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My mother, Jannèt, was 90 years old when she ended her life by means of euthanasia. For years she had been suffering from numerous serious and painful conditions that made her life miserable. She always worried about her health and was terrified of what the future undeniably held in store for her: more pain, more dependence on others, more suffering, more desperation.

On 20 June 2022 at 2pm she was visited by a doctor and a nurse. They had a last conversation with her, during which the doctor asked her if euthanasia was still what she wanted. My mother said yes. She had already decided that she would take the drink herself instead of being injected. She didn't want to mentally burden the doctor more than necessary.

I was impressed by my mother's courage in the face of death. She was completely calm, almost cheerful. Before the procedure started, she spoke briefly to us, her three daughters. She told us how it was important to take care of the Earth wisely, to recycle as much as possible and to look after one another. She then drank the small cup in one gulp. She fell asleep very quickly and 15 minutes later the doctor told us her heart had stopped beating. A long and tormented life had come to an end.

The country in which I live, the Netherlands, was the first in the world to legalise euthanasia in specific cases. That was in 2001. Assisted dying has become generally accepted in our country. We talk about it openly and we consider the possibility when situations call for it. We are grateful that this option exists, because it prevents so much pointless suffering. But we never talk about it lightly. Assisted dying has always remained something huge, something you don't resort to lightheartedly.

'I was impressed by my mother's courage in the face of death.' Renate van der Zee's mother Jannèt

As a matter of fact, you can't. In the Netherlands it will always remain a criminal offence to end a life. Exceptions are made only when a whole range of requirements are met. First of all, the patient must ask for it themselves and must therefore be mentally capable of asking for it. In addition, there are all kinds of due care requirements. For example, the doctor must be convinced that the request for assisted dying is voluntary and that the patient has carefully thought it through. The doctor must also be convinced that the patient's suffering is hopeless and unbearable. That they can no longer heal, that it is not possible to alleviate their suffering and that there is no reasonable other solution. At least one other independent doctor must be consulted. That independent doctor will discuss the situation with the patient and form his or her own opinion about the situation.

Assisted dying is allowed only if a person is suffering owing to a medical cause, not if someone is simply tired of life or feels that their life is complete. My mother didn't feel that her life was complete. There were still things that made her happy. She loved flowers and plants; she loved politics; she followed the news. But because of her deafness, incontinence and many other conditions she became socially isolated. Visits from friends became too much for her, and at a certain point even phone calls became impossible.

Walking became very difficult, and she grew afraid to go outside. She always loved to wander through a neighbourhood park, especially in springtime, when the bluebells and lilies of the valley bloomed abundantly. But she was no longer able to go there, not even in a wheelchair. She always enjoyed reading and watching nature programmes, but those things too became increasingly difficult. Her numerous ailments and her lack of mental resilience to deal with them made a normal daily existence impossible. And there was no prospect of improvement.

My mother's euthanasia was a long process. Five years before her death, she told her GP that assisted dying was what she wanted if her life became unbearable. Over the years, my older sister discussed this wish with her during long conversations. She also took charge of all the conversations that were necessary before permission was finally given.

My mother wanted to celebrate her 90th birthday before she took leave of life. Her last birthday fell on Easter, which she regarded as meaningful. But what kind of birthday gift can you give to someone who will soon be gone? My older sister came up with the idea of making a book in which all her loved ones wrote down what she meant to them, or reminisced. She was very happy with that.

We sat close to her when she died. My younger sister took my mother's hand and she held it tightly. The older sibling said in a soft voice, "You can close your eyes now, Mum." That's what my mother did. I sat there and tried not to cry. It's not easy to witness your mother drinking a deadly potion and dying after 15 minutes.

The next day was the first day of summer. The sun was shining, the weather was beautiful. I woke up with the pain that my mother was gone. But also with a feeling of relief and deep gratitude that, after such an incredibly difficult life, she had been granted a painless and dignified death. I knew we had given her a great gift.

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I understand why people are wary about assisted dying, but it gave my mother a dignified end | Renate van der Zee

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We don't take euthanasia lightly; we're just grateful to have the option, says Dutch writer and journalist Renate van der Zee

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Germany's cannabis reforms were approved this week, overcoming the final legislative hurdle when the Bundesrat, Germany's upper house, voted through the bill that passed with a huge majority in the Bundestag (lower house) last month. Germany is a significant addition to the growing list of countries defecting from the drug war consensus that had held for more than half a century. More than half a billion people now live in jurisdictions establishing legal adult access to cannabis for recreational use.

When Germany's new law comes into force on 1 April, it will decriminalise possession of up to 25g of cannabis for personal use (and up to 50g in the home), allow requests to remove criminal records for past possession offences, legalise home growing of up to three cannabis plants for personal use, and establish a regulatory framework for not-for-profit associations within which cannabis can be grown and supplied to members.

When the cannabis reforms were initially announced by Germany's coalition government in 2021, the plan was for a regulated commercial market more like Canada's, established in 2018. A study has suggested that such a commercial market could create 27,000 jobs in Germany, and be worth €4.7bn annually in tax revenue and criminal justice savings. But these aspirations had to be reined in when it became clear that the commercial market originally envisaged would probably breach legal obligations under the UN drug conventions, as well as EU law.

Instead, Germany has opted for a form of "legalisation-lite" that provides channels for legal access via home growing or not-for-profit associations while, it hopes, avoiding the minefield of international law that a commercial market would have led to. A similar retrenchment has occurred with reforms in the Czech Republic and Luxembourg. All three countries have moderated their plans and essentially copied Malta, Europe's unlikely cannabis reform pioneer, whose groundbreaking non-commercial home-grow and cannabis association model passed in 2021, becoming the blueprint for the new wave of EU reforms.

People in Berlin's Hemp Museum celebrate the Bundesrat's vote for cannabis decriminalisation on 22 March 2024. Photograph: Filip Singer/EPA

But while Malta has made clear that its not-for-profit model is a deliberate harm-reduction strategy to avoid risks of "big alcohol"-style over-commercialisation and corporate monopolies, Germany and other EU countries have unambiguously positioned their new models as a transitional step to a future of commercial retail, albeit more responsibly regulated. Germany has already announced that it will proceed with phase two of its cannabis plan, in the form of a time-limited retail "pilot study" in a number of cities. Like similar "experiments" under way in the Netherlands and Switzerland, it hopes to finesse the constraints of international law under the banner of "scientific research".

But as the debate about the merits of different cannabis policy models plays out in a globe-spanning natural experiment, from 24 US states, Canada and Uruguay to South Africa, Mexico and parts of Australia, Germany's move feels particularly consequential. More than 100 times the population of Malta or Luxembourg, and sitting at the heart of the European establishment, Germany has the economic and political influence to significantly reorient laws and thinking about drug policy in the EU and the wider international stage.

This influence is inevitably being felt in the UK as well. As longstanding arguments for reform move from theory into reality in respected neighbour states, they become harder to ignore and increasingly permeate the national consciousness. Why continue to waste billions on failed enforcement when we could generate billions in tax revenue like Colorado? Why drive 100% of cannabis users towards organised crime groups and street dealers, when about 70% of cannabis users in Canada buy their cannabis from licensed stores? Why should people have to buy dodgy street cannabis of unknown potency, when they can join a legal association and buy quality controlled products with mandated information on contents and risks, as in Malta or Germany? Why maintain policies that disproportionately criminalise Black people and overload our creaking criminal justice system, when we could redirect enforcement spending and tax revenue into community programmes benefiting those most affected by the "war on drugs", as they do in New Jersey or Massachusetts?

Endorsement of responsible cannabis regulation is increasingly normalised and mainstream. It is no longer a radical position but a pragmatic one, with real-world examples to prove it. And while Labour and the Tories, with an election looming, lack the courage to move beyond tired "tough on drugs" posturing, public backing for legalisation continues its inexorable rise, with polling now indicating majority support. As support for a reform platform becomes a political asset rather than a political liability, positions long held in private by those in power will increasingly emerge in public.

With London's support for cannabis legalisation topping 60%, for example, its mayor, Sadiq Khan, has started openly exploring reforms. In the absence of principled political leadership from the government, change may boil down to this cold political calculus. We are fast approaching the tipping point and Germany's reforms can only add to the momentum.

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With Germany legalising cannabis, Europe is reaching a tipping point. Britain, take note | Steve Rolles

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Regulating cannabis use is no longer radical but an increasingly normalised strategy, says drug policy analyst Steve Rolles

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Worker´s rights - Deliveroo and Gig Economy

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Worker´s rights - Deliveroo and Gig Economy

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Be warned: Deliveroo’s victory over its riders shows just how vulnerable British workers are | Callum Cant

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Why is the UK establishment so much more hostile to gig economy rights than other parts of Europe, asks the sociologist and author Callum Cant

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The idea of a guaranteed income for all has been floating around for centuries, its popularity ebbing and flowing with the passing tide of current events. While it is still considered by many to be a radical concept, proponents of a universal basic income (UBI) no longer see it only as a solution to poverty but as the answer to some of the biggest threats faced by modern workers: wage inequality, job insecurity - and the looming possibility of AI-induced job losses.

Elon Musk, at the recent Bletchley Park summit, said he believed "no job is needed" due to the development of AI, and that a job can be for "personal satisfaction". Economist and political theorist Karl Widerquist, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University-Qatar, sees it differently.

"Even if AI takes your job away, you don't necessarily just become unemployed for the rest of your life," he says. "What happens is you go down in the labour market, you start crowding the lower-income professions."

Widerquist believes, at least in the short term, that the growth of AI will push white-collar workers into the gig economy, and into other forms of poorly paid, insecure work. Such a shift in the workforce would, he fears, drive down wages and conditions, while increasing inequality.

Why not give people who have good alternatives the opportunity to reduce work, or not work at all?

Loek Groot, economist

A UBI policy in response to AI and automation would address the failure of employers to distribute the spoils of economic growth - propelled, at least in part, by automation - fairly among workers, says Widerquist.

Some go further still, pointing to UBI as a dividend due to workers for their role in the development and dissemination of knowledge used to train AI models such as ChatGPT. "Why," asks Scott Santens, editor of website Basic Income Today, "should only one or two companies get rich off of the capital, the human work, that we all created?"

If, in the future, workers do find themselves made redundant by automation and unable to secure new positions, UBI offers a similarly promising option, says Loek Groot, associate professor of economics of the public sector at Utrecht University.

In a study conducted by Groot and fellow researchers in the Netherlands between 2017 and 2019, unemployed individuals who were previously in receipt of social assistance were given a basic income. The study indicated increased participation in the labour market. This was not solely due to the financial support provided by UBI, but to the removal of conditions - and sanctions for failing to fulfil said conditions - traditionally imposed on job seekers, says Groot.

Specifically, participants who were exempt from obligations to find and accept work were more likely to secure a permanent contract - in contrast with the type of insecure work highlighted by Widerquist.

While UBI experiments do not generally show that the policy encourages workers to entirely leave the labour market, higher payments have led to some people reducing their working hours. This, Groot says, should not be considered a bad thing. "Why try to push everyone into paid work, if you can objectively see that there are not enough jobs around?" he asks. "Why not give people who have good alternatives the opportunity to reduce work, or not work at all, and cash in the basic income?"

"Good alternatives" include the opportunity to upskill or retrain. It's also possible that the policy could redefine what society has historically considered work. Caregivers - predominantly women - could be remunerated for traditionally unpaid labour, such as raising children or caring for elderly relatives.

Grace, a retired 65-year-old, takes care of her cow in Bondo region, western Kenya. Grace receives 75 cents (62p) a day as part of a large-scale universal basic income study by American NGO GiveDirectly. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images

In Kenya, the world's largest UBI scheme has been providing almost 5,000 people with a payment of about 75 cents (62p) a day since 2017. Organised by GiveDirectly and funded by donations, the experiment will run for 12 years. Tavneet Suri, a member of GiveDirectly's research team and professor of applied economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says she has so far seen some surprising results.

"We do see people leaving low wage jobs," she says. "They are going and starting businesses, and the businesses are doing great because there's money around." This unexpected wave of entrepreneurship has also had a positive impact on those taking jobs that pay wages, as a shrinking of the available workforce has led to an increase in salaries.

"In a developing country, if we see a 20% increase in businesses, that's people who are going to pay taxes," says Suri. "Because farmers [who make up a high percentage of Kenya's workforce] are not taxed in general, suddenly you have a bunch of people showing up in tax brackets, and they're buying stuff. And one of the biggest pieces of revenue for the government is actually sales tax."

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Proposals on how to implement a robot tax remain nebulous. The distinction between a machine and a robot is still not clear

Rosanna Merola, International Labour Organization

Suri and her colleagues also report that workers have not left the labour market, and that local economies have been boosted by increased buying power. Despite this, Suri is cautious. In a country where poverty remains far more pressing for workers than automation, she says a government-backed UBI programme must be shown to be truly beneficial before being seriously considered.

For countries where automation is a greater concern, Rosanna Merola, a macroeconomist and researcher at the International Labour Organization, has considered a very different approach: a robot tax. In a 2022 research paper, Merola described the possibility of taxing companies that replace workers with robots in order to fund a UBI as "philosophically appealing", if currently unrealistic.

"At this stage, proposals on how to implement a robot tax in practice remain very nebulous," she says. "Legislators are likely to deal with the complexity of defining what constitutes a 'robot' and how to tax it. The distinction between a machine and a robot or between a computer program and AI is still not clear."

Despite this, Merola does believe that the concept of a robot tax could be extended to apply to AI in more recognisable forms - large language models such as ChatGPT, for example. She suggests that companies that use AI to automate tasks, make decisions or perform services might be subject to taxes on the profits or revenue generated through AI-driven processes. Or, governments might tax the collection, processing or sale of data on which AI heavily relies, with a portion of this revenue used to mitigate the technology's impact on displaced workers.

Humanity painted out of the picture by robots. Is it time for a 'robot tax'? Illustration: Andrea Ucini/The Guardian

Joe Chrisp, a researcher at the University of Bath's Universal Income Beacon, feels that conversations surrounding automation in work can sometimes resemble a "counsel of despair". Crisp does believe that a UBI could deliver positive outcomes for workers, but describes himself as a "friendly sceptic".

While some argue that AI could drive workers into the gig economy, and that a UBI could help to lift them out, Chrisp says that such a policy risks "facilitating the proliferation of these types of jobs, rather than incentivising people to find more stable work".

And, on the topic of a possible UBI model, he is once again sceptical, describing even the most modest proposals as likely to require large increases in taxation, and therefore as "difficult to sell".

Research from thinktank Autonomy shows a modest UBI scheme would probably require higher contributions from the most well-off, but would not result in a net increase to taxation. "That model is effectively cost neutral, and would halve child poverty and pensioner poverty," says Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy. "But I think it wouldn't be high enough to achieve some of the more expensive cultural changes."

Chrisp agrees that in the medium term, there must be a strategy to help workers to secure new roles in a changing economy. And, in the shorter term, a safety net for those same workers must be found. However, he is not convinced that a single policy could provide the solution to an issue as complex as the impact of AI on work.

"Personally, that vision of a UBI providing lots of people who can't find any job in the labour market with a secure income indefinitely, I find that quite depressing," he says. "Capitalist economies are very good at continuing to generate things that people can do to earn a wage, it's just a question of whether those are good jobs or not - and that we can't really know."

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AI is coming for our jobs! Could universal basic income be the solution?

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Artificial intelligence will bring huge changes to the world of work - and dangers for society. Some think they can be solved by just handing everyone money. Is there a catch?

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Look at the cover letter and do the exercises to improve your writing skills.

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Your Europass Library is your free online space, linked to your Europass profile, where you can store files related to your career and studies. You can upload and share your Europass CVs, Cover Letters, Digital credentials, awards, certificates, diplomas, and any other relevant documents. Never store any documents that contain sensitive personal information (example: passwords or bank account details) in your Europass library

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Your Europass Library is your free online space, linked to your Europass profile, where you can store files related to your career and studies. You can upload and share your Europass CVs, Cover Letters, Digital credentials, awards, certificates, diplomas, and any other relevant documents.

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The No-Jet Set: They’ve Given Up Flying to Save the Planet

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With airplanes producing a large amount of climate-warming emissions, a growing number of travelers are signing pledges to keep their journeys on the ground.

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t has taken Roger Tyers four days to reach Moscow by train from Kiev. His destination is Beijing: a trip that will take 14 days, with a couple of overnight stops along the way. Tyers, an environmental sociologist at the University of Southampton, is on his way to China to research attitudes to the environment, the climate emergency and personal responsibility. "Given that, I thought it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to fly," he says over Skype from his hostel room.

It has been months in the planning - he had to convince his bosses to give him a month off to travel to and from China. Has it been a pain? "It definitely has. It's a matter of getting your train schedule in line with your visa requirements. I didn't realise I needed a visa to travel through Mongolia, even though I'm not stopping there. There have been moments when I've been close to giving up and either cancelling the whole trip or just booking a flight." But he is glad he has stuck with it, he says. "I have to prove it is possible."

The no-fly movement is a small but growing community of people who are drastically reducing the number of flights they take, or giving up air travel altogether. Many campaigners say they feel flying is about to receive the same attention as shunning plastic or eating less meat because of its 2% contribution to global carbon emissions, predicted to grow to as much as 16% by 2050. In Sweden, where the movement has taken off, a new term has emerged: flygskam, meaning "flight shame". Siân Berry, the co-leader of the Green party, has called on people to take no more than one flight a year and suggested a tax should be imposed on further journeys. Berry hasn't flown since 2005.

The climate activist Greta Thunberg hasn't flown since 2015; she did her European tour last month by train. In January, she attended the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, travelling 32 hours each way by rail, while a record number of private jets - about 1,500 - brought the rich and powerful attendees.

'There is nowhere I want to go that I can't get to by bike, train or boat' ... Anna Hughes, who run a no-flying campaign in the UK. Photograph: Mat Smith

It is becoming harder to defend alleged hypocrisy, however well-meaning. The actor Emma Thompson was criticised for flying from Los Angeles to support the Extinction Rebellion protest in London, not only by the usual naysayers eager to point out double standards, but also by environmental campaigners. "She could just as easily have paid for a billboard poster in Piccadilly and got her message across there," said Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist who hasn't flown since 2004, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. The issue has been significant among environmental scientists for years; the Flying Less campaign, aimed at academia, has been running since 2015.

Paul Chatterton, a professor of urban futures at the University of Leeds, also hasn't flown since 2004. "I think every academic has to justify why they are flying to that particular 'must-go' conference. If we have something really important to say, say it in a different way." He travels to European conferences by train. "One of the privileges of being a middle-income professional - and this is a direct plea to other middle-income professionals - is that you can negotiate with your boss and you have a bit more money to get the train. I'm not talking about people who can't afford to do that, because I know trains are more expensive."

As for Chatterton's no-fly family holidays, the best ones have been taking the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam and cycling around the Netherlands. "You travel light, you make it an adventure with your kids," he says. "Who wants to sit in a departure lounge? You get the excitement of travelling through places, figuring out what the next journey is. I think we have to get back into the idea that travelling is special; it's a privilege."

Most flying is carried out by a small proportion of the population. Aled Jones, the director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, says we have become used to the low-cost weekend flight abroad in a short space of time. "When I was growing up, and certainly for the generation before, flying on holiday was not something you expected to do," he says. "By radically cutting down, we're not going back to the dark ages; we're going back to when people holidayed in the UK. It will be less of a sacrifice for a lot of people than we expect." He admits that addressing "love miles" - flying to see family who live abroad - is "a very different challenge".

Maja Rosén, who lives in Sweden and gave up flying in 2008, had always kept quiet when friends talked about flying abroad on holidays - until last year. "I thought: 'How is it possible I'm more scared of destroying the mood than climate collapse?' I decided that my new year resolution last year would be to start asking some inconvenient questions. I realised that most people weren't aware of the impact from flying and how huge it is."

'Your journey becomes part of your holiday' ... Cath Heinemeyer hasn't flown for 19 years.

She and a friend started a campaign, Flight-free 2019 (now Flight-free 2020), to encourage people to pledge not to fly. By the end of 2018, 15,000 Swedes had signed; by the end of this year, she thinks it will be 100,000. It has changed the conversation around flying in the country: passenger numbers dropped at Swedish airports in 2018, while a record number of people in the country took the train.

"People don't realise that what they do as an individual is so important because it affects those around them," says Rosén. "If you keep flying, all your friends will as well. You contribute to the norm. But if you decide to give up flying or take a flight-free year, that makes others reflect. Change can happen fast as soon as enough people start acting. Before, people saw flying as an experience or something you do, it wasn't in the category of consumption, but I think now people are starting to realise that by taking a flight they are a heavy consumer of fossil fuel."

There is now a British arm of the campaign, run by the writer Anna Hughes, who last took a flight eight years ago. More than 1,000 people have pledged to have a flight-free year. Hughes likens it to the Veganuary campaign, by which people give up animal products for January to raise awareness of veganism and change behaviour. She has travelled to Ireland, Denmark and other European countries - and seen a lot of the UK. "There is nowhere I can think of that I want to go that I can't get to by bike, train or boat. If I was going to go further, I would just take a long time to do it."

The author Nicola Davies is taking long-haul flights for a couple of upcoming commitments, but after that she will radically rethink her flight consumption, she says. There will almost certainly be no more European flights; she has already travelled to the Balearic Islands in Spain by car. "We did the journey down to Barcelona in two days, then the ferry crossing is eight hours," she says, adding that it requires a bit more planning than travelling by plane. "It's much more exciting, much closer to the real skin of the planet than the feeling you get from going to an airport, popping into a metal tube and then popping out at some other point on the planet with no real grasp of the distance, habitat, people and cultures you've passed over on the way.

