in a room that she moved into when she was 14 but she said she had always imagined she would have her own place by the time she was 30. I dont see that happening, as its next year. But, hopefully, in a couple of years, Ill move out.


Glastonbury Festival wants to fight a war against plastic water bottles. They plan to become the world’s most environmentally friendly outdoor music event.
Each year, disposable bottles leave the Somerset festival site covered in plastic. About one million plastic bottles are used during the festival.
The festival organizers will give stainless-steel reusable bottles to all band members. Thousands more bottles will go on sale to festival-goers to stop them using plastic bottles. Organizers have asked the 140,000 festival-goers to bring reusable bottles that they can fill at 400 drinking water taps across the site.
Lucy Smith, Glastonbury’s green issues organizer, said: “We have amazing water quality in the UK but everyone drinks bottled water.”
There is currently 150 million tonnes of plastic rubbish around the planet and oceans, poisoning ecosystems and killing wildlife.
The festival organizers hope to make Glastonbury the world’s greenest music festival. They want to be like America’s Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, where people have to take away everything that they take to the festival.
Organizers have also asked Glastonbury festival-goers to travel to the site on public transport or to share a car with friends. “We want to be as environmentally friendly as we can,” said Smith.
Plastic water bottles can take hundreds or even thousands of years to completely biodegrade. Millions of barrels of oil are used to make plastic bottles and transporting mineral water across the planet produces even more carbon emissions.
Around 13 billion plastic water bottles are sold in the UK every year, but only one in five is recycled.
Smith said that festival-goers should not buy bottled water; they should use the water on tap, which comes from big underground reservoirs. The charity WaterAid will also set up water kiosks around the site. They will sell reusable bottles and cups and offer free refills.
Organizers say that almost half of all the rubbish left at the site was recycled in 2013. They also say that there will be 15,000 bins for recycling across the festival site in 2014.