If you keep flying, all your friends will. But if you decide to take a flight-free year, that makes others reflect

"I think this shift to no, or fewer, flights is an opportunity to redraft what travel truly means, rather than a sort of consumerist ticking of boxes. If we give up the idea of the weekend break in Budapest or the three days in Miami for a stag do, I think that's probably helpful - for us as human beings, as well as for the planet."

There are people who are reminding us that it is possible to travel overland with young children. "We've gone to Italy by train, Spain, different parts of France," says Linda Thomas, a fashion designer. For the first couple of years, giving up flying felt like a loss, she says, but the train-travel website seat61.com has enabled them to plan more adventurous journeys. "We've had some really incredible wildlife experiences. There would be a feeling of guilt otherwise - that you're seeing something, but also contributing to its demise at the same time, when you've taken a long-haul flight to get somewhere. It doesn't feel like a loss; it feels like we've gained new experiences."

Wendy and her husband have cut down on flying in recent years and decided to stop altogether at the beginning of 2019. "We couldn't really justify it any more. Something that was purely for fun didn't feel enjoyable any more; it didn't feel right." They have had fantastic family holidays by train, starting with a trip to Chamonix in the French Alps with their six-month-old daughter, but Wendy says it has been hard not seeing her husband's family, who live in Malaysia.

Cath Heinemeyer, a researcher and community artist who hasn't flown for 19 years, says visiting family has been a challenge. "My family live in Northern Ireland, my husband's family live in Germany and we live in York. We do see them, but we see them less frequently, for a longer time." She admits they haven't faced family commitments that would be simplified by flying. "Our parents are in reasonable health. Maybe it will get challenging if we're suddenly called to support them in their later years. We would have to decide that on a case-by-case basis."

'It doesn't feel like a loss; it feels like we've gained new experiences' ... Linda Thomas.

It can be more expensive - "You need to get a bit savvy about booking" - and it requires research, she says. "We have had mishaps, where we've had tiny children and missed a train connection and had to find last-minute accommodation in some city." Heinemeyer felt a twinge of regret at missing her high school reunion in Canada, but otherwise not flying hasn't felt like a sacrifice, she says. "I like the children to realise how far they've travelled and see how the landscape changes. It's just a thing we've always worked around. Your journey becomes part of your holiday."

Lewis McNeil, a project manager for the charity the Orchard Project, proved the viability of long-haul overland travel after he gave up flying in 2006. There was "a 'letting go' period akin to the end of a relationship, but things got exciting when I realised that one can still travel, and travel far, while creating a fraction of the emissions that air travel is responsible for", he says.

He has gone by coach to many European destinations, finding the train too expensive if booked last-minute, but his most intrepid no-fly holiday was a nine-day cargo-ship journey from France to Trinidad in the Caribbean, booked through a specialist company, then on to Venezuela by boat. "The idea behind this is that you're piggybacking on emissions that are already going to be emitted - that cargo ship, as unsustainable as it is with our crazy trade system, is going anyway. With flying, flights depend on demand." The journey was magical. "Watching dolphins and whales, seeing incredible starlit skies in the middle of the Atlantic, swimming in the little plunge pool, swotting up on Spanish, making friends with the Filipino crew and sharing music. It was pretty expensive, at €90 (£79) per person a day, but that included food and a lovely en suite room complete with a porthole and a writing desk." He returned from Colombia to the Netherlands.

The key to flight-free travel, he says, is "seeing the journey as part of the adventure" - although travel pillows, eye masks, earplugs, snacks, books and a tablet with films downloaded all help.

After Moscow, Tyers will get the Trans-Siberian railway to Irkutsk, then on to Beijing. "Not everybody can do it, I understand that," he says. "Not everybody has the time, or bosses who are willing to let people take longer to get places. But for those who can - and I think a lot more people can than realise - flying less is good; it's enriching." He is pessimistic that people will change voluntarily to the degree needed. "But we'll see. Often the cultural change comes first, then political change - and I do think there's something in the air."

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Could you give up flying? Meet the no-plane pioneers

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Growing numbers of travellers are abandoning air travel to help save the planet - even if it means spending 14 days on a train

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Cities generate 80% of gross domestic product, they are the engines of economic growth and have lifted millions out of poverty. As rural to urban migration is accelerating, sustainable cities are emerging to achieve idyllic urban settings. Here are the top five most sustainable cities in the world right now.
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UK-based company Uswitch recently came up with a list of the most sustainable cities in the world, ranking them with a score based on energy, transport infrastructure, affordability, pollution, air quality, CO2 emissions, and percentage of green space. The scores are out of 600 (600 being the best). To fully understand how technology can be beneficial, we can examine how the top smart cities in the world are making use of the latest technologies in the most practical ways to support their sustainability goals.

1. Wellington, New Zealand

It is home to organisations advancing in circular economic agendas such as Kaibosh, Powershop, Flick, and Whare Hauora, with the city regularly funding startups to assist finding new solutions to address social issues.

Wellington has adopted circular economy principles in its design of smart city infrastructure, allowing countless components to be reused, remanufactured, and replaced in ways that support continued improvement. These infrastructures are also complementing projects that help conserve the environment, such as Predator Free Wellington, which is a strategy eradicating pests from the city in order for bird life to thrive. The number of birds is counted by sensors with TensorFlow capabilities.

2. Zurich, Switzerland

Although Zurich is known for its financial powers, it is also one of the leading smart cities when it comes to sustainability. The city's smart initiatives mainly focus on education, efficient public transport, waste-reduction goals, and the use of renewable energies.

The construction of new housing and public buildings needs to comply with strict sustainable-building principles, with businesses and industries being held accountable for their energy consumption and waste-reduction goals. As of today, 70% of hotels in the city are sustainable certified.

Zurich is able to produce 80% of its electricity with renewable energy sources. Over 40% of its waste gets recycled. 94% of old glass and 81% of polyethylene terephthalate containers arrive at special collection points instead of ending up in household bins.
You might also like: 4 Commonly-Used Smart City Technologies Skiing in Copenhill. Photo by: Wikimedia Commons
3. Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen has multiple sustainability initiatives in place to achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2025 . Buses are making the transition from diesel to electric, while more roads are devoted to cycling. People are getting more accustomed to cycling than driving to get around, with only 29% of households owning a car .

A quarter of the city's total food sale is made up of organic produce. Even fast food options such pizzas, hot dogs, burgers, and craft beers are produced with organic ingredients here.

One of Copenhagen's significant landmarks, Copenhill, is an incredibly efficient energy plant that turns waste into energy that helps power houses and buildings. The facility is also covered by a year-round artificial snow slope - one of the longest in the world - for skiing and snowboarding,

4. Madrid, Spain

Madrid's well-publicised move to ban polluting vehicles in the urban centre is considered one of the most significant actions taken by a European city to improve air quality.

To meet the city's nitrogen reduction goals this year, diesel cars have been completely banned from the city centre. This would also make the city significantly more pedestrian-friendly. While some plans to turn car lanes into pedestrian walkways and cycling lanes are in motion, the city is also introducing more green transport options and installing more docking stations for bicycles, all so that people are encouraged to leave their cars at home. If residents do not fancy riding a bike, they can still hop on Madrid's 78 electric-powered buses.

5. Canberra, Australia

Whether it is about renewable energies, pollution levels, traffic management, affordability of property, percentage of green space, or CO2 emissions, Canberra takes the top spot among the most sustainable cities around the world. According to Uswitch, Canberra is the most sustainable city in the world due to its reliance on renewable energy and large amounts of green space. What's more, 87% of Canberra's transport infrastructure is green . The country's capital relies heavily on the use of solar power and nearby wind farms, while having ensured that 94% of its residents have access to the internet to make it a connected city.

Canberra is the first city outside of Europe to be powered by 100% renewable energy. The territory government also aims to have a net-zero carbon emission by 2045.
You might also like: Top 7 Smart Cities in the World and How They Do It

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Top 5 Most Sustainable Cities in the World in 2022 | Earth.Org

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Cities generate 80% of gross domestic product, they are the engines of economic growth and have lifted millions out of poverty. As rural to urban migration is accelerating, sustainable cities are emerging to achieve idyllic urban settings. Here are the top five most sustainable cities in the world right now.

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Impact on heart beat rate of students

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The 'House of Children' is another central building in the new district in the Tivoli area of Innsbruck that was completed in the fall of 2008. Implementation was based on the design of Innsbruck-based architect Helmut Reitter, who won with it an urban building competition. His planning envisioned a kindergarten harmonizing with the existing ensemble of public buildings, consisting of indoor swimming pool, youth center and retirement home, and hence corresponding to the basic concept of 'Pavilions in the Park'.

Every single detail is important in a place where children grow up and have their first experiences - that is how the architect describes his basic idea. With this central theme in mind, Reitter considered every aspect also from the perspective of a child and created a modern and functional public building in wood.

Project House of Children
City Innsbruck, Austria
Year of Construction 2008
Client Innsbrucker Immobilien Gesellschaft
Execution, timber construction Schafferer Holzbau GesmbH
Architecture DI Helmut Reitter
Support structure planning zsz Ingenieure

The kindergarten building is designed as an elongated pavilion. It combines ground-floor group rooms facing west with exercise, recreation and eating rooms facing east. The two separated areas are connected by a broad middle corridor lit by skylights, which is also a cloakroom and lounge with seating islands.

The first floor, facing north, houses an after school care center. The windows with generous horizontal dimensions provide a fantastic panorama of the Nordkette mountain range.

The kindergarten was built as an all-timber construction in passive house construction. The high proportion of window areas allows the direct visual relation to the neighboring park. The architect quite consciously opted for external walls with a large share of glass in order to disprove the prejudice of the "passive house bunker." This didn't make support structure planning any easier but turns the kindergarten into an open and light one-of-a-kind place.

The construction as a passive house demands the highest level of accuracy, especially with connection details. That is why all elements should be prefabricated as much as possible.

This requirement was easily met by load-bearing inside walls and ceilings made of binderholz CLT BBS. The BBS elements executed in visual quality allow for a high degree of prefabrication. The workers of Holzbau Schafferer were able to erect the approx. 1,500 m² of floor space and make it rain-proof in no more than 15 installation days. Due to the high proportion of glass, the external walls are executed predominantly as timber frame construction. This timber frame structure was blown out with cellulose on site and filled out with hemp blanket insulators on the installation level.

These and other measures underscore the ecological overall concept of the building, thus fitting in perfectly with the idea of the Tivoli area as the city's "green lung.

Exactly 12 months went by from the start of the excavation work to the handover of the turnkey building. A total of approx. 630 m³ of BSH glulam and CLT BBS went into the building.

Statement Helmut Reitter, architect, graduated engineer

"Frequently, I'm asked how we deal with the soiling on the visible surfaces of solid timber elements caused by unavoidable construction site conditions. In my experience, screed splashes can be easily removed with fine-grained sandpaper.
Up to now, I have always had fir wood surfaces - such as in the kindergarten - painted with a light oil-water glaze with white pigments. It prevents the wood from turning yellow and gives it a more elegant appearance. The atmosphere is not so 'sauna-like.' In addition, glazed wood is substantially easier to care for. I am sure that comes in handy in a kindergarten, even though the little ones actually treat the BBS surfaces that look precious and velvety with great care."

The generous space, plethora of windows and warm wood surfaces in visual quality created a natural atmosphere. The quality of the indoor climate at the 'House of Children' is outstanding. Many parents and children are quite enthusiastic over the pleasant smell of wood, which makes you feel good immediately when entering the building.
A study conducted by Joanneum Research, a research institute in Graz, provides evidence for the fact that wooden interiors have a positive impact on the human organism. Two classrooms in a secondary modern school in Styria were furnished with solid timber especially for this study. The remaining classrooms were given the standard furnishing. Over a complete school year, the researchers monitored the pupils, measuring at regular intervals their heartbeat and the so-called vagus tone (= heart protection factor of the central nervous system).
The findings indicate: For the same levels of concentration and performance, pupils attending school in classrooms furnished in wood needed around 8,000 heartbeats fewer per day than their school comrades in the standard classrooms. In addition, they showed a higher vagus tone, which is better for the heart.

The positive impact of solid timber in classrooms can be summarized as follows:
· Lowering of the heart rate
· Fewer mistakes due to lack of concentration
· Less aggression
· Increase in willingness to learn
· General improvement of the quality of lessons

These positive effects have been scientifically corroborated, e.g. by the study "Schule ohne Stress (SOS, School without Stress)".

Photos: © Helmut Reitter, Schafferer Holzbau, Günter R. Wett

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'House of Children' Kindergarten, Innsbruck | Austria

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The 'House of Children' is another central building in the new district in the Tivoli area of Innsbruck that was completed in the fall of 2008. Implementation was based on the design of Innsbruck-based architect Helmut Reitter, who won with it an urban building competition.

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Excellent materials for Lockdown Learning (Materials for GCSE Revision in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)

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GCSE is the qualification taken by 15 and 16 year olds to mark their graduation from the Key Stage 4 phase of secondary education in England, Northern Ireland and Wales.

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Information in EASY English (Google Kiddle)

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Information in EASY English (Google Kiddle)

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Kiddle is a safe search engine, offering a safe web, image, and video search. Results are vetted by editors.

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National news in English

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Two children play on a street in Khan Younis, surrounded by buildings destroyed by Israeli attacks. MOHAMMED SALEM (REUTERS)

Inhabitants of the Strip want the temporary truce to become definitive while the families of Israeli hostages have called for 'the return of all of them, immediately, whatever it takes'

The children dying in Gaza didn't choose to be born in a long-coveted land of great religious significance

Employees and investors had powerful financial incentives to force Sam Altman's return to the company that developed ChatGPT

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When lawmakers return to Washington this coming week, Biden's request will be a top item on the to-do list

Marta Rojo Cervera| Valencia

The wild animal was found abandoned in a private house in a war zone and transferred to a rescue and rehabilitation center in Alicante

In a major event in American comics, after nearly three decades of silence, the cartoonist returns with 'The Mysteries,' a laconic black-and-white fable done in collaboration with cartoonist John Kascht

Fashion brands are entirely convinced that climate change is a fact. It's already here, and we must adapt quickly

People who have suffered attacks because of their sexual or gender identity and were welcomed in Mexico see their stories reflected in the exhibition 'Doors of Hope'

The success of these sneakers has partially compensated the athletic apparel and footwear company for the hole in its finances caused by the fiasco of collaborating with the American rapper

The Swedish workers are demanding that the carmaker sign a collective bargaining agreement, which most employees in Sweden have

This global industry has been the first to demonstrate it can successfully boost the fortunes of the underprivileged, but is it actually efficient?

In her latest book - 'Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma' - the American author examines the idea of being able to separate artists from their work, despite their personal behavior

Live

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English version of EL PAÍS to read online: breaking news, opinion and editorial, reviews, features, science, business, culture, sports, travel, education & more with EL PAÍS.

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These conversation topics are the most basic, but great for getting to know a new language exchange partner!

Do you ever send letters? Why or why not?

Do you think sending postcards is thoughtful or kitsch?

What do you think about emojis? When (or why not) do you use them?

Do you buy more things online to be shipped to your house than you did 5 years ago? Why or why not?

Why would someone want to collect stamps? (Have you ever met anyone who does?)

Do you get or receive Christmas cards? Why? What do you do with the ones you receive?

Why do you think it's important to people to send printed invitations to certain parties (weddings especially) and not electronic invitations?

This topic might feel a bit small-talk, but the real reasoning for including it was to give beginner language students some interesting ways to use the vocabulary and grammar they're learning, and force advanced students to brush up on some lesser-used daily routine vocabulary.

If you could pick your ideal daily schedule, what time would you get up or go to bed? How often would you eat?
While "family" doesn't always make it on the list of taboo topics to talk about, make sure the other person is interested in these before deciding to spend an entire exchange chat on it. (Adoptees, children who immigrated, and many other people might find certain questions painful, although I tried to be cognisant about that while writing these.) Our weird relationships with jobs and work span cultures. This is a great one for practicing storytelling and polishing your ability to ask good follow-up questions!
A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics

C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics
The education questions here are a mix of personal and political, and could certainly be split up between two or more language exchanges. So again--ask great follow up questions and really enjoy this one! Everyone's favorite topic! These questions were a ton of fun to write, but if you have any other ideas leave them in the comments below so I can take a look and hopefully expand this section.

What languages do you speak or study?

What is your favorite language and why?

What languages don't interest you at all?

What do you think about conlanguages? (Esperanto, Klingon, etc)

Do you prefer to study multiple languages at lower levels or fewer languages to higher levels? Why?

What do you think is the prettiest accent in the world?

What do you think the most attractive accent in the world is?

What do you think makes a good language teacher?

Do you think spelling is important? Why or why not?

If schools in your area could only teach a local sign language or an international language, which do you think they should teach and why?

Our relationships with the people we live with and where we live are not only unique culture-to-culture but person-to-person. This is great for practicing or revisiting beginner vocab, especially if you go into a lot of detail about specific objects and how they're used.

Have you moved around a lot? Why or why not?

Where did you grow up? What was it like?

How has your city or town changed over the past 20 years?

Is gentrification a problem where you live? What's your relationship to it?

If you have pets, how did you pick their names? If not, what is your favorite pet name?

Did you have any pets growing up? Why or why not?

What do kitchens in your region normally have?

What do bathrooms in your region normally look like?

In your community, where do elderly people live? What do you think about that?

Do many people own their homes in your town or city? Why or why not?

Is the interior design of your house important to you? Why or why not?

A1-A2 Language Exchange Questions

What are the most important holidays in your culture? What events, parties, or dinners do people have to celebrate?

What are some popular foods to have at a party?

What does a birthday celebration look like where you're from?

When is alcohol appropriate or inappropriate to have at an event or party?

If you're invited to a party that begins at 7:00p, at what time is it polite to arrive?

On a Friday night, would you rather go out with friends or relax at home alone?

B1-B2 Language Exchange Questions

What makes a good party?

What was the best party you've ever gone to?

Can a wedding be boring? What would make a wedding fun or boring?

What was the worst party or event you've ever gone to?

When you get together with a small group of friends, what do you actually like to do?

What is the most stressful part of having people over your house to celebrate something?

What was the best event you've ever organized yourself?

How do you decide what kind of gift you would bring to a given event?

What is one type of holiday or event you are socially obligated to go to but always dread?

What culture has the coolest events? (Parties, festivals, etc?)

If you go to a party and you don't know anyone there besides the host, what are your strategies for making friends?

C1-C2 Language Exchange Questions

What life accomplishments or milestones are most celebrated in your culture? What life accomplishments/milestones are not celebrated that you wish were?

If you had 100,000 euros to throw the best party ever, what would it look like?

If you had to organize a party but had zero budget, what would that party look like?

This section was absolutely inspired by all of the faux pas and groseros that have tripped me up before with friends from other countries. Again--if you have any other ideas for what else could go in this section, please leave the questions in the comments for consideration to be added!
A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics

Can you give a good example of how someone in your country should act with a waiter or taxi driver? What should tourists do or avoid in order to be polite?

What is one thing that everyone in your culture really cares about that you don't care about at all? (Ex: personal space, beauty, social obligations, politics, etc)

What is one very rude thing that foreigners sometimes do when visiting your country?

Who do you give tips to in your country? How much? Why or why not?

Is it appropriate to touch friends or people you are talking to in your country? Can you explain when or why?

Can you show some examples of non-verbal body language from your culture?

What topics should be avoided when speaking with people you don't know in your culture?

What's a rude question that someone from another country might ask you? How do you respond?

When making plans in a group, should a person wait to be invited or invite themselves?

Do you think people say things very directly in your culture, or very indirectly? ("That shirt doesn't look good" vs "I think another shirt might be better".) Do you think this is important?

C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics

What's one thing you wish you knew about language learning before you started?

If you had a time machine but could only use it once, what is the one dormant language you would go back to learn?

A1-A2 Conversation Ideas B1-B2 Conversation Ideas C1-C2 Conversation Ideas Who do we know outside of our families? And how important are those people to us?

Who was your first celebrity, movie, or TV crush?

Can you give anyone advice on flirting with someone in your culture?

What is dating like in your culture?

If someone moves to your country or city, how should they find new friends?

What was the best date you ever went on?

What was the worst date you ever went on?

What kind of casual parties do you have in your country? (Dinners, birthdays, etc.) What do they look like?

What do weddings look like in your culture?

What was the best party you ever went to?

How should people dress when they go to weddings in your country?

How should people dress when they go to a friend's house for a casual evening?

Who is your longest friendship with? Have you both changed, or not?

Is there anyone who's no longer in your life who you wish you could reconnect with? Why?

Is there anyone who you wish you had met earlier in life? Or had never met ever?

Food vocabulary is often taught at lower language levels. But do you know how to name herbs, explain cooking instructions, or critique a dish? Hopefully you can get really expansive with these questions and your answers!
A1-A2 Language Exchange Questions

B1-B2 Language Exchange Questions

C1-C2 Language Exchange Questions

If you were a fruit or vegetable, what fruit or vegetable would you be?

If caffeine became illegal, what would you do? What lengths would you resort to in order to continue to use it?

If you could only ever eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be?

I tried to make these questions less about the individual and more about society as a whole. But if either you or your partner isn't excited about these, you can skip this section of topics.

If you could change one law in your country, what would it be and why?

If you could make one international law that every country had to comply with, what would it be and why?

Time for some nostalgia! Have fun explaining these to someone who's maybe never heard of them before.

What kind of bank holidays / federal holidays do you have in your country? Do you think they're important?

Is there any holiday that you celebrate where you give gifts? What is the gift-giving like? (If not, why not?)

What's the best gift you've ever gotten?

What's the worst gift you ever gotten?

What do you do with gifts you don't want? Why?

Does your culture have any unpopular or controversial holidays? What are they, and why?

Is there any special food that you love, but that is only eaten for one certain holiday or celebration?

If you go over to someone's house for dinner, should you bring something with you? How do you decide what to bring?

What are some common wedding gifts for adults?

What kind of gifts do you get someone for their birthday? How should you pick one out?

What would an example of a really bad gift be?

If you could start your own holiday, what would it be?
Dig into some really culturally-relevant vocabulary and C-level grammar. Because of the difficult vocabulary, none of these questions are good for A-level students--but if you're excited to talk about this hopefully you can use it as inspiration to improve the language you're learning!

Do you have a good luck charm? What is it, and why? Or why not?

Do you have good luck in any one thing? Do you believe in luck?

What's one conspiracy theory that you actually believe in or think could be true?

What is the worst, least probable, or most harmful conspiracy theory you know about?

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Do you believe in aliens? Why or why not?

What cultures have the coolest myths? Why?

What book, movie, game, or series has the fictional universe you'd most like to live in? Why?

If you had a familiar (a spirit animal or magical creature that is linked to you somehow), what would it be and how would it act?

You're transported into the last fantasy or science fiction book/movie/series/game you read. Are you going to survive? What will your life look like?

Have you ever gone to a psychic, tried tarot cards, or had your palm read? If so, how was it? If not, are you interested in it?

Do you think rituals like Ouiji boards or seances are dangerous? Why or why not?

Have you ever seen something supernatural? (Bigfoot, an angel, a UFO, etc?)

Do you think time travel will be possible one day? Why or why not?

Does your culture believe in witches? What are the historic and current opinions?

Does your culture have any mythical creatures? (Fairies, dragons, Big Foot, Moth Man, etc?)

You encounter the exact opposite version of yourself. What would they be like?

If you could level up your life in a video game, what ability would you level up next? (Health, intelligence, speed, strength, etc.)

Time has stopped for everyone in the world except you for 24hrs. What would you do?

If you could perfectly communicate with all animals, what would you do with that power?

If you could trade one year of your life for a million dollars, how many years of your life would you trade?

You drink a magic potion that makes you never have to sleep again. What would you do with the extra time every night?

Do you have a myth or folktale you really like? Can you tell it?

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?

If you could have one magical power, what would it be?

What would the worst power be, and why?

If aliens exist, what do you think they look like?

With the workday getting longer and longer, do people still have hobbies?
A1-A2 Language Exchange Questions

B1-B2 Language Exchange Questions

Did your parents' generation have any hobbies that your generation doesn't have?

What was the first hobby or interest you remember as a child?

What TV channel doesn't exist but really should?

Do you play board games? If so, what's your favorite? If not, why not?

Have you ever collected anything?

Video games, social media, and TV steaming are incredibly addicting. Do you think they should come with warnings or government regulation? Why or why not?

If you had to go onto a reality TV show for one season, what TV show would you pick and why?

Do you care about any sports team rivalries? Or are there any in your local area?

What do children do during school breaks in your region? Do you have any good memories?

Do you think learning languages is a fun hobby or a chore you have to do so you can speak it?

If time and money weren't an issue, what's one hobby you would pick up that you can't right now?

What do you think about "hustle culture", ie: only having hobbies if you can make money off of them?

C1-C2 Language Exchange Questions

Dressing up as your favorite video game, movie, or comic book character ("cosplay") is becoming more and more popular with adults who attend media conventions. What do you think of this phenomenon? Who would you like to dress up as if you went to a fan convention?

If you could cheat at a board game to guarantee that you won and not get caught, would you cheat? Why or why not?

For this language exchange topic, please be sensitive to different physical abilities your partner may have. We've included questions for language learners who use wheel chairs, have had tramatic injuries, or who have any disability--but it's best not to assume that everyone can do things as easily as you can! A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics Not only is health personal, but it's also political. Remember not to ask questions that are too direct about someone else's health unless they volunteer that information.
A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics

C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics

If you could change one thing about your country's healthcare system, what's the one rule you would make?

If you could change your country's laws about drugs, what would you change and why? Or why wouldn't you change it?

Language learning often focuses on cultures. But what about that places we live? What do they look like, and how do we survive them? My goal with these questions was to make them as inclusive as possible. Remember to not assume your language partner's passport has the same accessibility as yours, or that they've traveled as widely as you have.

If you could visit one planet, what planet would you visit?
This category of language exchange topics isn't just for fashionistas! Plenty of nostalgia, politics, and culturally-interesting questions for anyone to enjoy.
A1-A2 Conversation Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Conversation Exchange Topics

C1-C2 Conversation Exchange Topics
Do you use music in your language learning routine? Do you know the history of the language you're studying? You don't have to be a professional artist to enjoy these questions!
A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics

C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics
This is another great list of topics to help you give and receive awesome recommendations, as well as deepen your understanding of other cultures. This is probably going to be the most beloved part of this list. Remember: don't spoil a new show for your partner if they haven't seen it!
A1-A2 Conversation Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Conversation Exchange Topics

Did you have any film or TV crushes as a kid? Do you remember your first?

What's the most recent movie or show that you saw? Would you recommend it?

What movie have you watched the most times in your life?

What was your favorite show or movie as a child? Why?

Do you feel represented in mainstream movies or shows? Why or why not?

What's the worst cliché in movies or TVs that you hate?

What is your favorite movie or show that you've seen in the language we're speaking right now?

What country do you think makes the best movies and TV? Why?

Do you prefer subtitles or dubs? When do you use them?

Would you rather never watch a movie or series again, or never read a book again? Why?

C1-C2 Conversation Exchange Topics

If you could have dinner with one character from any TV show or movie, who would it be and why?
Language learners tend to love people, but what about all of the other species we coexist with? Since you're reading this online, you almost certainly have some opinions about cyberspace...
A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics

C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics

If you were in charge of Facebook, what's the one policy you would change?

Who should be held responsible for fake news? How do you that should be enforced?

Since you're reading this online, you almost certainly have some opinions about cyberspace...
A1-A2 Language Exchange Topics

B1-B2 Language Exchange Topics

C1-C2 Language Exchange Topics
Language exchange topics about science are almost always reserved for B2+ level students. We added some for the A-level students, but don't get frustrated if these end up too hard! They're meant to be a challenge.

Do you like science fiction movies, books, or TV shows? Why or why not?

Do you think Pluto is a planet? Why or why not?

What do you think aliens look like? (Describe what you think their appearance is like.)

Does your government have a space program? What do people think about it?

How important do you think science and maths courses are in school, in comparison with literature, technology, arts, history, or anything else?

Are you curious about life on other planets? Why or why not?

To close off this list, let's look to our future with some optimism.

If you had an extra free hour every day, what would you do?

If money were no issue, how would you spend your time?

Bonus: how to do a language exchange tips

Honestly, this list is going to change how you do language exchanges. But on top of using this menu, here are the biggest lessons I've taken away after two years of awesome (and terrible) language exchanges.

1. Ask a lot of people, but make sure you screen them. Many people you ask simply won't reply, won't have schedules that line up, or won't have things in common with you. After that, plenty of people will drop off or just not be a great fit. So ask plenty of people, but make sure you want to talk about the same language exchange topics and have schedules that work well together.

2. Don't put up with a bad conversation exchange partner. Is someone flaking on dates or always coming late? Has someone made uncomfortable comments? Or do you just have nothing in common, and spending time together is like pulling teeth?? If you don't love your language exchange partner, you don't have to stay with them. Another reason why asking a lot of people is a great idea!

3. Spend each lesson 50/50 between your languages. Doing Day 1 in Language 1 and Day 2 in Language 2 can be extremely frustrating if schedules changes or someone doesn't show up. At the halfway point of your language exchange, just put on your biggest smile and announce that it's time to switch into the other language. It might seem awkward at first, but it'll feel normal really soon! (And it's much, much better this way anyway.)

4. Don't forget about non-native speakers. Most people want to trade conversation in their native language for a conversation with a native speaker of their target language. But advanced students of a language might have more linguistic understanding of that language than a native--and making friends who are studying the same language as you at the same level can mean more time speaking that language. So don't discount fellow learners!

5. Communicate about corrections. I love to receive written corrections if one of my partners notices a mistake or knows the word I'm looking for. Do you prefer to just try your best without corrections? Or ONLY work with people who will give you notes? Or are afraid to get your self-esteem destroyed? If this is important to you, make sure you communicate!

6. Ask awesome follow up questions. "Why is that?" "How did that feel?" If someone seems shy to really elaborate on any of these questions, asking them questions is a great way to make your conversation go deeper and longer.

7. Consider a language exchange book club or film club. Another way to make your language exchanges more interesting is by using an extension to watch Netflix together in your target languages, or reading the same book together and coming together to discuss. I've done both, but you really need a reliable buddy--so make sure you find someone just as committed as you! (This also works best with someone who's studying the same language as you when you're both at B2-C2 levels.)

Do you have any questions or language exchange topics you think should go on this list? Let me know in the comments so I can consider adding them and making this list truly inexhaustible!

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400+ Language Exchange Topics (organized by language level & theme)

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These conversation topics are the most basic, but great for getting to know a new language exchange partner! Do you ever send letters? Why or why not? Do you think sending postcards is thoughtful or kitsch? What do you think about emojis? When (or why not) do you use them?

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Practise and improve your reading skills for your school studies and your English exams. There are activities for different levels, so find your level and make a start.

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"Man of Steve Cutts"  Consumismo Ser Humano

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Read about the Buy Nothing movement and answer the questions to practise and improve your reading skills.

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Ways you can travel more sustainably based on expert advice - The Points Guy

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If you've recently taken a bucket-list trip or visited an iconic city, you know the need for sustainable tourism has never been more pressing.

Beloved destinations - including Bora Bora, the Maldives, Barcelona and Venice, Italy, among others - are facing existential challenges, either from climate change or sheer overcrowding.

However, it's one thing to recognize the importance of eco-friendly tourism; it's another to put principles into practice.

There's no doubt the travel industry has played a part in creating economic stability and driving positive growth in locations across the globe, but the downsides are clear. Overcrowding, environmental damage and a strain on resources are just a few ways an increase in tourism can have a harmful impact on a destination.

As a result, many locales are taking significant steps to reverse course in order to save their fragile ecosystems before it's too late. From bans on megaships and vacation rentals to strict visitor limitations, governments worldwide are taking drastic measures.

At TPG, we know travel is an essential part of life and overall a great experience - one we never want to give up. That has become even more true in recent years as we've all dealt with extended periods of time when we could not travel due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Related: Updated: A country-by-country guide to coronavirus reopenings
However, we should not (and cannot) let traveling be an occasion or excuse for us to disregard concerns for our planet. It's vital that we do our part to be more mindful about the decisions we make when we travel.

To help you minimize your impact on the planet when you travel, we've asked experts at TPG and Red Ventures sister sites Lonely Planet, Platea and Elsewhere, plus experts at the United Nations Environmental Program, to weigh in on what you can do to be an eco-conscious traveler. Here are eight strategies they suggest to make your next trip more sustainable.
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Explore under-the-radar locations

Overtourism is one of the biggest threats facing the travel industry. About 80% of all travelers visit the same five to 10 spots in each country, according to data from the World Economic Forum.

During peak season, popular cities experience as much as a 70% population increase, resulting in strains on everything from infrastructure to the environment.

"A low-season visit can help offset the boom and bust cycle many destinations endure, and it'll give you a more solitary, intimate look at the place itself," shared Alexander Howard, managing editor at Lonely Planet.

To avoid adding to overtourism concerns, travelers can get creative when deciding where to go next.

"Skip Machu Picchu and opt for Choquequirao - these Incan ruins only draw 20 visitors per day," said Alexis Bowen, founder of sustainable travel startup Elsewhere and CEO at Lonely Planet.

Or, consider a trip to a smaller European destination instead of one on everyone's bucket list. Oftentimes, the experience will prove far more authentic and memorable than what you'd experience in tourism hot spots like Paris and London.

"Last month, I took a weekend trip to Procida, a small fishing island off the coast of Naples ... far from the bling of Italy's Amalfi Coast," Bowen said. "We were told about an 'agriturismo' [a sustainable farm] with incredible food on the neighboring island of Ischia, so we hopped on a ferry to check it out. ... When the food started coming, it was whatever Giuseppe [the owner] was cooking that day using ingredients from his farm. The food was simple but delicious ... and this moment was our definition of pure luxury."
Related: From theme parks to power plants, why Denmark is our sustainable destination of 2022
Choose every aspect of your itinerary wisely

"Ethical travel is also about being mindful of what you consume on the road," said Sarah Reid, Lonely Planet writer and sustainable travel expert. "This includes everything from the food you eat to the activities you sign up for. Ideally, you should opt for experiences that have a low environmental footprint, such as kayaking instead of Jet Skiing, and have a positive impact on the local community."

Being eco-friendly doesn't mean you have to severely restrict what you do, though. Enlist the expertise of an adventure company that combines thrilling experiences with environmental preservation. Award-winning travel outfitter ROW Adventures, for example, offers an array of low-impact adventures worldwide, including sailing excursions in Croatia; kayaking outings in La Paz, Mexico; and hiking trips in Peru and Corsica, France.

Also consider destinations that foster ethical tourist consumption like Puerto Rico. By embracing sustainable farming techniques and highlighting local businesses and tour operators after Hurricane Maria's devastating impact on the island in 2017 exposed its over-reliance on mainland exports, Puerto Rico has emerged as a top spot for sustainability in the U.S.

Puerto Rico offers "so many ways to give back to the community" through sustainable businesses like bed-and-breakfast accommodations and shops, shared Adriana Serrano, brand manager for San Juan-based travel website Platea. You'll also find many farm-to-table options where locally sourced ingredients are on the menu, helping cut down on greenhouse gases while improving the overall quality of what you're eating.

Embrace slow travel

When Greta Thunberg stopped flying as part of her crusade against climate change in 2015, she triggered a surge of interest in train travel, as well as the adoption of a couple of catchy Swedish concepts: "tagskryt" (train-bragging) and "flygskam" (flight shame).

Sebastian Modak, Lonely Planet's editor-at-large, advises travelers to avoid thinking faster means better. "Slowing down can be better for the planet, and it will also allow you to really soak in every sensation and experience instead of rushing through a checklist," he said.

Train travel is essential to the art of slow travel. It allows you to connect with off-the-beaten-path towns and cities that you'd normally miss if you flew a direct route. Plus, it has a smaller carbon footprint than other modes of transportation.

"As part of the UN's sustainable travel agenda, we recommend all journeys of less than 600 kilometers (or 373 miles) be taken by train," United Nations Environmental Program officer Helena Rey de Assis told TPG.

But don't assume that traveling by train means you have to sacrifice on comfort.

"You can still travel in style and lower your impact," Rey de Assis said. "There have been massive rail investments in luxurious services, especially in Sweden, Italy and Austria."

By allotting a little more time for the journey, you'll discover more charm and character than what you may find in more common transit hubs, all while lessening your impact on the environment.

Reduce your carbon dioxide emissions

Of all the ways you can get from point A to point B, traveling by air is by far the most harmful to the planet.

The airline industry is responsible for roughly 3% of global industry emissions, according to the World Economic Forum. However, its convenience makes it a transportation option that won't fall out of favor any time soon. So, to reduce the environmental harm flights cause, experts are increasingly encouraging travelers to offset their carbon footprint.

Carbon offsetting involves donating money to environmental projects around the world to make up for your carbon output. But does paying to offset greenhouse gasses emitted during air travel merely enable people to continue choosing less sustainable options?

"There's some truth to that," said Katie Genter, a senior writer at TPG. "But if you're going to fly, offsetting your carbon emissions is better than doing nothing."

Know, though, that not every organization that says it offsets carbon emissions is created equal.

"You'll find many companies and organizations willing to take your money, but not all of these companies provide high-quality carbon offsets," Genter explained. "One of the easiest ways to donate ... is to choose a project listed on Green-e Climate or Climate Action Reserve, or donate directly to a project through Gold Standard."

You can also make strategic choices about routes, aircraft and airplane cabins that will lessen your impact. Since takeoffs and landings consume considerably more fuel than the rest of the journey, travel by the most direct route when possible. Remember, too, that traveling in premium cabins (like business or first class) will increase your carbon footprint.

Give back to the local community

Around 80% of low-income countries rely on tourism revenue, yet 90% of tourism dollars earned are pocketed by foreign-owned businesses, according to a Brookings Institute report.

As a result, a considerable amount of money coming from tourism does not end up going back into the local economy, which is essential to supporting local communities and ensuring their cultures, traditions and more can thrive for generations to come.

"Traveling responsibly and supporting the local economy means different things to different travelers," said Daniel Fahey, a Lonely Planet guidebook author and editor. "This might mean choosing a family-owned lodge instead of a chain hotel, dining in a restaurant that sources its produce locally or taking a paddle boarding trip with a local guide."

Wherever you travel, look for opportunities to make a difference through volunteer opportunities, wildlife rescue programs and beach cleanup events. Hands-on experiences in destinations across the globe (including Alaska, South Africa, Thailand and Bhutan) are easy to find through travel companies like Discover Corps, which specializes in grassroots, off-the-beaten-path travel.

For example, voluntourism trips in Costa Rica may include stays at high-end ecolodges and monitoring wildlife along key biological corridors in the rainforest.

Pick accommodations with good environmental credentials

You don't have to be a backpacker who camps every place they visit to be an eco-conscious traveler.

In recent years, there's been a spike in interest for quality eco-friendly lodging that marries environmental consciousness with style and comfort. In fact, 81% of travelers plan on looking for sustainable accommodations in the next year (up from 62% in 2016), according to Booking.com's 2021 Sustainable Travel Report.

TPG writer Lori Zaino is one of those travelers.

"I consider many things beyond just if the hotel recycles or has ditched single-use amenities," Zaino said. "Sustainable tourism is also about supporting the local community whenever possible, so whenever I can, I stay with Fairbnb, a vacation rental website that gives 50% of its proceeds back to a community project local to my destination. I like to support family-owned hotels, too, especially in places overrun with large hotels."
Related: The Brando: A sustainability leader in the hotel industry
Be a responsible wildlife tourist

Any time you are offered the chance to ride an animal, take a selfie with one or participate in any kind of animal "show," odds are the creature's welfare is not front and center.

TPG contributor Melanie Haiken advises travelers to "see wildlife in the wild or in highly rated sanctuaries that take only animals that can't be returned to the wild. While there are ethical private animal rescue facilities and preserves, there are also many (like the one exposed in the 'Tiger King' documentary) where animals are treated poorly or obtained by underhanded means. Many operations also stress the animals by not giving them enough space and privacy and allowing too much visitor contact. This goes for sea life, too - there is no dolphin that likes to be ridden!"

Several options are available if you wish to see wildlife in a thrilling yet humane way. Tour operator G Adventures works with World Animal Protection and the Jane Goodall Institute to design ethical wildlife-focused experiences for travelers. Additionally, there's small-group tour company Intrepid Travel, which is renowned for its commitment to sustainable travel, as evidenced by its decision in 2014 to remove elephant rides from its tours before other major international travel providers.

Eliminate single-use plastics

In many destinations, the sight of plastic bottles strewn across beaches, parks and waterways has become disturbingly common. Plastic waste is a major health hazard for living organisms, particularly marine life. Billions of tonnes of plastics made from 1950 to 2017 are discarded, and of that waste, roughly 75% ends up in landfills or ecosystems like rivers, forests and oceans, according to reporting by The Guardian.

"The pandemic has exacerbated problems with single-use plastics and disposable masks," Rey de Assis said. "With smaller island nations that don't have effective waste management systems, it becomes a plastic storm. In the Mediterranean Sea, 40% of waste can be attributed to tourism."

Following the sustainable trifecta (reduce, reuse and recycle) can dramatically help preserve the environment. Miniature shampoo, conditioner and lotion bottles are a major source of plastic waste and are especially problematic for small island nations.

Lonely Planet's senior news editor, Melissa Yeager, avoids using travel-size bottles whenever possible. "Reuse/refill previous containers or look around your house and repurpose things like contact lens cases or other small containers and fill them," she said.

Hotel groups, including Marriott and IHG, have already switched to single-use refillable toiletry bottles, and other brands look set to follow suit. Some destinations like Hawaii are even aiming to eliminate them completely.

Whenever possible, try to refill and bring along your own travel-size containers. If you must use small containers provided by the hotel, always save what's left for your next trip.
Related: What is the Malama Hawaii program - and why is it a model for the tourism industry?
Bottom line

As travelers and frequent flyers, we need to strike a balance between reducing our carbon footprint and supporting destinations that rely on tourism. Sustainability begins when you choose your destination and consider who is going to benefit from your tourism dollars.

By committing to being more mindful of how we travel and visiting places where fragile ecosystems are cared for and local communities are supported, we can all help preserve our beautiful planet.

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Ways you can travel more sustainably based on expert advice - The Points Guy

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If you've recently taken a bucket-list trip or visited an iconic city, you know the need for sustainable tourism has never been more pressing. Beloved destinations - including Bora Bora, the Maldives, Barcelona and Venice, Italy, among others - are facing existential challenges, either from climate change or sheer overcrowding.

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Guide 4 - Case study: Old and New Towns of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)

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Baseline situation

The World Heritage Status Report showed that 41% of visitors to Edinburgh are aware that it is a World Heritage site, and 17% of all visitors think that Edinburgh's World Heritage status influenced their choice. Even with these impressive numbers it was considered that much more could be done in making the most of Edinburgh's World Heritage status, especially after confirming that few tourism businesses were using Edinburgh's World Heritage status within their promotional materials. Moreover, in the 'Edinburgh 2020: The Edinburgh Tourism Strategy', it was widely recognized that the tourism industry's ability to access relevant business support was a key factor in improving business performance, and that Edinburgh's WHS was one of its main strengths as a tourism destination.

What did they do?

The Edinburgh Tourist Action Group, an association made up of representatives from across Edinburgh's tourism sector, together with Scottish Enterprise, an organisation supporting Scotland competitiveness, worked together to create the 2010 World Heritage Business Toolkit Kit, with the aim of providing businesses with an insight into how they can use the Edinburgh's World Heritage status as an strong competitive advantage and promotional tool. They also counted on the support of Edinburgh World Heritage, the charity responsible for protecting, conserving, and promoting Edinburgh's World Heritage site.

Strategic priorities

To raise awareness about Edinburgh's World Heritage status and OUV among local businesses.

To make every business aware of the importance of Edinburgh's heritage resources as it strongest visitor motivation, and influence towards an integrated targeted promotional strategy.

To ensure improved business performance through the development of new products, services, and innovative marketing strategies using the World Heritage status of the city.

By influencing those that deliver tourism services to improve visitors' experience and Edinburgh's destination competitiveness and sustainability.

What worked?

The easy language used throughout the toolkit made the World Heritage concept very easy to understand for a general audience. It explained in a very simple way the qualities that allowed Edinburgh to be included in the World Heritage List.

By offering relevant statistics pointing to heritage as Edinburgh's main visitor motivation, it provided a clear, common strategic objective to the whole tourism sector.

It clearly outlines the potential benefits of World Heritage as a strong destination quality brand, as an effective tool to attract higher-spending cultural visitors, and as a reinforcement of the destination image (through focusing on identity, authenticity, unique culture, etc.).

By giving very practical tips for businesses on how to use the Edinburgh's heritage and World Heritage status for their benefit, this initiative is making possible for businesses to start small actions immediately to improve their reach into Edinburgh's potential tourist market.

What was tough?

It was a challenge to develop a training tool able to speak directly to business managers of diverse backgrounds and varied initial knowledge concerning World Heritage issues. It was also difficult due to the numerous and diverse tourism related businesses present in Edinburgh (an estimated 3,500) - as well as making the tool accessible and distributing it among all stakeholders at a low cost.

How did they get buy-in?

A user-friendly format was developed. This included an e-magazine, with brief and easy to read content, which focused on 'ready to act' tips. The tool was made available using innovative distribution platforms, like Issuu, a well-known digital publishing platform that can be accessible through smartphones. The fact that the tool was developed by three different stakeholders - Edinburgh Tourism Action Group, Scottish Enterprise, and Edinburgh World Heritage Organization - helped to make it relevant for business, tourism and conservation interest.

What are the results?

All of Edinburgh's businesses can now use a very simple and practical tool to develop new business opportunities benefiting the World Heritage status of Edinburgh. This will also help to improve visitors' overall experiences to the World Heritage site. An update of the tool is due in 2014.

What lessons can others take from this?

The case study offers a great example of a multi-stakeholder effort to create World Heritage awareness among their local business sector. Moreover, it is proof of the great results that can be achieved when culture and heritage, tourism and business innovation schemes/organizations work together towards a common objective. Finally, it is an excellent example of a capacity building-business supporting tool, which has the possibility to be adapted to suit other World Heritage destinations.

The Old and New Towns of Edinburgh World Heritage Site Management Plan 2011-2016 also contains valuable information pertaining to stakeholder engagement, management, and conservation issues.

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Guide 4 - Case study: Old and New Towns of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)

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The World Heritage Status Report showed that 41% of visitors to Edinburgh are aware that it is a World Heritage site, and 17% of all visitors think that Edinburgh's World Heritage status influenced their choice.

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Looking for inspiration where to go on holiday?

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Green cycling and hiking adventuresSlovenia's landscape of mountains and lakes lends itself to outdoor adventure: nearly 60% of the country is covered in forests, and there are more than 40 parks and reserves. Some areas, such as Lake Bled, have seen an influx of tourists over recent years but much remains off the beaten track - and the government has a strategy for sustainable tourism growth.

Europe

Slovenia

Green cycling and hiking adventures
Slovenia's landscape of mountains and lakes lends itself to outdoor adventure: nearly 60% of the country is covered in forests, and there are more than 40 parks and reserves. Some areas, such as Lake Bled, have seen an influx of tourists over recent years but much remains off the beaten track - and the government has a strategy for sustainable tourism growth.

Opened last year, the 270km Juliana Trail, a hiking route through the Julian Alps, takes walkers away from some of the most visited parts of Triglav national park in a bid to combat overtourism. The circular trail, which starts at Kranjska Gora near the Italian border, is divided into 16 stages, with most of the daily routes starting at a railway station or bus stop.

Bike Slovenia Green offers another way of exploring a multi-stage itinerary through the Julian Alps, around Lake Bohinj and Lake Bled and on to the Adriatic coast. The series of one-day cycling loops visits places that have a Slovenia Green certificate, such as the karst village of Komen, known for fresh cheese ravioli, fresh herbs and prosciutto. Designed by sustainable travel agency Visit GoodPlace, and funded by the EU, the bike routes go through three wine regions, and take cyclists to family-run hotels via quiet roads and cycle paths.

Also new for 2020 is a Best of Slovenia By Train trip from Inntravel. Travelling via Vienna and Venice, it makes use of Slovenia's charming, old-fashioned rail network and takes in highlights from alpine Bohinj to capital Ljubljana and Piran on the Adriatic coast. (from £1,045 for seven nights, inntravel.co.uk).
Jane Dunford

Explore Sweden's eco-certified city
Almost everything you can do in Gothenburg, you can do with a clean conscience. For the past three years Sweden's industrial second city has topped the Global Destination Sustainability Index, thanks to its efforts to "minimise any negative impact on people and the environment". All major venues are eco-certified and 92% of hotel rooms hold an official eco-certification, making Gothenburg one of the world's greenest hotel cities. Even the Opera House, Concert Hall and Liseberg amusement park are eco-certified, and restaurants have good access to local and organic produce.

For the energetic, Gothenburg hosts the world's largest half marathon ... and the world's biggest annual swim-run event

Step off the train at the central station - you took the train, right? -and walk five minutes to the ferry stop opposite the Opera House. The Älvsnabben ferry plies a gentle loop up and down the river and it is going electric in 2020. Gothenburg is a small big city, or maybe a big small city, with a cultural scene that includes Way Out West, a three-day summer music festival that is 100% vegetarian and has reduced its carbon footprint year on year. And, in half an hour, you can be deep in the Bohuslän countryside, or kayaking up river to picturesque Jonsered, with its sustainable hotel Le Mat.

The Hagabion caf e and bar in the central Linné area is renowned for a vegetarian menu that changes daily. People gather here, too, for a drink before moving on to the many other restaurants, bars and venues nearby. At the heart of the city is the Gothia Towers hotel, the biggest hotel in Europe to be certified according to the Breeam standard for environmental certification. Out of season, rooms can be had for £100, though a luxury room with access to the spa and glass-bottomed pool on the 19th floor will cost (much) more.

The kitchen garden on the roof boasts Sweden's highest apiary, with 150,000 bees. The garden produce is K rav-certified for sustainability and, like the herbs and spices grown here, the honey is used in the dishes of the Upper House restaurant, and in its own beer (brewed in-house).

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Sauna at Frihamnen. Photograph: Beatrice Törnros

For the energetic, Gothenburg hosts the world's largest half marathon, with more than 60,000 runners. It also has many events for cyclists and swimmers, including the world's biggest annual swim-run event (1 August). Hire a bike to see the city and explore further afield. Put the bikes on the train for the 20-minute trip to the town of Kungsbacka, and cycle around Lygnern lake. Alternatively, stick to the southern coastal path from the centre to Särö island.

There is no shortage of spots for wild swimming at lakes in and around Gothenburg. A short bus ride away is Gunnebo Slott manor house and gardens, with its organic restaurant - and lakes nearby. Typing badplats (bathing spot) into Google Maps will bring up a wealth of places with wooden quays and ladders into the water. There's canoe hire on Surtesjön lake and nearby waters on the northern edge of the city, and sea-bathing to the south at Näset. On the island of Tjörn, further north, the Pilane outdoor sculpture park is breathtaking. For unwinding afterwards, there's a free public sauna at Frihamnen, across the river from central Gothenburg.
David Crouch

Val di Vara

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Vara valley, Liguria. Photograph: Alamy

Italy's 'greenest' valley
The rolling Vara valley in north-west Italy is not unusual in suffering a haemorrhage of young people from rural communities but it is unusual in its response: going greener. At the turn of the century, thanks to an enlightened mayor, farmers up and down the valley, which runs parallel to the coast between Genoa and La Spezia, started switching to organic production. The idea spread to hotels and restaurants, artisanal producers and tourist initiatives and led, in 2013, to the creation of the Val di Vara Biodistrict, to represent the businesses and run community events.

Today, 55% of the valley's 345 sq km of hilly terrain is under organic cultivation - compared with 11% in Italy as a whole (which in itself puts the UK's 2.9% to shame). And more than 100 business have organic certification. Farmers around San Pietro Vara are raising "wild" Limousin cattle with barely any human input and the Val di Vara dairy co-op makes cheeses to ancient recipes.

To work up an appetite, the swift-flowing Vara river and its tributaries offer kayaking, rafting and canyoning

The area's Bio Festival, launched in 2018, is now an annual event, with streetfood, games, livestock shows and music. And last summer the Biodistrict started running full-day bus tours of the valley from Levanto on the coast (€47 adult, €25 child, family 2+2 €141, including lunch and tastings).

In the past few years, young locals have opened five farms to the public and started 13 agriturismos, offering rustic rooms and farmhouse meals, plus jams, liqueurs, olive oil or meat to buy. Try Il Risveglio Naturale or Il Filo di Paglia. Local cycling enthusiast Marco runs five-hour e-bike tours of the valley - in Italian and English - from agriturismo L'Antico Cornio, with tastings of focaccia, cured meats, cheeses and wine (€60pp, book at foodyexperience.com).

The capital of Val di Vara is Varese Ligure, a walled town dating from 1161, with a castle, medieval churches and a 16th-century stone bridge. On a small riverside square, Pietro Picetti, who is in his 70s, hand-carves wooden moulds for stamping corzetti (or croxetti), the local, disc-shaped pasta - once with prominent families' coat of arms; now often just with pleasing patterns, or your initials! Visitors can have an organic lunch of corzetti pasta with walnut sauce at Albergo Amici in Varese Ligure, before stocking up on foodie gifts from, say, honey and fruit farm Cascina le Bosche or herb and saffron producer Le Piccole Erbe. Dinner could be at the equally organic Antica Locanda Luigina in Mattarana.

To work up an appetite for all this bounty, the Vara river and its tributaries offer kayaking, rafting and canyoning (valdivara.it) and the area is crisscrossed by footpaths including the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri - a 400km ridgetop cycling/hiking route. There's more adrenaline action on the high ropes and zipwires of Parco Avventura Val Di Vara.
Liz Boulter

Flims Laax Falera

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Photograph: Gaudenz Danuser

Eco-snow sports, Swiss-style
The Flims Laax Falera region in eastern Switzerland's Graub

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Where to go on holiday in 2020: the alternative hotlist

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Green cycling and hiking adventuresSlovenia's landscape of mountains and lakes lends itself to outdoor adventure: nearly 60% of the country is covered in forests, and there are more than 40 parks and reserves. Some areas, such as Lake Bled, have seen an influx of tourists over recent years but much remains off the beaten track - and the government has a strategy for sustainable tourism growth.

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British Council

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With this acknowledgement of their "greatness" comes all the trappings of modern day celebrity: money, power, influence and seemingly unbeknown to many, responsibility. For better or for worse, like it or loathe it, modern sportsmen are the role models of children everywhere.

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Gen Z teenagers talk about their future post COVID

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'So many revolutions to lead': Europe's Gen Z on their post-Covid future

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As part of the Guardian's 200th anniversary, we asked young people how the worst global pandemic in a century has affected their lives, hopes and dreams. Fifty from Europe's generation Z tell us how they see their future

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Inspiring people when it comes to health and wellbeing

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BBC Radio 4 - The Joe Wicks Podcast - Available now

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Available episodes of The Joe Wicks Podcast

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May be of great interest... Check out Edurne Pasaban

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Biographies of Salient Women website, which I started writing in April 2020, I have the satisfaction of offering 152 biographies of exceptional women from different countries.

On the website of " salientwomen ", that we began to translate into English, in April 2018, we reviewed the 152 biographies of exceptional women that we had previously published in Spanish.

My intention to spread the knowledge of extraordinary women has been well received.

I have endeavored to carefully present the lives and merits of women of 27 different nationalities.

It is appropriate to express my gratitude to the family and friends who have encouraged us, and who have contributed to publicize this website.

I have to thank the generous collaboration of Dania Souchay and the company " Dynamic Droides ". This help made this foray into the world of design and the internet possible.

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Biographies of salient women of all the world

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Biographies of Salient Women website, which I started writing in April 2020, I have the satisfaction of offering 152 biographies of exceptional women from different countries. On the website of " salientwomen ", that we began to translate into English, in April 2018, we reviewed the 152 biographies of exceptional women that we had previously published in Spanish.

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Important straits

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The Ever Given, a 400-meter (1,300-foot) container ship got stranded in Egypt's Suez Canal on Tuesday and has since been blocking the vital maritime passageway between Asia and Europe.

The suspension of traffic through the narrow channel has deepened problems for world trade already disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Dozens of ships - including several oil tankers - are now waiting either side of the canal, according to Refinitiv shipping data, while several others have been rerouted. That is likely to add up to 15 days to their journey.

On Friday, the Reuters news agency reported that efforts to free the ship had failed and may now take several more weeks. Unstable weather conditions may further complicate the dredging of sand from around the vessel.

The blockage could cost global trade $6-10 billion (€5-8.5 billion) a week, a study by German insurer Allianz suggested. The cost of shipping oil products, for example, has already doubled and delays to the global manufacturing supply chain, especially the auto industry, could hit consumers.

However, Suez is not the most vulnerable bottleneck for world trade. DW looks at the four chokepoints that a strong post-COVID economic recovery relies on.

Strait of Hormuz

The sea passage between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman that leads to the Indian Ocean is the most critical chokepoint for oil and gas.

Some 167 kilometers (90 miles) long, about a quarter of seaborne-traded oil and a third of the world's liquefied natural gas passes through the strait.

The route is particularly vulnerable due to Middle East geopolitics. The strait connects many different powers and oil market players, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq.

The actual width of the fairway for the huge tankers is roughly 3 kilometers in both directions, meaning the waterway could be easily controllable during a conflict.

During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the two sides sought to disrupt each other's oil exports plying the strait.

Iran has repeatedly threatened to disrupt oil shipments through the strait in retaliation for US sanctions aimed at its energy exports. At one point, Tehran threatened to mine the waterway.

In May 2019, four vessels - including two Saudi oil tankers - were attacked off the UAE coast near Fujairah, just outside the strait.

In January this year, Iran seized a South Korean-flagged tanker in Gulf waters and detained its crew.

Strait of Malacca

The 900-km long strait is Asia's primary chokepoint and one of the world's busiest shipping lanes. The waterway links Asia with the Middle East and Europe, carrying about 40% of global trade. More than 100,000 vessels ply the waterway every year.

At its narrowest point off Singapore, the strait is only 2.7 kilometers wide, creating a natural bottleneck, as well as potential for collisions, grounding or oil spills.

Some 16 million barrels per day of oil flowed through the waterway in 2016, making it the world's second most important energy passageway.

The strait has become increasingly important strategically to Beijing, with nearly 80% of China's crude oil imports passing through, from the Middle East and Africa.

Suez Canal

This artificial waterway connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and prevents ships from having to pass through the Cape of Good Hope, off South Africa. The canal knocks about 8,900 kilometers off a ship's journey time.

The Egyptian government expanded the canal in 2014, almost doubling the number of ships that can use the waterway per day from 49 to 97. Despite this, some supertankers can still not ply the canal, and some have to offload part of their cargo onto smaller vessels and reload at the other end.

Suez saw about 12% of world trade volume pass through last year. The Suez Canal Authority reported that a record of 18,880 ships traversed the passageway in 2020, carrying more than 1 billion tons of cargo.

At least two other ships have got stuck in the canal since 2008 - one forced a three-day closure.

The canal is also seen as highly vulnerable to political unrest in the Middle East. However, the Arab Spring and subsequent fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 had little impact on traffic.

In 2013, Cairo said it had foiled an attack on a container ship which was aimed at disrupting shipping in the busy Suez Canal.

Panama Canal

The 80-kilometer Panama canal spans the narrowest part of Panama and connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. One of world's busiest shipping routes, it has historically handled about 5% of world trade and nearly 14,000 transits were made last year.

In 2016, Panama opened the long-delayed $5.4 billion expansion, which triples the size of ships that can travel the canal.

In theory, 98% of the world's shipping can now ply the route, avoiding the lengthy and hazardous Cape Horn route around the southern tip of South America.

Although the canal isn't subject to the same geopolitical risks as other chokepoints, the coronavirus pandemic and adverse weather have created bottlenecks in recent months, delaying the transport of container ships and supplies of gas from the US Gulf Coast.

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Suez Canal blockage: 4 of the biggest trade chokepoints | DW | 27.03.2021

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The Ever Given, a 400-meter (1,300-foot) container ship got stranded in Egypt's Suez Canal on Tuesday and has since been blocking the vital maritime passageway between Asia and Europe. The suspension of traffic through the narrow channel has deepened problems for world trade already disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Excellent series where famous people present inspiring persons. Check out Maya Angelou, Jim Morrison, Prince,...

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BBC Sounds - Great Lives - Available Episodes

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Listen to the latest episodes of Great Lives on BBC Sounds

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Simukai Chigudu about his life in Zimbabwe and Oxford. Very worth reading

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here was no single moment when I began to sense the long shadow that Cecil John Rhodes has cast over my life, or over the university where I am a professor, or over the ways of seeing the world shared by so many of us still living in the ruins of the British empire. But, looking back, it is clear that long before I arrived at Oxford as a student, long before I helped found the university's Rhodes Must Fall movement, long before I even left Zimbabwe as a teenager, this man and everything he embodied had shaped the worlds through which I moved.

I could start this story in 1867, when a boy named Erasmus Jacobs found a diamond the size of an acorn on the banks of the Orange river in what is now South Africa, sparking the diamond rush in which Rhodes first made his fortune. Or I could start it a century later, when my grandfather was murdered by security forces in the British colony of Rhodesia. Or I could start it today, when the infamous statue of Rhodes that peers down on to Oxford's high street may finally be on the verge of being taken down.

But for me, it starts most directly in January 1999, when I was 12 years old. That was when my parents first drove me from our home on the outskirts of the city through the imposing black gates of St George's College, Harare. Dressed in a red blazer, red-and-white striped tie, khaki shirt and shorts, grey knee-high socks and a cartoonishly floppy red hat, I looked like an English schoolboy on safari. As our car climbed towards the college, I peered up in awe at the granite castle tower, crowned with a full set of crenellations, that dominates the grounds. It was as if I had entered one of the last redoubts of Britain's global imperium.

Saints, as I would learn to call it, is among the oldest and most prestigious schools in Zimbabwe. It was founded in 1896, just five years after the British South Africa Company colonised the inland region of southern Africa north of the Limpopo river. The colonists dubbed the area Rhodesia, in honour of the company's founder, Cecil Rhodes. Backed by the British army, Rhodes's colonising forces dispossessed millions of Africans of their land and created an apartheid state that endured for 90 years. Saints was established in the mould of the University of Oxford and public schools like Eton to prepare young white Rhodesians to carry on the country's political and economic regime. For nearly a century it was devoted to educating the scions of the country's wealthy white settlers.

Beginning in 1963, the college had also accepted a handful of boys from the country's small Black upper class, and after a 15-year liberation war that won Zimbabwe its independence in 1980, the school began admitting select sons of the country's new Black middle classes, like me. When I passed the exacting admissions exam - four papers, in maths and English, notoriously difficult to complete - I felt, in my juvenile way, that I had earned my place in the world. But when I arrived, in January 1999, I was suddenly adrift in a Zimbabwe unlike any I had known before.

At 7.25am on my first day, the school bell rang, and I joined the other boys in their red blazers filing into the Beit Hall. The hall was named after an Anglo-German gold and diamond magnate who employed Rhodes when the latter first arrived in southern Africa. As I glanced upward to an interior balcony, I noticed a series of polished mahogany panels with gold lettering bearing the names of Old Georgians who had won the Rhodes scholarship, which sends about 100 international graduates to study at Oxford every year. I could see that most of the names belonged to white students.

During the assembly, new pupils were informed that we had a two-week grace period in which to master the college's peculiar traditions and hierarchies. We would then be tested on school history and expected to follow local custom to a T. Over the grace period, I anxiously crammed the college mottoes, the names of all the prefects and captains of sports, the history of the founding fathers and the first six pupils to attend the college, the numbers of Old Georgians who had died in the first and second world wars. At Saints, this was the past that seemed to matter most.

Discipline was important, too. I quickly learned to live in fear of the prefects, senior boys entrusted with meting out punishments for even the most minor transgressions. A careless misstep could result in manual labour - a routine punishment where we had to dig fields and carry bricks for hours in the heat of an unforgiving sun. Even worse was the threat of being sent to the headmaster for "cuts". I imagined the headmaster's cane whipping across my tender buttocks, raising a fine welt of swollen tissue. No, thank you.

Saints's rituals of dominance and sadism were only some of the ways that it taught its boys to accept the logic of colonialism. Wasn't it only natural that older students ought to wield power over younger ones, or that those who excelled at sports or schoolwork be granted privileges, like the ability to tread on certain college lawns, that were denied to lesser children? Wasn't it right that those who stepped out of line be forced to labour, or even whipped? These were perfect lessons for a world in which one race thought itself worthy of violently subjugating another.After independence, Saints's ways were embraced by a Black middle class that had imbibed colonial culture and internalised that culture's sense of superiority.

For my parents, the decision to send me to this former imperial training ground was a fraught one. My mother was a women's rights advocate, born in 1957 to a large working-class family in what was then the British Protectorate of Uganda. My father, born six years earlier, grew up under the full weight of racial segregation in Rhodesia, where 250,000 white people, barely 3% of the population, had usurped more than half of the country's agricultural land and owned almost all of its commerce and industry. Black people were denied the franchise, their movements were controlled by a punitive internal passport system, and they died at heinous rates from chronic malnutrition, high infant mortality and limited access to basic health services. Meanwhile, white people in Rhodesia enjoyed the highest per capita number of private swimming pools anywhere in the world.

Radicalised by the condition of Black people, my father fought against the Rhodesian government in the liberation war that began in the early 60s. During the conflict, my uncles and an aunt were incarcerated by the Rhodesian state, my father was nearly killed on the battlegrounds bordering Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and my grandfather was lynched by Rhodesian security officers.

Following independence, my father joined Zimbabwe's civil service, and he and my mother began a suburban life that was modest in means but not in aspiration for their son. St George's appealed to them, as it did to many Black families like ours, because of the cultural and social foothold it provided. Boys from Saints regularly went on to study at Oxford, or play on Zimbabwe's celebrated national cricket team. But within the cloistered world of the college, the war of independence my father fought seemed to be only half-complete.

Formal segregation in Zimbabwe had ended nearly two decades earlier, but even in 1999 the college signalled its prestige through its racial makeup. We had a white headmaster and a white rector. The teachers with the strongest reputations for excellence were white. We also had a high percentage of white students, about half of the student body in a country where white people made up less than 1% of the population.

Without quite realising it, this was a racial logic I readily accepted. In his memoir of growing up white in Africa, the Zimbabwean writer Peter Godwin recalls meeting a handful of Black students at Saints in the 60s: "They didn't want to discuss African things. They wanted to be like whites. They spoke English without much of an African accent." I suppose I was much the same. I barely spoke Shona, the language my father was raised speaking, but had a fluent command of English. I resented white racism but aspired to the cultural capital of whiteness.

It was obvious, though, how conservative white Zimbabweans - "Rhodies", Black people call them - saw me, whether I wore Saints's red blazer or not. "Chigudu," one white classmate said to me, "what's the difference between a nigger and a bucket of shit?" I looked at him blankly. "The bucket," he chortled.

Early on, I committed myself to the art of survival at Saints: mine was a two-pronged strategy of conforming to expectations and never questioning authority. I kept a low profile throughout my first year, maintaining a steady, mediocre performance in all aspects of school life. My mother worried I might cede whatever talents I had to this strategy, and urged me to be more ambitious. I took heed and, around the time I turned 14, I started to apply myself seriously in my studies. I refused to be defeated by Thomas Hardy's dense prose, I agonised over the difference between ionic and covalent bonds, I memorised Latin noun declensions. I began to excel academically, and found the success intoxicating. But as I grew in enthusiasm for Saints, I failed to notice another way that colonialism was still operating at the college: we were learning almost nothing about the troubled country that lay beyond those black gates.

gnorance of history serves many ends. Sometimes it papers over the crimes of the present by attributing too much power to the past. Perhaps more often, it covers up past crimes in order to legitimise the way society is arranged in the present. As a teenager, I saw these dynamics play out in the former colony of Rhodesia. I would later discover how much more potent they were in Britain, the metropole.

By the turn of the millennium, outside the walled-off kingdom of Saints, Zimbabwe's colonial legacy was unfolding in dramatic and violent ways. Although formal segregation had ended in 1980, the world that apartheid built had never fully ceased. By the beginning of my second year, the country was descending into what would soon be called "the crisis".

Throughout the 90s, the government of Robert Mugabe, who had been in power since independence, had lost popular support. Corruption, economic austerity, the country's involvement in a war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a failure to fully address the fundamental problem of who owned Zimbabwe's land - white settlers or Black Africans - all threatened Mugabe's power. A new political party arose that claimed to stand against Mugabe and for the values of democracy and civil rights.

Mugabe responded by blaming all of Zimbabwe's problems on its history of colonialism. And no figure was more foundational to that history than Cecil Rhodes. In 1877, Rhodes called for the British, "the finest race in the world", to rehabilitate "the most despicable of human beings" by bringing them under British dominion. Two decades later, he paid for the conquest of Rhodesia with the profits he had extracted from Black labourers in his South African gold and diamond mines. After seizing land from Africans, Rhodes's British South Africa Company forced them to toil on it as indentured labourers. As one early biographer put it, Rhodes "used blacks ruthlessly ... giving them wages that made them little better than slaves". This was the basis for the apartheid regime that existed in Rhodesia until political independence.

It was true that Rhodes was a racist and imperialist who built a society based on racism and exploitation. But Mugabe used this history to deny the corruption of his own regime. He made white farmers the scapegoats for the country's economic problems and tarred the opposition as un-African. He argued that the values his political rivals stood for were a cover for neoliberal policies that, like colonialism before them, would only serve to exploit Zimbabwe on behalf of the west. Real nationalism, Mugabe said, was about finishing the anti-colonial liberation struggle by taking back the land.

In 2000, bolstered by Mugabe's rhetoric, Black war veterans began occupying commercial farmland owned by white people. The occupations spread widely across the country. They were sponsored by the ruling party, while partisan militias carried out evictions on the ground. In less than five years, the number of white farmers actually farming the land dwindled from about 4,500 to under 500, while as many as 200,000 Black farm workers lost their jobs, and often with them their homes. About 10 white farmers were killed by militias, while the number of black farm workers killed by the same militias was just under 200, with many thousands more suffering violent assaults.

The foreign and white media soon introduced its own distortions into the crisis, portraying the occupations as a racially motivated attack against white people, and not as a violent political uprising rooted in the complex history of colonialism. At home, my father praised Mugabe and lambasted western powers as hypocrites who preached democracy but practised imperialism. He had no patience for the opposition party, whose members he saw as stooges serving the interests of white capitalists in Zimbabwe and Britain. I later came to see the land seizures as acts of political and economic grievance that answered directly to Zimbabwe's colonial history, and to feel that, in many ways, Mugabe and my father were right: real emancipation from that history could not be accomplished if white people still owned more than their share of the land.

At the time, though, I accepted their arguments in part because I connected the aims of the land struggle with my distaste for the racist Rhodies I was surrounded by at Saints. But then Mugabe took aim at schools. He argued Saints and its ilk represented a refusal of former colonisers to fully acquiesce to African leadership (again, not entirely wrong). His Ministry of Education attempted to implement a state-controlled curriculum that would teach Mugabe's version of history. I panicked. I was supportive of decolonisation if it ended with farms, but schools were another matter. I worried that I would be forced to sit local exams that lacked the credibility to earn me university admission overseas. The thought of going to university in Africa had not even occurred to me.

The educational reforms I dreaded had not come to pass in private schools by the time I completed my O-levels in 2002, but Zimbabwe was facing economic and political meltdown. Sanctions were soon imposed on the country and Mugabe was condemned by western governments, the media and NGOs for human rights violations. My comprehension of "the crisis" was rudimentary, but I saw its effects in my daily life. Even in the wealthy bubble of Saints, textbooks and chemistry sets were suddenly in short supply. Inflation and therefore school fees spiralled out of control, forcing staff and students to leave the college in droves. The headmaster was arrested after accusing Mugabe, in racist terms, of rigging that year's election.

Though my parents believed in redressing the colonial theft of African land, like many other Black parents of their class, they recognised that their children would have better educational opportunities outside Zimbabwe. So in 2003, I joined a wave of young Zimbabweans emigrating for education abroad. My mother travelled with me to England and deposited me at Stonyhurst College, a 400-year-old Jesuit boarding school in rural Lancashire on which much of Saints's architecture and pedagogy had been based. She cried all the way down the school's near mile-long driveway.

t wasn't until arriving in England that I began to appreciate that colonialism had furnished not only Zimbabwe but Britain, too, with fiercely held national mythologies. In both countries, colonialism had left behind ideas and institutions that stood in the way of a more honest reckoning with the past.

At Stonyhurst, I felt like I had stepped out of Saints's pantomime version of English boarding schools and into the real thing. But I was taken aback by the view of Zimbabwe I soon encountered. If Mugabe liked to claim that colonialism was the cause of all the country's problems, many of my new classmates were equally simplistic in blaming them entirely on Mugabe. One even suggested that recolonising Zimbabwe might end its woes. To a large extent, they were parroting the British and international media, which portrayed Mugabe as an icon of evil fixated on murdering white people. Even Hello! magazine devoted a five-page special on Zimbabwe to covering the death of a white farmer. Little to nothing was said, in the media or elsewhere, of Zimbabwe's colonial legacy, or of the suffering of Black people under Mugabe's regime.

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At the same time, it was dawning on me how little I myself knew about my own country. I began to read more about Zimbabwe's history, and was startled by what I found. In particular, I had known nothing about the Gukurahundi massacres perpetrated by the state following the war of liberation. In the worst case, as many as 20,000 civilians from the Ndebele people were murdered by the Zimbabwean army over a period of five years in the mid-80s. It was a double shock: not only at the size of the atrocity, but at the scope of the ignorance I had been encouraged into at home and at school.

Having once been proud of my success at Saints, I was suddenly ashamed at how sheltered and privileged my life had been. Motivated by an uneasy combination of guilt, idealism and a longing for home, I resolved to become a doctor and go back to Zimbabwe to help heal the nation. After finishing at Stonyhurst I took up a place at Newcastle University to study medicine. I was one of very few Black faces in the medical school, and the only one from continental Africa. Racism was no less common than it had been at Saints, but it took a variety of forms. Sometimes it was direct: I was called a "golliwog" by patients while on clinical rotation and told to "fuck off back to Africa" on nights out in Newcastle city centre. More often, it was subtle and patronising: white students touched my hair without my consent or expressed incredulity at the eloquence of my spoken English. One even called me "the whitest Black man I know".

The more my white friends made it clear that I didn't fit their notions of what it meant to be Black or African, the more I, too, questioned the authenticity of my Blackness. At the same time, in Zimbabwe, people like me were cast as sellouts who preferred their former coloniser to the motherland. I felt as if I was losing my grip on who I was. For a while I sustained myself with my fantasy of returning home to treat the sick. But, as Zimbabwe's crisis grew larger and larger, my clinical training felt inadequate. Back home, inflation was out of control. On a visit in 2008, I bought an ice-cream sundae in a Harare suburb for 38 billion Zimbabwe dollars. Public services, including healthcare and sanitation, had largely disintegrated. Major shortages of basic commodities - such as fuel, cooking oil, bread and water - compounded the effects of political turmoil and violence. Cholera was competing for lives with one of the highest HIV rates in the world.

By the time I qualified as a doctor in 2010, I regularly spent my quiet night shifts in the hospital reading books about Zimbabwe and Africa. Most of the ones I could find in local bookshops were accounts by western journalists and memoirists who decried aspects of colonialism but thought African politics was ineluctably despotic. In light of what Mugabe had done to Zimbabwe, many of these authors argued, maybe colonialism wasn't that bad.

Not everything they said about colonialism or Mugabe or Africa was entirely wrong, but little of it struck me as entirely right either. In a sense, I was shedding the world and the worldview I had been inducted into at Saints, but I wasn't quite sure what I should replace it with. Once again, I felt at sea. I decided to commit myself to studying African history and politics, in the hopes not necessarily of helping my country, but simply of better understanding it. After three years of practising medicine, I left the NHS and took up a scholarship at the University of Oxford, where I once again found myself directly in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes.

hen I arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 2013, I was surprised to discover the ghosts of Zimbabwe's colonial past all around me. None haunted the place more than Rhodes, who had been a student at Oriel college in the 1870s, and later gave millions to the university through a number of gifts and bequests. Most striking of these to me was Rhodes House in central Oxford, a gathering place for recipients of the scholarship. (To my great unease, the Rhodes scholars I met often referred to themselves with the same term Black Zimbabweans refer to racist white people - "Rhodies".) Rhodes House is a grand building in the style of a Cotswold manor, with one conspicuously incongruous feature: on top of the building's copper-clad dome perches an enormous bronze carving that I recognised immediately - the Zimbabwe Bird.

The sculpture is a copy of one of a half dozen or so 11th-century carvings stolen in the late 19th century from the ancient city known as Great Zimbabwe, in the country's south-eastern hills. Rhodes believed the sculptures too sophisticated to have been fashioned by an African culture, and attributed them instead to a Mediterranean civilisation. In time, I came to see the carving atop Rhodes house as the negative image of what would soon become a much more famous statue: a larger-than-life likeness of Rhodes that peers down on to Oxford's High Street from a niche high up Oriel college's facade, above a Latin inscription thanking him for his munificence. If the statue of Rhodes portrayed him as a great benefactor, the Zimbabwe bird stood for the wealth extraction and human exploitation on which Rhodes's fortune was built, as well as for the racist ideology that helped him justify his colonial programme.

Colonialism continued to shape Oxford in less concrete ways, too. I wasn't there long before I learned that the dim view of Africa and Africans held by Rhodes had been shared by many of Oxford's most esteemed historians. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who for a quarter century held Oxford's most prestigious history chair, infamously pronounced in the 60s that there was no African history, "only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness." Before Europeans brought history to Africa and places like it, Trevor-Roper went on, there was merely "the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe". This was only a touch crasser than what a Fellow at Balliol College said to me at a dinner in my second year at Oxford: "African politics? What a mess. How could you possibly fix that?"

Among the handful of Oxford scholars who actually studied Africa, however, most had a nuanced understanding of the continent and shared my disgust at Rhodes. William Beinart, who was then the Rhodes Professor of race relations, quipped that his title was an embarrassment, like having the position "Goebbels Professorship of Communication". But although my professors at the African Studies Centre were rigorous scholars, I couldn't help but notice that they were all white. This is true throughout academia: there aren't a massive number of Black people in the UK - only about 3.3% of the population - but there are far fewer Black academic faculty (about 2%) and about 140 Black professors in the whole country.

My studies and my family's history as colonial subjects came together most painfully in a seminar on the history of political imprisonment and punishment in Africa. My father had told me little about his incarceration in a Rhodesian prison during the liberation war, except to say that the conditions were "inhuman" and that the prison guards caned his buttocks so badly that they streamed with blood and he couldn't sit for weeks. Now, in Oxford, I spent every Friday morning in a sterile seminar room where Prof Jocelyn Alexander guided my classmates and me through a discussion about how colonial states - most dramatically, settler states like Rhodesia - employed corporal and capital punishment, mass incarceration and labour detention on a large scale as a means of creating social order in Africa and shoring up white political domination.

Of course, white domination and colonialism wasn't just something that happened in or to the colonies. The more time I spent in Oxford, the more I realised how colonialism had remade the entire material and intellectual world of the British empire, especially its most elite university. Oxford is strewn with tributes to men of empire who have scholarships, portraits, busts, engravings, statues, libraries and even buildings dedicated to their memory. Christopher Codrington, a slave plantation owner, bequeathed £1.2m in today's money to All Souls College to erect one of the university's most magnificent libraries (which, until last year, bore his name). George Curzon, the viceroy of India who presided over the Indian famine of 1899-1900 in which about 4 million people died, is memorialised at his alma mater, Balliol. Augustus Pitt Rivers, a 19th-century colonial officer, founded Oxford's archaeological museum, which long doubled up as a storage facility for loot stolen during the British empire.

From the start, the quest for knowledge of Africa was motivated by the aim of conquest. Even today, African studies has an air of the 1884 Berlin Conference, which heralded the "Scramble for Africa" - but instead of European powers claiming and trading different parts of the continent, it's mostly white scholars staking out their territory and asserting expertise over ethnicity in Kenya, democracy in Ghana or refugees in Uganda. After I stayed on at Oxford to pursue a doctorate, I began attending African studies conferences throughout the UK, only to find mostly white scholars talking to predominantly white audiences.

In other words, I was surrounded in Oxford not by the ghosts of colonialism, but by its living dead. As at Saints, colonialism at Oxford had never really ended, and couldn't. It wasn't a period that had passed, but a historical mass that bent everything around its gravity. As I had in Newcastle, I began to question the strange place I occupied in this contorted world. Every day, I left Africa more completely, while becoming more intimately involved with the colonial project that the university represented. In a sense, I was complicit in that project - but I was also alienated and angered by it. I was at a loss about how to navigate the ambiguities of my position.

Then, on 9 March 2015, a student at the University of Cape Town hurled a bucket of human shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes. Suddenly, everything that I and many of my fellow Black students had been feeling about Oxford came into sharp focus. A movement to redress the colonial legacy of neglecting and denigrating Black students was afoot in South Africa. Before I knew it, I would become a leader in a fight to remake Oxford, too.

e called our work decolonisation. There were several dozen of us - Black and brown students who were born in Britain or its former colonies, African American students who saw links between decolonial politics and anti-racism work in the US, and a number of white students. Our goal was to slay the racist ideologies that still held sway in various disciplines, to bring more Black people into academia at every level, and to end the glorification of the men who had dedicated their lives to advancing the colonial project. The scale of these ambitions was core to our politics. We were not interested in half measures or compromises with institutional racism. We knew it would be an uphill battle. As one of my friends cautioned me, "You know what they say about Oxford, Simukai? 'Change is good. But no change is better.'"

To draw attention to the fight, we decided to focus on a single object, the statue of Rhodes on Oriel college's facade, borrowing the name of the student movement in South Africa: Rhodes Must Fall. I had originally opposed this tactic, worrying that focusing on the statue would obscure our larger mission. But my friend and fellow organiser Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh eventually convinced me that the fight over the statue would be an important litmus test, revealing just how committed - or resistant - the university and its various members were to ending racism in all its forms.

The first action of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford was to protest a debate at the Oxford Union Society on the legacy of colonialism in May 2015. We wanted to press the point that colonialism was not a thing of the past. When we arrived at the debate, we discovered to our astonishment that the Union had inadvertently beaten us to the punch: the bar was advertising a cocktail called the "Colonial Comeback" with a flyer depicting Black hands in manacles. Racist attitudes were obviously alive and well. We posted photos of the flyer to social media, and they soon went viral, prompting national outrage.

A few months later, in November, Rhodes Must Fall organised a 300-person strong protest outside Oriel college. Ten times that number had signed a petition demanding that the statue of Rhodes be taken down and housed in a museum. Protesters condemned the statue as "an open glorification of the racist and bloody project of British colonialism", and people chanted in call-and-response, "Rhodes Must Fall! Take it Down!".

I tracked the protest from Harare, where I was researching my PhD, gathering harrowing testimonies from human rights activists, politicians and the urban poor about how they had suffered during the country's 2008 cholera outbreak, in which 100,000 people were infected and more than 4,000 people died. I wanted to understand how a simple bacterial infection became a public health disaster and a political scandal in a country that once boasted the best healthcare system in Africa. Countless western critics laid the blame for this crisis at the feet of Robert Mugabe. Mugabe's government hit back with an absurd counternarrative claiming that the cholera outbreak was racist, terrorist, biological warfare from the west to undermine African sovereignty. I asked one doctor, a friend of mine from Saints, whether he believed in the government's anti-colonial rhetoric. "I am anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial," he said, ruefully. "I know that Great Britain is wealthy in part because it has plundered countries like ours. Nevertheless, our leadership has failed us."

When I returned to Oxford in January 2016, I began debating Rhodes Must Fall at student society meetings, colleges, other universities and in the press. Were we historically illiterate, attempting, as some of our opponents ironically charged, to "whitewash" history? Unlike many of our critics, we at least recognised that the statue of Rhodes did not actually exist in the past. It is not a sterile historical relic, or some accurate record of prior events. It is a piece of self-conscious propaganda designed to present an ennobled image of Rhodes for as long as it stands. (Mugabe was using a similar strategy when he tried to rewrite Zimbabwean history.) If anyone was trying to erase the past - specifically the history of subjugation and suffering on which his fortune was built - it was Rhodes. I had to wonder why many eminent white commentators were so attached to him.

The ultimate point was never to weigh the soul of Rhodes, and find out whether he was "really" a racist. It was to try to uproot the racism in the soul of the institutions built in his image. It was apparent that many of our critics, even some of those who knew something about colonial history, couldn't appreciate how Rhodes and the colonial project had intimately shaped lives like mine. They couldn't fathom the ways in which colonialism had never really ended.

As a collective, we thought we were making progress on our aims when Oriel College pledged to launch a six-month listening exercise to gather evidence and opinions to help decide on the future of the statue. But, a mere six weeks later, in late January 2016, the college reneged on this pledge, stating that it would not remove the statue of the imperialist on the grounds that there was "overwhelming" support to keep it. It was later revealed Oriel stood to lose £100m in donor gifts were it to take down the statue. I was crushed, and for a long time it seemed like Rhodes Must Fall had failed.

our years later, in May 2020, I sat alone in my flat in Oxford watching the video of the brutal torture and murder of George Floyd at the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. After my shock came anguish and rage. For days on end, I consumed the news and commentary on the killing, until my mind was foggy and my body ached. I can't tell you if I thought about my father's father, who was murdered by the Rhodesian state before I was born, but I know that, like many Black people, I experienced Floyd's death as an intimate and personal trauma. If you have ever been on the sharp end of anti-Black racism, it is not difficult to identify with the suffering of other Black people under all kinds of racist regimes.

Ten days after Floyd's death, the heads of all the Oxford colleges - every single one of them white - wrote an open letter in the Guardian claiming that they stood in solidarity with Black students and affirming their commitment to equal dignity and respect. I immediately thought of Gary Younge's piercing observation that white people periodically "discover" racism "the same way that teenagers discover sex: urgently, earnestly, voraciously and carelessly, with great self-indulgence but precious little self-awareness."

It had been four years since Rhodes Must Fall had seemingly dissipated. There had been a few small changes at the university - Hugh Trevor-Roper's name was stripped from a room in the history faculty - and at least one more substantive reversal: the Pitt Rivers Museum began repatriating some of its stolen works. ( Dan Hicks, one of the museum's curators, has since written that Rhodes Must Fall "shattered the complacency" at the institution.) But the main aims of our work had not been far advanced, and the statue of Rhodes still stood.

I had remained in Oxford, completing my doctorate before being appointed to the faculty as an associate professor of African politics. As one of the few people from the first wave of Rhodes Must Fall who was still at the university, I was asked to speak at an antiracism protest on 9 June. I stood before a crowd of thousands gathered on Oxford's high street outside Oriel College, beneath the Rhodes statue. As soon as I took the microphone, the words "Rhodes Must Fall!" came out of my mouth with a guttural force that I couldn't contain. The crowd responded with thundering applause.

On 17 June, Oriel College's governing body expressed its wish to remove both the Cecil John Rhodes statue and a plaque commemorating him. To implement this, the college launched an independent Commission of Inquiry tasked with considering the Rhodes legacy and wider concerns about inclusivity, access and experiences of Black and other minority ethnic students at the college. A formal decision to remove the statue is expected later this year. Meanwhile, All Souls College removed the slaver Christopher Codrington's name from its iconic library, and University College appointed the first Black head of a college in university history, Valerie Amos. Progress is slow, and never inevitable, but it can visit even Oxford.

I am often asked how I feel about being an associate professor at Oxford, specialising in African politics. Do I see any contradiction in working for the institution that I am agitating to change? Who is the target audience of my writing - privileged, often white students, or my fellow Africans? The answers to such questions are long. However, there's a fallacy in thinking that Africa is where I am needed most. Yes, I remain committed to writing about the combustible politics of the country of my birth, and I hope the true promises of liberation will be fully realised one day. But Oxford, Britain, and the west must be decolonised, too. Essential to this is advancing a richer, more complex view of the imperial past and its bearing on the present. Zimbabwe is not Britain's troubled former colony - it is its mirror. As the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe humbly put it: "I would suggest from my privileged position in African and western culture some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystification but quite simply as a continent of people - not angels but not rudimentary souls either."

* This article was amended on 15 January 2021 to clarify details of Rhodes' financial gifts to the University of Oxford, which amounted to millions and not £100,000 as an earlier version said. The latter sum was Rhodes's donation to Oriel college specifically. Also, the Zimbabwe Bird on the dome of Rhodes House is made from bronze, not soapstone.

* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, sign up to the long read weekly email here, and find our podcasts here.

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'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes

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The long read: After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine - as well as their own

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A letter

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As director of Birmingham Museums from 2013 to 2020, I led a process of rethinking how the museums of Britain's youngest and most diverse city could better serve all its communities. Simukai Chigudu's article on decolonisation was therefore of great interest ( 'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, 14 January). However, it raises issues that deserve further consideration:

(1) Are the symbols of imperialism best housed in museums? Around 98% of all museum collections are inaccessible in store. Even on display, these objects would be seen by many fewer people and with less impact than in their original positions. Why do we not make the effort to interpret the imperialist legacy of our townscapes in their full historic and architectural context?

(2) The British empire was not an isolated historical phenomenon. It would be interesting to compare human cultures from Assyria to America, with a view to understanding the behaviours and beliefs that compel some societies towards empire-building.

(3) The persistent ability of the British class system to label groups and individuals as "other", and thus justify many forms of overt and covert discrimination, would repay examination, if not extirpation. Dr Chigudu's article shows that this is as active as it was 50 years ago, when a female postgraduate at Oxford could be regaled by male students with Scottish jokes showing how mean, unattractive, stupid and of inferior class we were, and invited to fuck off back to Scotland. However, really serious prejudice could be observed at senior levels.
Dr Ellen McAdam
Marston Green, West Midlands

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Imperialism and the British class system | Letters

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As director of Birmingham Museums from 2013 to 2020, I led a process of rethinking how the museums of Britain's youngest and most diverse city could better serve all its communities. Simukai Chigudu's article on decolonisation was therefore of great interest ( 'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, 14 January).

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We know that it takes an enlightened leader to reposition an organization to provide also value for society and the planet. And we also know that there aren't enough such leaders. However, latest research shows that there is hope: any engaged employee can increase their changemaker potential by inviting external stakeholders to traditionally internal decisions-making meetings. The current digital meetings are a great bridge for this. Learn here more about the magic of external stakeholders in triggering the organizational mindset shift towards creating positive value. What lesson does COVID-19 crisis have for business?
Covid has shown us how important it is for organizations to become resilient. There is one guaranteed way to increase your resilience, and that is by orienting yourself to the burning challenges that society and the world face today. Pioneering organizations do this by matching their core competencies with these challenges in order to develop new business models and revenue streams for their business. This requires you to create value, no longer just for your shareholder, or even stakeholders, but to think beyond the existing markets and clients to think broader. The question becomes: How can you as an organization with all the competencies, resources, and capacities you have contribute to solving societal and environmental challenges that are out there?
How do leading positive impact organizations accomplish this?
The pioneers show that in order to transform from a traditional organization to a positive impact organization, there are two predictors of success:

1. an enlightened leader, meaning somebody who gets the benefits of contributing value to society beyond just looking for creating value for your business, and

2. an organization that is capable to work outside of its business boundaries, as effectively as internally. I call this the co-creative organization. In addition to managing your business internally, you need to learn how to be co-creative outside, and not just the CEO, but actually many people in your organization.

So that's why I talk about two mindset shifts: 1) one of the leader who needs to shift somehow the purpose of the organization to want to create more value than just for shareholders. And 2) the mindset shift of the organization where suddenly a sufficient number of employees in the organization learn how to work creatively outside of their boundaries and make sense for their own organization out of it. This external fluency is an entirely new expertise that typically doesn't get developed in business schools.
But there aren't enough such leaders, are there?
Indeed, there are unfortunately there aren't enough leaders. But our research offers great hope. Since it takes two things, the leader, and a co-creative organization, I have some ways to make sure that your organization can become co-creative. Even if you don't have an enlightened leader, at least you now have one of the two success factors. And we have seen that process of becoming co creative co creative becomes a mindset shift trigger for the CEO. By engaging in the practices to become co-creative, there is a transformation. Even with the leader so you may have initially a leader who doesn't get it.
Are you saying anybody can bring about change?
Indeed, we are calling them intrapreneurs or change-makers. It could be the head of sustainability, the head of strategy, head of innovation, who says: "Hey, we're going to bring in such new practices". In addition, there is a younger generation, an amazing amount of changemakers that are already kind of intrapreneurs that are ready to bring in a lot of energy, new thinking and dynamism, to be the changemakers that can bring in that that can work on that co-creation part.
But what would such a change agent do?
There is a method for turning a traditional organization into a co-creative one. There is a specific way to bring in external stakeholders. I call them Collaboratory events. The change agent invites constructive external stakeholders and together with them the company participants develop a solution to a problem that is out there. In that one-day workshop, particularly if you have the CEO present, our research shows that something happens with people. Exposure to different thinking, arguments, ideas, perspectives opens your mind. And sometimes, the little opening that happens triggers a mindset shift. A mindset shift is nothing else than an expansion of mind. The key to the organizational mindset shift is all about creating triggering incidents where participants minds expands. There are specific proven processes for this. My book " Five Superpowers for Co-creators " is all about it.
So what do you suggest for changemakers out there?
If you have an appetite for helping your organization to identify what are the positive opportunities in there and get together with the innovators and the strategists in your business together, what you need to do is to find a professional facilitator, ideally somebody trained with the SDGXCHANGE methodology, and organize a multi-stakeholder meeting. You pick a day, invite some external stakeholders and a diverse range of your work colleagues - new and long-time serving your organization, all ages, genders, backgrounds and skills. And together with a skilled facilitator, the group has a conversation about what could be the positive role or contribution of your business to address these issues out there. This is what it would mean to put yourself on the "offense" team.
Take-away message
Even if you work in an organization that currently isn't focused on creating a positive impact for society and the world, and your leader doesn't necessarily get the importance of such an orientation, there is something you can do: find ways to bring in external stakeholders to your next meeting you have in your department. Any meeting that benefits from a broader perspective and new ideas will be perfect for this. With this simple act, you will start broadening the mindset of your colleagues and help position your organization for a mindset shift. Be surprised with how the positive benefits start to spread in your organization.

If you need help in how to go about this, feel free to reach out to me katrin@katrinmuff.com.

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We know that it takes an enlightened leader to reposition an organization to provide also value for society and the planet. And we also know that there aren't enough such leaders. However, latest research shows that there is hope: any engaged employee can increase their changemaker potential by inviting external stakeholders to traditionally internal decisions-making meetings.

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Underdogs from the 2016 Olympic Games

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doping and Zika infections, the 2016 Olympics are sure to deliver in the same way the Games always do: Shattered world records and Phelps-like individual dominance, as well as shocking upsets and heartwarming tales of athletes whose mere participation is a victory. We remember wrestler Rulon Gardner for his shocking upset of Russian powerhouse Aleksandr Karelin, as well as Eric "The Eel" Moussambani, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who, thanks to his opponents' disqualification, swam his 100-meter freestyle heat alone, struggling to finish because he'd never even competed in a pool that big. Looking ahead to Rio, here are 15 underdog stories to watch, from those who might win gold to some runner-ups you'll root for anyway.

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The Underdogs: 15 Olympic Athletes That Could Shock the World

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doping and Zika infections, the 2016 Olympics are sure to deliver in the same way the Games always do: Shattered world records and Phelps-like individual dominance, as well as shocking upsets and heartwarming tales of athletes whose mere participation is a victory.

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In a few days, Para Olympics will start

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Amy Purdy has been at the forefront of adaptive snowboarding since having both legs amputated in 1999 after surviving bacterial meningitis. Determined to beat the odds and continue her passion, she was riding again well before professional advice ever suggested and it did not take long for Purdy to become a force not only on the course, but behind the scenes as well.

At her second Paralympic Winter Games, Purdy reached the both podiums including a silver in snowboard-cross. She raced at the 2017 World Championships in Big White, Canada, after returning from injury. She captured bronze in banked slalom and consistently reached the podium at three more competitions afterward.

Although the women's SB-LL1 class has seen the rise of her compatriot Brenna Huckaby, a focused, healthy Purdy can still be a force to be reckoned with ahead of PyeongChang 2018.

After founding Adaptive Action Sports with her husband Daniel Gale, Purdy has pushed the boundaries of her sport in the USA and abroad, helping others find and love the sport so central to her life. She was instrumental in getting Para snowboard to be included at the Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter Games, where she finished third in snowboard-cross.

Purdy's career since then took off exponentially not only in the sport.

In the 2014-15 season, Purdy did not compete, choosing to focus on motivational speaking, writing and starting a new clothing line after a wildly successful appearance on the US television show "Dancing with the Stars."

While her career outside snowboarding began thriving, she still missed competition and high-level training, and sought to balance her athletic and non-athletic career.

She was held back for much of the 2015-16 season to an injury and did not competed on the international scene since the US Nationals in March 2016 where she won in snowboard-cross.

Biography

Further personal information

Athlete, Author, Businessperson, Motivational Speaker

Sport specific information

When and where did you begin this sport?

She took up snowboarding at age 15 and began competing professionally in Para snowboard at age 30.

Having been a snowboarder before her illness, she was determined to find a way to continue in the sport.

Adaptive Action Sports: Copper Mountain, CO, USA

She trains for up 30 hours a week. Her schedule includes 10 hours in the gym and 20 hours on the slopes, where she tests equipment, practises drills and sharpens her technique.

General interest

Exploring the outdoors, writing, wakeboarding, mountain biking, cooking. (teamusa.org, 07 Mar 2018)

Memorable sporting achievement

Winning a bronze medal at the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi. (actioncam.sony.com, 14 Jul 2015)

Most influential person in career

Her husband Daniel Gale. (Athlete, 20 Nov 2013)

She spent eight days in hospital in November 2016 with rhabdomyolysis, a condition caused by harmful proteins being released in the bloodstream due to intense exercise. (self.com, 12 Dec 2018; olympics.nbcsports.com, 29 Nov 2017)

An injury forced her to miss the start of the 2016/17 season. She returned to competition at the 2017 NorAm Cup event in Twin Bridges, CA, United States of America. (paralympic.org, 27 Jan 2017)

Superstitions / Rituals / Beliefs

She uses a visualisation technique she was taught by a sports psychologist to help her relax before competitions. "It calms me down instantly and completely puts me in the moment so when I open my eyes up, my anxiety is gone." (self.com, 12 Dec 2018)

Sporting philosophy / motto

"Never allow defeat to defeat you. You become truly disabled when you choose not to overcome your obstacles." (amypurdy.com, 01 Mar 2012)

She received the Inspirational Athlete Award at the 2018 Cedars-Sinai Sports Spectacular gala in Inglewood, CA, United States of America. (justjaredjr.com, 16 Jul 2018)

At age 19 she was rushed to hospital in a state of septic shock due to meningitis. On the way, she experienced respiratory and multiple organ failure. Combined with a blood condition, this resulted in the circulation to her feet, hands, nose, ears and kidneys being cut, and led to her lungs and adrenal glands haemorrhaging. After losing 26 pints of blood and having her ruptured spleen removed, she was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis and was in a coma for three weeks. Doctors also had to amputate both her legs below the knee. She was the first person in Las Vegas, NV, United States of America, in 20 years to contract that particular strain of meningitis and survive. (Athlete, 20 Nov 2013; amypurdy.com, 01 Mar 2012; redbull.com, 04 Feb 2012)

TRAINING FOCUS
In November 2016 she contracted rhabdomyolysis, a condition in which harmful proteins are released into the bloodstream after muscle tissue breaks down. She spent several days in hospital and the experience made her switch her focus on training, cutting down on the high-intensity workouts she did previously. "It felt amazing and that's what athletes do, you push past these barriers and that's a huge reason I love athletics and I love working out like that. But obviously it ended up with a severe injury because of that." (self.com, 12 Dec 2018)

ADAPTIVE ACTION SPORTS
In 2004 she and her husband Daniel Gale founded the non-profit Adaptive Action Sports organisation, the first adaptive snowboard and skateboard specific organisation of its type in the United States of America. It provides sports camps, events and programmes for youth, young adults, and wounded veterans living with a permanent physical impairment. She also coaches a team of aspiring Paralympians through the organisation. "It's been so fulfilling being able to help others fulfil their dreams." (self.com, 12 Dec 2018; paralympic.org, 25 Jan 2016; amypurdy.com, 01 Mar 2012)

EVACUATION
She had to evacuate her home in Silverthorne, CO, United States of America, during the Buffalo Mountain fire that struck the region in June 2018. "We were working on our yard when a neighbour said, 'You guys, better get ready to evacuate. Come look at this.' So crazy how fast this happened, we didn't even know a fire hit. If it wasn't for the fire breaks put in place, our neighbourhood would have burnt down." (denver.cbslocal.com, 13 Jun 2018)

BOOK RELEASE
In January 2015 she released her autobiography named 'On My Own Two Feet: From Losing My Legs to Learning the Dance of Life'. (teamusa.org, 26 Jan 2015)

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Amy Purdy - Snowboard, Alpine Skiing | Paralympic Athlete Profile

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Amy Purdy has been at the forefront of adaptive snowboarding since having both legs amputated in 1999 after surviving bacterial meningitis. Determined to beat the odds and continue her passion, she was riding again well before professional advice ever suggested and it did not take long for Purdy to become a force not only on the course, but behind the scenes as well.

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"Lose against the Czech Republic, lose against Croatia, but beat England - I would take that," is the general consensus among Scotland fans as their side end a 23-year hiatus from the big football stage. Why the fans had to wait so long, what they can expect at the Euros and whether stars Andy Robertson and Scott McTominay can lead them to unprecedented glory will be answered on Sports Life.

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"Lose against the Czech Republic, lose against Croatia, but beat England - I would take that," is the general consensus among Scotland fans as their side end a 23-year hiatus from the big football stage.

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The 24-year-old from suburban Houston, who has won every major team and individual all-around competition she's entered since her senior debut in 2013, is favored to become the first woman to repeat as Olympic all-around champion in 53 years. The 19-time world champion will also take a second crack at becoming the first US woman in any sport to win five golds at a single Olympics (team, all-around, vault, floor and beam), a feat she came within a momentary slip of achieving in Rio.

David Boudia, Diving

A four-time Olympic medalist on the 10m platform including an individual gold at the London Games, the 31-year-old Indianan switched to the 3m springboard after suffering a concussion on a badly missed training dive in February 2018, when he crashed into the water head-first from the height of a three-story building. A fifth career Olympic medal in Tokyo would move him level with Greg Louganis for most ever by an American diver.

Donavan Brazier, Track and Field

The 23-year-old from Michigan overcame a series of early-career setbacks and injuries to emerge as the clear Olympic favorite in the 800m after becoming the first American man or woman to win a world title at the distance at the 2019 world championships. His winning time of 1:42.34 in Doha eclipsed Johnny Gray's 34-year-old national record of 1:42.60. After Tokyo, he's hinted at trying to make an NFL roster.

Caeleb Dressel, Swimming

The freestyle, breaststroke and butterfly sprint specialist has been cast as the heir to Michael Phelps as the face of swimming in the US and, potentially, the world. Dressel equaled Phelps's world championships record with seven gold medals in Budapest in 2016, followed by six golds and two silvers at the most recent worlds in Gwangju. The 24-year-old from Florida will enter Tokyo as the favorite in the 50m free, 100m free and 100m fly with a chance for as many as seven golds after relays.

Brady Ellison, Archery

The three-time Olympic medalist was on a head of steam after a 2019 season that saw him regain world No 1 ranking for the first time in six years and become the first American to win an individual world title in recurve since 1985. All that's left for the 32-year-old Arizonan to win is the Olympic gold that's eluded him in three previous appearances, which would be the first by an American since Justin Huish swept the individual and team titles at Atlanta 1996.

Allyson Felix, Track and Field

The only female track and field athlete in history to win six Olympic golds, the 35-year-old LA native has nothing left to prove after rewriting the record books since first reaching the podium as a teenager at Athens 2004. Felix will try to make her fifth Olympic team anyway; she plans on running the 200m and 400m at the US trials in June. Another medal in Tokyo would move her level with Carl Lewis's record as the most decorated US Olympic track and field athlete ever, man or woman. Two more would break it.

Adeline Gray, Wrestling

The first wrestler from the US to win five world titles, Gray was tipped for gold in the freestyle 75kg event at the Rio Games until a shock quarter-final defeat. After booking a return Olympic trip by winning the 76kg tournament at US trials earlier this month, the 30-year-old will try to become the second-ever American woman to win Olympic gold after US team-mate Helen Maroulis.

Vincent Hancock, Shooting

The 32-year-old Georgia native and Fort Worth transplant, who honed his skills as a sergeant in the US Army Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning, became the first back-to-back Olympic champion in skeet shooting at the Beijing and London Games (where he shot a perfect score in the final). After failing to reach the podium in Rio, he reasserted his dominance in becoming the first men's skeet shooter to win four world titles with a near-perfect exhibition at the 2018 world championships in South Korea.

Nevin Harrison, Canoe Sprint

The 18-year-old, who took up the paddle after hip dysplasia ended her track career in 2016, became the first American to win a world title in the sport previously known as flatwater at the 2019 world championships. Now the Seattle teenager can become the first Olympic champion from the United States in sprint canoe or kayak since Greg Barton won double gold in 1988.

Grant Holloway, Track and Field

The reigning world champion in the 110m hurdles was a four-star wide receiver in high school who chose track over the gridiron despite recruiting interest from college football powers like Georgia, Clemson and Virginia Tech. Smart move. A promising indoor campaign augurs well for the 23-year-old Virginian as US trials draw near: Holloway pipped Colin Jackson's 27-year-old world record in the 60m hurdles at the final meet of the World Indoor Tour in February.

Nyjah Huston, Skateboarding

Skateboarding debuts as a medal event in Tokyo and the four-time world champion from Laguna Beach is widely regarded as the gold medal favorite in men's street. The 26-year-old is a long-established star in the skate world, having amassed more than 4.5m Instagram followers, 18 X Games medals, a signature Nike shoe and more prize money than any other skateboarder in history since winning his first major competition aged 10.

Lilly King, Swimming

The double Olympic champion from Indiana, who has unapologetically called out drug cheats at home and abroad, will be favored to repeat in the 100m breaststroke after winning back-to-back 50m breast, 100m breast and 4x100m medley relay titles at the last two world championships. At 23 and in her prime of her career, she will touch down in Tokyo as the clear favorite in the sprint breaststrokes.

Rose Lavelle, Soccer

A stylish playmaker and future Ballon d'Or contender adept at breaking opponents' back lines with her creativity, vision and technical skill, Lavelle was the breakout star of the 2019 Women's World Cup after scoring three goals, including a left-footed strike in the final against the Netherlands that was hailed as an instant classic, and winning the Bronze Ball as the third-best player in the competition. The USWNT are seeking to become the first team to immediately follow a World Cup title with an Olympic gold.

Katie Ledecky, Swimming

Since bursting on to the scene at 15 at the London Games as a distance specialist, the five-time Olympic champion has extended her dominance into the shorter races. She ​lay a compelling claim to the title of world's most dominant athlete at Rio, winning the 800m freestyle by an astonishing 11.38 seconds en route to the first 200-400-800 treble in 48 years. With the addition of the 1500 free to the Olympic program in Tokyo for the first time as a women's event, the 24-year-old could bring home as many as five golds.

Noah Lyles, Track and Field

The reigning 200m world champion, who turns 24 the week of the opening ceremony, became the Olympic 100m favorite after the suspension of team-mate Christian Coleman. Whether he can match the retired Usain Bolt's feat of sweeping the 100m, 200m and 4x100m titles will be one of the juiciest plotlines of the Tokyo Games. The talent is there: his times in both the 100 and 200 are faster than Bolt's at the same age.

Simone Manuel, Swimming

The reigning Olympic champion and two-time defending world champion in the 100m freestyle made history in Rio when she became the first African American woman to win an individual swimming gold medal, then backed it up (and then some) with eight more titles at the 2017 and 2019 world championships. The 24-year-old from the Houston suburb of Sugar Land could vie for gold in up to six events in Tokyo including relays.

Alexander Massialas, Fencing

No American man has managed to win an Olympic fencing title in the modern version of the sport. Massialas, then ranked No 1 in the world, nearly became the first in Rio only to be cruelly denied with a surprise defeat to Italy's Daniele Garrozo in the individual foil final. That silver medal and a bronze in the team event made him the first US man in more than a century to win multiple fencing medals at the same Olympics. Now the 26-year-old from San Francisco will make a third attempt at a historic gold.

Sydney McLaughlin, Track and Field

It's been five years since McLaughlin, then a 16-year-old high-school student, became the youngest athlete to make the US Olympic track and field team in nearly 40 years. Now 21, the New Jersey phenom has since become a world champion in the 4x400m relay and a world silver medalist in the 400m hurdles (bested only by US team-mate Dalilah Muhammad), winning both medals in her world championship debut two years ago.

Carissa Moore, Surfing

The 28-year-old from Honolulu and four-time world champion will be among the hot favorites as surfing makes its Olympic debut at Shidashita Beach, known familiarly as Shida, about 40 miles outside of Tokyo in the Chiba prefecture. She will headline a US team that includes another gold medal contender in Caroline Marks, the Florida teenager who is the youngest surfer to ever qualify for the women's championship tour.

Dalilah Muhammad, Track and Field

The 31-year-old Queens native and Los Angeles transplant smashed the world record in the 400m hurdles twice in 2019, adding a world title to go with her gold medal from the Rio Games. The prohibitive favorite to retain her Olympic title in Tokyo, Muhammad's stiffest competition expects to come from US team-mate Sydney McLaughlin, whose personal-best time of 52.23 in their memorable Doha showdown is the second-fastest in history.

Hannah Roberts, BMX

The 19-year-old two-time world champion from the southeast corner of Michigan, who is the gold medal favorite in the new event of BMX freestyle, can become the youngest US Olympic cycling medalist in 109 years and the first teenage woman to win an Olympic cycling title from any country. The fresh-faced newlywed has also emerged as a gender-equality pioneer in a traditionally male-dominated sport.

Maggie Steffens, Water Polo

The double Olympic gold medalist and two-time Fina player of the year from California is the captain of a US women's water polo squad that might be the world's most dominant team in any sport. Since the 27-year-old Stanford alumna joined the team, they have won every major tournament they have entered, including two straight Olympic golds, three straight world titles, three straight World Cup titles and and six straight World League titles. They will attempt to become the third nation to win three straight Olympic water polo titles after the Hungarian men (2000-08) and British men (1900-20).

Christian Taylor, Track and Field

The two-time Olympic and four-time triple jump world champion was forced to switch his takeoff leg at the height of his powers to combat a degenerative knee issue. Now the 30-year-old from outside Atlanta, who trains full-time at the British Athletics' national performance centre in Loughborough, will take aim at a third straight Olympic gold and the 26-year-old world record of 18.29m held by Great Britain's Jonathan Edwards.

Serena Williams, Tennis

The 39-year-old Williams, who has won a combined four Olympic titles across singles ( 2012) and doubles (2000, 2008 and 2012), remains in dogged pursuit of her record-tying 24th grand slam title. But a fifth Olympic gold medal in Tokyo, following surprise early-round ousters in both singles and doubles at the Rio Games, would break a deadlock with older sister Venus for the most in history.

Katie Zaferes, Triathlon

The 31-year-old from Maryland didn't compete in her first triathlon until after she graduated from Syracuse, where she was a 3000m steeplechase star for the track team. She's gone on to emerge as the face of USA Triathlon following the retirement of 2016 Olympic champion Gwen Jorgensen. Since going off in Rio as a medal contender but slipping to an 18th-place finish, she worked her way up to the No 1 in the world rankings and enters Tokyo as the favorite for gold.

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100 days to the Tokyo Olympics: Twenty-five US athletes to watch

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The 24-year-old from suburban Houston, who has won every major team and individual all-around competition she's entered since her senior debut in 2013, is favored to become the first woman to repeat as Olympic all-around champion in 53 years.

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16 March 2021

Eurofound provides research, data and analysis on a wide range of social and work-related topics. This information is largely comparative, but also offers country-specific information for each of the 28 EU Member States, which included the UK prior to its withdrawal from the European Union on 31 January 2020. Most information is available in English but some has been translated to facilitate access at national level.
Eurofound strives to strengthen the ongoing link between its own work and national policy debates and priorities related to quality of life and work. Increasingly important in this context are the EU's policy priorities for a European Green Deal, a digital future, an economy that works for people, promoting and strengthening European democracy. To help repair the economic and social damage caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, the European Commission, the European Parliament and EU leaders have also agreed on a recovery plan that will lead the way out of the crisis and lay the foundations for a modern and more sustainable Europe. The EU's long-term budget, coupled with NextGenerationEU, the temporary instrument designed to boost the recovery, will be the largest stimulus package ever financed through the EU budget to help rebuild a post-COVID-19 Europe.

The European Semester provides a framework for the coordination of economic policies across the EU. It allows Member States to discuss their economic and budget plans and monitor progress at specific times throughout the year. For 2021, the European Semester will be temporarily adapted to coordinate it with the Recovery and Resilience Facility to address the impact of the crisis caused by the pandemic. As part of this, Member States are encouraged to submit national reform programmes and recovery and resilience plans in a single integrated document. These plans will provide an overview of the reforms and investments that Member States will undertake in line with the objectives of the Facility.

Living and working in Spain and COVID-19

COVID-19 continues to have a profound impact on people's lives across the globe, with major implications for quality of life and work. Eurofound has taken a multipronged response to the pandemic, adapting its research focus in a variety of ways. A new database of national-level policy responses, COVID-19 EU PolicyWatch, collates information on measures taken by government and social partners, as well as company practices, aiming to cushion the effects of the crisis. Eurofound's unique e-survey, Living, working and COVID-19, provides an insight into the impact of the pandemic on people's lives across the EU, with the aim of helping policymakers to bring about an equal recovery from the crisis. Two rounds of the survey in April and July allow for comparisons between a lockdown situation in most Member States and the gradual reopening of society and economies. The survey investigates the impact on quality of life and society, working and teleworking, the financial situation and security of people, and the quality of public services during COVID-19. Findings for each country and a range of data pages are now available.

Explore our data pages by country to find out more on the situation in Spain.

The country page gives access to Eurofound's most recent survey data and news, directly related to Spain:
Research carried out prior to the UK's withdrawal from the European Union on 31 January 2020, and published subsequently, may include data relating to the 28 EU Member States. Following this date, research only takes into account the 27 EU Member States (EU28 minus the UK), unless specified otherwise.

Survey results

Eurofound contacts in Spain

Correspondents in Spain

Correspondents report on topics related to developments in the country's working life and inform Eurofound's pan-European comparative analysis. Read more

Consortium Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona ( UAB- QUIT), and Instituto Sindical de Trabajo, Ambiente y Salud ( ISTAS)

Eurofound Management Board members from Spain

Eurofound's Management Board is made up of representatives of the social partners and national governments of all Member States, European Commission representatives and an independent expert appointed by the European Parliament. Read more

Noel Rodríguez García Ministry of Labour and Social Economy

Miguel Canales Gutiérrez Spanish Association of the Electrical Industry (UNESA)

Fernando Rocha Sánchez Federation of Workers' Commissions (CCOO)

Related content

Other country-specific information may be available in certain areas on demand. Please feel free to contact your country contact at Eurofound for this or any other information at information@eurofound.europa.eu

Living in Spain

Quality of life

Quality of life

The EQLS findings show that both life satisfaction and happiness have decreased slightly from 2011 to 2016 in Spain. Life satisfaction fell from 7.5 in 2011 to 7.0 in 2016 and happiness from 7.8 to 7.3 during the same time period (on a scale from 1 to 10). These 2016 levels are very similar to the respective EU28 averages of 7.1 for life satisfaction and 7.4 for happiness.

However, the share of respondents in Spain reporting at least some difficulties in making ends meet increased from 41% in 2007 to 52% in 2011 and has not recovered, standing at 51% in 2016. This is also higher than the respective EU28 average of 39% in 2016.

Many of the indicators about life satisfaction in Spain are close to the EU28 averages. For instance, 66% of respondents in Spain are optimistic about their own future (EU28 average, 64%) and 57% are optimistic about their children's future (EU28 average, also 57%).

Work-life balance

Work-life balance

The share of respondents in Spain reporting work-life balance problems in 2016 is similar to the 2011 figure. Additionally, the work-life balance indicators in Spain are close to the EU28 averages. Overall, 65% of respondents in Spain report being 'too tired from work to do some of the household jobs which need to be done' at least several times a month, while the respective EU28 average is 59%. Furthermore, 41% of the respondents in Spain feel that 'it has been difficult to fulfil family responsibilities because of work', which is close to the EU28 average of 38%.

Women are more likely to report work-life balance problems in Spain. For instance, 70% of women feel 'too tired from work to do some of the household jobs which need to be done', compared to 60% of men.

(At least several times a month)

Quality of society

Quality of society

Perceived tensions between poor and rich have decreased in Spain. In total, 32% of respondents reported 'a lot of' this type of tension in 2003, decreasing to 25% in 2016 and falling below the EU28 average of 29%. Similarly, perceived tensions between different racial and ethnic groups have decreased, from 42% reporting 'a lot of' tension in 2003 to 26% in 2016, which is much lower than the EU28 average of 41%.

The share of respondents in Spain who felt safe when walking alone after dark stood at 48% in 2016, compared with the lower EU28 average of 35%.

Trust in other people has decreased in Spain during the observation period (2003-2016). In 2003, the mean trust score was 6.0 (on a scale from 1 to 10), falling to match the EU28 average of 5.2 in 2016.

Quality of public services

Quality of public services

Quality ratings for seven public services

Note: scale of 1-10, Source: EQLS 2016.

The perceived quality of health services has improved in Spain, from 6.3 in 2003 to 7.2 in 2016 (on a scale from 1 to 10. This rating is also higher than the respective EU average of 6.7 in 2016. Most of the other quality ratings for public services also show signs of improvement, except the rating given for the state pension system which decreased from 5.7 in 2003 to 5.3 in 2016. The quality ratings for public services in Spain are similar to the respective EU28 averages.

Working life in Spain

About

Author: Oscar Molina

Institution: Centre d'Estudis Sociològics sobre la Vida Quotidiana i el Treball - QUIT, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB

Published on:

This profile describes the key characteristics of working life in Spain. It aims to complement other EurWORK research by providing the relevant background information on the structures, institutions and relevant regulations regarding working life. This includes indicators, data and regulatory systems on the following aspects: actors and institutions, collective and individual employment relations, health and well-being, pay, working time, skills and training, and equality and non-discrimination at work. The profiles are updated annually.

Highlights - Working life in 2020

Highlights - Working life in 2020

Although it is still too early to assess the medium-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the labour market because of the extension of the temporary lay-off and short-time work schemes, it is possible to outline some general trends based on available indicators. Existing evidence suggests that the Spanish economy and labour market will be among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis in the EU. Despite the growth and improved employment opportunities experienced in the period following the 2007-2013 economic crisis, Spain's employment level in 2019 was still below the pre-2008 level; it had a higher unemployment rate and real wages, although rising, were still lower than those registered in 2007. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the post-economic crisis recovery to a sudden halt and threatened to intensify imbalances in the Spanish labour market while aggravating the economic and social risks faced by some vulnerable groups, including young people and migrant workers. Policies implemented to date have focused on limiting the impact of COVID-19 on employment and job destruction, but the pandemic has also provided an opportunity to develop new policies, including on the regulation of telework and the creation of a minimum living income.

The severity of the impact of the pandemic on Spain's economy and labour market required the government and social partners to work closely together to mitigate its effects. As a result, social dialogue has played a central role in designing key instruments to reduce the negative shock on the labour market and employment relations, but also in regulating important aspects such as telework. Among the policy measures negotiated and implemented, the extension of the conditions for temporary lay-offs and reduced work schemes agreed in the early stages of the crisis deserves particular attention.

Some disagreements have nonetheless appeared in relation to the recovery strategy. An example can be found in the negotiations to set the minimum wage increase for 2021, with unions defending the need to increase it in order to support demand and employers considering that under the current circumstances any increase would have a negative effect on the creation and maintenance of employment. Notwithstanding this, the social partners and the government maintain a strong commitment towards social dialogue and negotiated solutions to the crisis. They are currently developing a strong agenda for social dialogue, including negotiations around the central aspects of the plan for economic recovery and resilience presented by the government.

Just as during the Great Recession, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the weaknesses of a strongly segmented labour market. High levels of temporary employment lead to rapid job destruction during recessions, which has a greater effect on younger workers and migrants. In a context of uncertainty surrounding the final impact of the pandemic on the labour market (once the cushioning effect of temporary lay-offs and reduced work schemes ends), the need to devise innovative policy approaches to tackle these negative employment effects will be crucial. To date, policies to promote structural changes in the economy leading to a more sustainable working life have remained a secondary concern. However, compared with the Great Recession, the momentum enjoyed by social dialogue provides an opportunity to develop an ambitious plan to tackle some of the traditional imbalances.

Key figures

Key figures

Comparative figures on working life in Spain

2012

2018

% (point) change 2012-2018

Source: Eurostat - Real GDP per capita (chain linked volumes [2010], in EUR) and percentage change 2012-2018 (both based on tsdec100). Unemployment rate by sex and age - annual average, % [une_rt_a]; Employment rate by sex and age - annual average, % [lfsi_emp_a].

Background

Background

Economic and labour market context

In 2018 the Spanish economy maintained a positive GDP growth of 2.6%, above the EU average. Even though the economy started to show signs of deceleration, labour market indicators improved considerably in 2018. The unemployment rate went down to 14.6% in the third quarter compared to 16.4% one year before. Male unemployment decreased 10.9 percentage points in the six years considered. Youth unemployment remains high at 34.3% in 2018, in contrast with the EU average of 15.2% for the same year. The total employment rate in 2018 was 73.7%, the same level as the EU average. Youth employment figures decreased between 2012 and 2018 (-6 percentage points) and stood at 33% in 2018, against an EU average of 41.7% for the same year.

More information on:

Legal context

The main labour code for private employees is the Statute of Workers' Rights (1980). It also regulates collective bargaining issues (mechanisms governing coordination between different levels of collective wage setting, opt-out clauses and conditions, etc). It has been modified by different royal-decrees and laws. The last law that modified important elements was Law 3/2012 of 6 July.

The main labour code for public employees is the Basic Statute of Public Workers (Law 7/2007).

Trade union regulation and representativeness is regulated through the Organic Law of Trade Union Freedom (1985).

Industrial relations context

Industrial relations in Spain during the 1980s were affected by the political transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, as well as a process of industrial and economic modernisation in order to prepare the country for its integration into the European Community. During the first years of the transitional period (1978-1982), the unions accepted wage moderation in exchange for institutional recognition and further development of social and labour rights. In addition, it favoured some coordination and centralisation of collective bargaining. The collective bargaining structure that consolidated in those years is still present today and is characterised by its multi-level character, with negotiations taking place at sectoral, provincial and company levels.

From 1986 to 1997, a period of crisis in 'social concertation' negatively affected collective bargaining. The most important problems at this time were the lack of coordination and the poor renewal of the rounds of collective bargaining.

After 1997, social dialogue was revitalised during a period of economic and employment growth. Thus, from 1997 to 2008, different tripartite agreements were achieved. In addition, annual bi-partite peak inter-sectoral agreements on collective bargaining started to be concluded by the social partners. These agreements play an important role in coordinating collective bargaining in Spain. The economic crisis that began in 2008 has strongly affected the industrial relations context. The Spanish system weathered the impact of the economic crisis relatively well initially, but the situation changed dramatically after 2011, when two important reforms on collective bargaining rules were enacted by the government. Both reforms seemed to accept a common diagnosis formulated by different EU and Spanish institutions, which deemed Spanish collective bargaining too rigid, thus impeding companies from modifying working arrangements in order to adjust to shocks. The last reform approved in 2012 has affected some of the most important dimensions of the Spanish collective bargaining system (ultra-activity, predominance of company level agreements, etc.). Several studies have shown how labour market reforms have contributed to the process of internal devaluation and decline in real wages, which have not yet regained pre-crisis levels. During the crisis and in the context of austerity policies, social dialogue experienced a breakdown and only started to recover in 2016. In 2018, social dialogue gained momentum with the signing of some tripartite agreements and bipartite pacts that seek to reverse some of the negative effects of the economic crisis.

Actors and institutions

Actors and institutions

Trade unions, employers' organisations and public institutions play a key role in the governance of the employment relationship, working conditions and industrial relations structures. They are interlocking parts in a multilevel system of governance that includes European, national, sectoral, regional (provincial or local) and company levels. This section looks into the main actors and institutions and their role in Spain.

Public authorities involved in regulating working life

The main ministry dealing with social dialogue and working conditions is the Ministry of Labour, Migration and Social Security and the Employment Departments of the Autonomous Communities. The Ministry plays an important role in fostering tripartite social dialogue. Moreover, these institutions are in charge of registering the collective agreements. Once a collective agreement has been concluded, the signatory parties must send the collective agreement to the public authority (the Ministry of Labour if it is national and the Employment Departments of the Autonomous Communities if it is regional) within 15 days. Prior to the registration, the public authorities make sure that the content of the agreement is in line with legislation. If the collective agreement goes against legislation, the public authority can challenge it.

The main institution ensuring the enforcement of employees' rights is the Work Inspection and Social Security body, which does so through the labour inspectorates. Labour inspectorates are in charge of monitoring working conditions, the unions' relationships and social security duties (registration of workers for social security, contributions paid to social security and so on).

The labour inspectorates are also in charge of monitoring the performance of health and safety regulations. This includes validating and promoting the implementation of the health and safety regulations, advising companies on how to apply health and safety regulations, elaborating reports concerning work accidents and professional diseases, suggesting penalties to the Labour Administration in case of non-compliance and ordering the stoppage of work in case of dangerous circumstances.

Representativeness

In Spain, the concept of representativeness guarantees an erga omnes representation for both trade unions and employers' organisations. Thus, it endows the most representative trade unions and employer organisations with the capacity to negotiate agreements on behalf of all workers in the sector or company in which the agreement is negotiated.

The main legal criterion for determining the representativeness of trade unions is based on the workplace election results of workers' delegates and workers' committee members. Accordingly, the electoral process aiming to choose the employees' representatives at the workplace is used to measure trade union support. For employers' organisations, the criterion for determining their representativeness is based on membership.

Through the concept of 'most representative organisations', employers' organisations and trade unions are entitled to conclude multiemployer collective agreements, to have institutional representation (in other words, to be a part of tripartite bodies, to be consulted by the government and to conclude social pacts) and to take part in extrajudicial systems of labour conflict resolution. Moreover, meeting the criterion of legal representativeness is the basis for getting access to public funds.

Trade unions

About trade union representation

According to the Organic Law of Trade Union Freedom (1985), all workers can join trade unions except members of the Spanish Forces, judges and public prosecutors.

Trade union density in Spain has remained rather stable since the early 1980s. Even though the lack of reliable data make it difficult to assess it, most estimates point to 15-20% as the density rate in Spain since the early 1980s. Even though it has been subject to cyclical fluctuations, it does not exhibit a clear downward trend, as it does in other EU countries. Since the onset of the crisis, however, trade union density has slightly decreased according to the figures provided by the Working and Living Conditions Survey conducted by the Ministry of Employment (17.4% in 2008 compared to 16.4% in 2010). Unfortunately, the survey has not been conducted since 2010. According to OECD figures, trade union density remained stable at 17% from 2010 to 2013.

The main criterion for determining union representativeness is the electoral audience, which is determined by the number of delegates and working committee members obtained in the elections. This, together with the automatic extension of collective agreements explains the low density rates in Spain, as workers have limited incentives to join trade unions.

Trade union membership and trade union density

Main trade union confederations and federations

The most representative unions in Spain are the Trade Union Confederation of Workers' Commissions (Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras, CCOO) and the General Workers' Confederation (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT), which account for 70% of workers' committees representatives elected in 2015 (Alós et al. 2015).

Main trade union confederations and federations

Long name

Abbreviation

Members

Involved in collective bargaining

Sources: *CCOO report "Affiliation and representativeness in 31-12-2015 (Afiliación y Representación en 31-12-2015)".
**article in Expansion newspaper.

In addition to the most representative confederations at national level, there are some smaller confederations, including Trade Union Workers Unity (Unión Sindical Obrera, USO) and General Workers' Confederation (Confederación General del Trabajo, CGT). Moreover, there are the most representative confederations at regional level. These are the Galician Inter-sectoral Confederation (Confederación Intersectoral Galega, CIG) and Solidarity of Basque Workers (Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos, ELA-STV). Finally, the third most important confederation in the public sector is the Independent and Civil Servant Central Trade Union (Confederación Sindical Indepdendiente y de Funcionarios, CSIF).

UGT's last congress was held in March 2016, and Mr Pepe Álvarez was elected as the new General Secretary (he replaced Mr Cándido Méndez, who had been General Secretary of UGT trade union for 22 years). CCOO's last congress was held in June 2017, and they named a new General Secretary, Mr Unai Sordo (replacing Mr Ignacio Fernández Toxo, who had spent 9 years in that position).

Since the 1990s, the most important trade unions at national level, UGT and CCOO, have maintained a cooperative relationship and unity of action. They have also maintained their representativeness.

The most important changes relate to the mergers of federations that both trade unions carried out in 2014. CCOO merged the Federation of Textile, Chemical and Related Activities (FITEQA-CCOO) into the Industry Federation (CCOO INDUSTRIA). It also merged the Federation of Commerce, Hotels and Restaurants, Tourism and Gambling (FECOHT-CCOO) with the Federation of Financial Services (COMFIA-CCOO) into the new Federation of Services. Meanwhile, in 2014, UGT merged the Federation of Transport (TCM-UGT) and the Federation of Commerce, Hotels and Restaurants, Catering Trade, Tourism and Gambling (CHTJ-UGT) into the new Federation of Services for Mobility and Consumption (SMC-UGT).

More recently, in May 2016, new federations were created within the UGT structure: Federation of Public Services employees - formed by the previous public services federation (FeSP) and education federation (FEYE) - and FICA,formed by the union of the Federation of Metal and Construction (MCA) and the Federation of Agriculture (Fitag).

For both unions, the mergers were carried out in order to combat the reduction in public financing.

Employers' organisations

About employers' representation

Employers' organisations do not have a legal text that regulates their rights and obligations, like the trade unions do with the Organic Law of Trade Union Freedom (1985).

The procedures to verify the representativeness of the employers' organisations are not clearly established. There is a lack of official and institutional procedures to check if the employers' organisations that claim to be representative meet the legal requirements. In addition, there are no official publications of affiliation figures to employers' organisations. As such, the only figures available are those provided by the employers' organisations themselves.

The absence of figures on employers' organisation membership does not mean a lack of legitimacy or social recognition of the most representative associations at national level. In fact, the 'most representative' employers' organisations - the Spanish Confederation of Employers' Organisations (CEOE) and the Spanish Confederation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (CEPYME) - are recognised by the employers, trade unions and government. Moreover, there are no potential competitors that can challenge their status.

In November 2018, Mr. Antonio Garamendi was elected as the new president of CEOE. Mr Garamendi was the only candidate in the elections and was elected by acclamation. He will replace Mr Juan Rosell, who had been president since December 2010. Until the elections, Mr Garamendi was president of CEPYME, the Spanish Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises.

Employers' organisations - membership and density
*Percentage of employees working in an establishment that is a member of any employers' organisation that is involved in collective bargaining.
Main employers' organisations

The Spanish Confederation of Employers' Organisations (CEOE) and the Spanish Confederation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (CEPYME) are the most representative employers' organisations. There are no official publications of the affiliation figures of the employers' organisations, but CEOE claims to represent 2 million companies and 12 million employees through its 225 federations. CEPYME does not provide figures of companies and employees.

Main employers' organisations and confederations

*Source: CEOE website.
**Source: CEPYME website.

Tripartite and bipartite bodies and concertation

The main tripartite body is the Spanish Social and Economic Council (Consejo Económico y Social). It is a consultative body created in 1991 that submits reports to the government before laws and royal-decrees are enacted. Moreover, it analyses and studies different elements and topics under its own initiative. In most regions, there is a tripartite Social and Economic Council with similar functions and composition to the national one. However, in some regions these bodies ceased their activities due to lack of funding.

The so-called Industrial Observatories are important tripartite bodies operating at the sectoral level. There are 10 observatories in different industry sectors and in the construction sector. These tripartite bodies were created in 2005 in order to improve and extend the analytical information on the sectors. The aim of the observatories is to foster debate and to identify strengths and weakness in order to promote efficient industrial policies. However, their activity has dramatically decreased since the onset of the crisis, and nowadays they are practically dismantled. Finally, another tripartite body is the National Consultative Commission of Collective Agreements (Comisión Consultiva Nacional de Convenios Colectivos), created by Royal Decree 1362/2012. It is a consultative body for aspects such as proposing and determining the functional scope of collective agreements. It is also involved in monitoring collective agreements, including information, studies, documentation and diffusion of them.

The most important bipartite body is the Interconfederal Service of Mediation and Arbitration (Servicio Interconfederal de Mediación y Arbitraje, SIMA). It is financed entirely by the state and managed autonomously by the social partners. It manages industrial conflicts by offering industrial dispute resolution mechanisms.

In spite of the existence of tripartite and bipartite bodies, social pacts and peak inter-sectoral agreements are not negotiated under any of the existing institutional bodies.

With regard to bipartite agreements, since the mid-1990s peak intersectoral agreements for collective bargaining have been signed between the most representative trade unions and employer organisations. These agreements were signed, with only a short interruption in the crisis in 2012, 2015 and more recently in 2018. Even though these are not mandatory agreements and only provide guidelines on different issues, such as pay increases, they nonetheless provide some degree of coordination and a general framework for collective bargaining.

With the advent of the sovereign debt crisis and the implementation of austerity policies, tripartite social dialogue was discontinued. Only since 2014, with the start of the economic recovery, some tripartite pacts on specific issues have been signed. Tripartite social dialogue seems to have gained momentum in 2018 when agreements on youth employment and decent work were signed.

Main tripartite and bipartite bodies

Name

Type

Level

Issues covered

Workplace-level employee representation

The main bodies for workplace-level representation in the private sector are workers' delegates and workers' committees. In the public sector, workplace-level representation is done through the so-called 'Juntas de Personal'.

Workers' delegates are responsible for representing workers in establishments and workplaces between 11 and 49 employees. There may also be a workers' delegate in undertakings with 6 to 10 employees, provided that it is a decision reached by the majority of the employees. In undertakings with up to 30 employees there may be one workers' delegate, and three workers' delegates in undertakings with between 31 and 49 employees.

Workers' committees are employee representative bodies in workplaces with a staff of 50 or more workers. In the case of companies with two or more establishments in the same province or bordering municipalities with fewer than 50 employees in each workplace but with 50 or more employees as a whole, a joint workers' committee may be established (Article 64, TRET).

In addition, workers affiliated to a union can constitute a so-called trade union's section within the enterprise.

Elections for workers' delegates and workers' committee members can be called by the most representative trade union organisations (those that have a membership of at least 10% of company representatives or employees in a workplace by majority agreement). Those who call the elections must inform the company and the public labour authorities of their intentions at least one month in advance. In addition, elections may be called at a more general level in one or several functional or territorial areas, subject to the agreement of the most representative trade unions.

According to Spanish legislation, these bodies can also exercise I&C rights and can conclude company collective agreements. In this regard, it is worth noting that a recent regulation (Royal-decree 7/2011) gave priority to the trade union's sections over work councils in order to conclude company collective agreements, when these trade unions have a majority of seats in the workers' committee.

According to the ECS, the percentage of establishments that have any form of employee representation increased from 53% in 2009 to 57% in 2013.

Regulation, composition and competences of the bodies

Regulation

Composition

Competences of the body Involved in company-level collective bargaining??

Thresholds/rules when they need to be/can be set up

* According to the Law, the most representative trade unions are those that constitute 10% of workers' delegates and members of workers' committees at state level and 15% within the autonomous communities. Similarly, trade unions that have a membership of 10% or more of workers' delegates and members of workers' committees in a specific territorial and functional sphere will be considered representative within that scope.

Collective bargaining

Collective bargaining

Collective bargaining in Spain is characterised by a multi-level bargaining structure and high coverage rates. The latter is the result of the 'erga omnes' extension of collective agreements to all workers within the functional scope of an agreement, irrespective of whether they are trade union members or not. Moreover, collective agreements have normative force and their implementation can be pursued by labour authorities.

Wage bargaining coverage

Spain has a high collective bargaining coverage rate. According to the European Company Survey it is close to 90%, which closely corresponds to SES data (92%). Most workers are covered by multiemployer collective agreements concluded at national, regional and provincial level. According to the Spanish Statistics of Collective Bargaining, company agreements signed in 2015 covered around 5% of all the workers covered by collective agreements.

Collective wage bargaining coverage of employees at different levels

Level

Source

All levels

92%

2010 - SES data

All levels

98%

2013 - ECS

All, excluding national level

89%

2013 - ECS

Sources: Eurofound, European Company Survey 2013 (ECS), private sector companies with establishments >10 employees (NACE B-S) - multiple answers possible; Eurostat, Structure of Earnings Survey, companies >10 employees (NACE B-S), single answer: more than 50% of employees covered by such an agreement.

There are no official national figures on collective bargaining coverage. The way in which collective bargaining is usually calculated is by taking the average number of persons affiliated to the Social Security in a given year, divided by the total number of persons whose working conditions are regulated by a collective agreement. Using data for 2016, the last year for which definitive figures on collective agreements are available, and the statistics on affiliations to social security in the general regime (i.e. excluding self-employed workers and special social security regimes like domestic workers), a coverage rate of 81.6% is obtained. However, this estimation presents some methodological problems, mostly related to problems with the statistics of collective agreements.

This last source collects information on all collective agreements, so it is a full register. The basic source of information derives from what is known as the 'statistics sheet', which is completed by the bargaining commissions once the agreement is signed. This sheet is presented along with all the necessary documentation in order to register the agreement. The source is not updated every year. Moreover, figures on the collective agreements for one year are only considered definitive in the annual publication that elaborates the figures of the collective agreements recorded until 31 May two years later. Thus, figures from 2017 will only be definitive once the figures of all the collective agreements have been recorded by 31 May 2019, the economic effects of which started in 2017.

Bargaining levels

The structure of collective bargaining has remained rather constant since the end of the 1990s. The collective bargaining structure in most sectors in Spain is characterised by its multi-level character, with collective agreements signed at national, sector, provincial and/or company level. Since 2002 (with the exception of 2009), peak bipartite cross-sectoral agreements have only established guidelines on working time and pay that are not legally binding. With regard to the number of agreements recorded by economic activity, there is a greater preponderance of company agreements. The second most numerous are the provincial sectoral agreements, followed by the national and regional sectoral agreements. In contrast, most workers are covered by provincial sectoral agreements and national sectoral agreements.

In addition, it is worth noting that multi-tier bargaining models are quite common. Thus, in some sectors the sectoral level establishes the structure of the wage system and the lower levels establish the amount of the wages.

Levels of collective bargaining, 2018

National level (intersectoral)

Sectoral level

Company level

Articulation

The mechanism governing coordination between different levels of collective wage setting was changed in 2011 and 2012 by two legislative reforms implemented by the Socialist Party (PSOE) and the Popular Party (PP), respectively. Before 2011, wages agreed at the sectoral level prevailed over wages agreed at company level. As such, lower bargaining levels could only improve wage standards agreed at higher levels.

In 2011, the Socialist Party government reformed this mechanism as part of a broader reform of collective bargaining rules (Royal-decree 7/2011 of 10 June), through which it gave priority to company-level agreements over sectoral multiemployer agreements (whether national, regional or provincial) in matters such as basic pay and pay supplements. However, the law allowed social partners to establish - whether at the interprofessional level or sectoral level (regional and national) - another collective bargaining structure that could continue to prioritise the sectoral level.

In 2012, the Popular Party reformed this mechanism again as part of a deep reform of the Spanish labour market legislation (Law 3/2012). It gave priority to company-level agreements over sectoral multiemployer agreements (whether national, regional or provincial) in matters such as basic pay and pay supplements even if the social partners decide to establish an alternative collective bargaining structure.

Different articulation models of the components of wage setting were observed in the years before the new regulation came into effect. Most of them were multi-tier models. In some sectors, such as the graphic arts, the sectoral level established the structure of the wage system and the lower levels (regional and provincial sectoral level or company level) established the amount of the wages. In other sectors, such as the manufacturing of gypsum or the chemical sector, the sectoral level exclusively regulated some aspects of the wage level (mostly minimum wages linked to professional groups or categories), allowing the company level to regulate other wage elements (extra payments, etc.). These models still exist.

Timing of the bargaining rounds

In Spain, a general pattern with regard to the month or quarter of the year when collective bargaining takes place is not observed.

Coordination

Since the early 2000s, peak bipartite intersectoral agreements provide a general framework for all the collective agreements and, although every sector and/or company has its own particularities and their collective agreement is adapted to those, interprofessional agreements provide common guidelines and a soft form of coordination for all of them. These agreements establish guidelines on pay, among other aspects, which are not legally mandatory, but the social partners commit themselves to following at different levels. The last national agreement was the IV Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining 2018, 2019 and 2020 ( IV Acuerdo para el Empleo y la Negociación Colectiva 2018,2019 y 2020) . It includes guidelines on salary issues, negotiated flexibility and conflict resolution.

Extension mechanisms

In Spain, once they are signed, collective agreements are extended to all workers irrespective of whether or not they are affiliated to the unions that signed the collective agreement. The same applies to companies. This has not changed in recent years.

In Spain, collective agreements can be extended by legislation, according to article 92.2 of the Workers Statute and Royal Decree 718/2005. This is in order to avoid the damages to workers and the companies from the impossibility of subscribing a collective agreement of those contained in the 3rd Title of the Workers Statute due to the absence of parties legitimised to negotiate it. In this case, the legitimacy to request the extension relies on the social partners, and the competent institution to resolve the issue is the Ministry of Employment and Social Security (in case of a national level collective agreement or collective agreement affecting more than one Autonomous Community) or the Autonomous Community. It is a measure set by the legal framework for certain cases, and not voluntarily by all sides.

However, the previously mentioned labour reform has introduced the possibility for companies to opt out from higher collective agreements because of economic, technical or organisational circumstances. Therefore companies, under some conditions, can decide on the collective agreement extension.

Derogation mechanisms

In Spain, the opening clauses that allow derogation from collective wage bargaining were regulated in 1994 (Law 11/1994). According to this regulation, multiemployer collective agreements had to establish the conditions and procedures that allow companies to derogate from collective bargaining.

In 2010, the socialist government allowed the modification of wages stipulated in multiemployer collective agreements by means of negotiations within the company. According to law 10/2010, companies have to consult the employees' representatives and negotiate the changes within a non-extendable period of 15 days. If they do not achieve an agreement, they will have to apply for mediation procedures established in the multiemployer collective agreements.

Finally, the latest regulation enacted by the Popular Party government (Law 3/2012) makes it easier for companies to derogate from collective agreements. It allows companies to opt out of collective bargaining if the enterprise records a drop in its revenues or sales during six consecutive months. Moreover, the law enables employers to unilaterally modify wages on technical or organisational grounds.

Expiry of collective agreements

The continuation of collective agreements beyond expiry was one of the most important elements reformed by Law 3/2012. This law reformed the so-called 'ultra-activity' principle of the collective agreements, which guaranteed the continuation of a collective agreement, even after its expiry date. Its aim was to protect current working conditions even if an employer refused to sign a new agreement. However, Law 3/2012 states that the ultra-activity principle has allowed working conditions to become static and rigid, so it has reformed this principle by establishing that a collective agreement will cease to be in force one year after its completion. More specifically, it states that from 7 July 2013, all expired and unrenewed collective agreements made before 7 July 2012 will become invalid.

Nevertheless, a recent Supreme Court (rec. 264/2014) decision has annulled the reform of the ultra-activity principle. The Supreme Court has ratified the decision of the Courts of the Balearic Islands on the so-called ATESE case, in which the trade unions brought the company to court because of its decision to decrease wages once the collective agreement ceased to be in force (one year after its completion). The Supreme Court has argued that working conditions agreed in a collective agreement have a contractual juridical status and must be applied even if the collective bargaining of reference has expired, thus annulling the reform of the ultra-activity principle.

With this decision, the Supreme Court has reoriented, in part, the legislation in force regarding the previous labour relations regulation, preventing the 2012 reform from unfolding all the effects. However, this decision highlights two important issues. Firstly, it leaves open the possibility of modifying working conditions using the procedure contained in article 41 of the Statute of Workers Rights, about substantial change in working conditions (if economical, technical, organisational or productive causes are met). Secondly, this decision is not applicable to newly joined workers, because the expired collective agreement has never been applied to them. Because of this, other conditions could be applied to these workers, although new juridical problems could arise (double pay scale and its prohibition according to the jurisprudence) (Source: article in Derecho News)

Ultimately, this decision has created a great degree of juridical uncertainty in the application of the new principle of expiry.

Peace clauses

Broadly speaking, collective agreements have an 'implicit' obligation of labour peace. Meanwhile, ('explicit') peace clauses are not compulsory in Spanish collective agreements, but they can be included. According to article 82.2 of the Workers' Statute, collective agreements can regulate labour peace through agreed obligations. If negotiators decide to apply this possibility, then peace clauses appear. In general terms, collective agreements in Spain can include two main types of clauses: normative clauses and compulsory clauses. Normative clauses refer to the basic contents of the agreement (that is, salary regime, working time, professional classification, etc.), whereas compulsory clauses regulate particular obligations. Thus, peace clauses are compulsory clauses. Peace clauses imply (for the signatory parties) a temporary commitment to not making use of the right to strike during the validity of the agreement.

Other aspects of working life addressed in collective agreements

Generally speaking, collective agreements in Spain are poor in terms of the issues included. This is because of the detailed regulation of working conditions in the Workers Statute, that reduces the spaces for collective bargaining. In most cases, the main issues discussed in collective bargaining are wages and working time. The crisis has negatively affected the inclusion of working life issues in collective bargaining. As in previous crises, trade unions have tended to accept wage moderation and a reduction of workers' rights in exchange for employment maintenance. Even though a trend towards enlarging the number of issues discussed (including clauses related to training, working time flexibility, telework etc.) can be observed, the situation is still characterised by the limited number of working life aspects addressed.

Industrial action and disputes

Industrial action and disputes

Legal aspects

The right to strike is regulated in Royal-decree 17/1977, the Spanish Constitution and a judgment of the Constitutional Court (11/1981).

According to the regulation, legally there are two types of industrial action: the strike ( la huelga) and the lockout ( cierre patronal). The strike is a collective action by workers consisting of the agreed withdrawal of their labour. It is normally directed against the employer to back up the collective bargaining process and force compliance with statutory or contractual regulations.

On the other hand, the lockout is an industrial action taken unilaterally by the employer and consisting of the total or partial cessation of production activity. The premise may be the physical closure of the company or some other action taken to prevent the performance of work. To protect the right to strike, Spanish legislation allows lockouts only when persons or property are in danger, as a policing measure. However, it is a measure rarely put into practice by employers.

In Spain, a strike can be called by the majority of employees' representatives at the workplace, by all the employees of a company (by simple majority) and by the trade unions that are representative in a sector. The decision to call a strike must be communicated to the company and to the labour authority five days before it is to be held. For public companies, the notification period is 10 days. Finally, a strike committee made up of a maximum of 12 members must also be constituted.

During the strike, labour contracts become suspended. The right to strike is an individual right that is collectively exercised. Thus, individual workers are free to choose whether or not to participate.

The only strikes that are forbidden are political strikes, solidarity strikes and strikes that aim to challenge a collective agreement that is in force, but Spain has a tradition of these types of strikes, often taking the form of general strike (because of the prohibition).

Recently, due to the Spanish Penal Code reform (Organic Law 1/2015), a change has been introduced on the strike issue. Article 315.3 states that those acting in a group or individually, but in agreement with others, who coerce other persons to initiate or continue a strike shall be punished with imprisonment for one year and nine months up to three years or with a fine of eighteen months to twenty-four months.

Incidence of different forms of industrial action between 2010 and 2013

Work-to-rule or refusal to do overtime

Work stoppage or strike for less than a day

14%

Strike of a day or more

24%

Blockade or occupation

3%

Note: Percentage of private sector establishments reporting any form of industrial action during the indicated period.
Source: European Company Survey 2013.

Industrial action developments, 2012-2017

Source: 'Strikes developed, workers participating and days not worked, by sectoral, institutional, territorial and motivation aspects' ( Huelgas desarrolladas, trabajadores participantes y jornadas no trabajadas, por ámbitos sectorial, institucional, territorial y por motivación), Official statistics on labour conflicts from the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security.

Dispute resolution mechanisms

Collective dispute resolution mechanisms

In 1996, the Agreement on the Extrajudicial Resolution of Labour Conflicts (Acuerdo de Solución Extrajudicial de Conflictos, ASEC) was concluded. It was renewed in 2012 until 2016 by the UGT, CCOO (the unions) and CEOE and CEPYME (the employers' organisations). This agreement opened the door for the creation of the private foundation administered by the Interconfederal Service of Mediation and Arbitration (SIMA) ( Servicio Interconfederal de Mediación y Arbitraje), financed entirely by the state and managed autonomously by the social partners. It provides free services, similar to those of the joint institutions of the communities.

According to the Agreement, the procedures and aspects covered include:

The interpretation and application of a state legislation, collective agreement, agreement or pact, whatever its effectiveness, or a decision or practice of the company.

Conflicts that arise from the negotiation of a collective agreement that entail its blockade.

Conflicts that lead to a blockade in the negotiation, agreement or collective agreement.

Conflicts that arise from the call for a strike or from arrangements about security and maintenance services in the event of a strike.

Conflicts that affect several work centres of a company, group of companies, or related companies, located in different autonomous communities.

Individual dispute resolution mechanisms

In the case of individual conflicts, first there are conflicts of law, that is, conflicts that concern the interpretation of laws or arise from the implementation of collective agreements. These conflicts can be submitted to a judicial process that will start once the suit has been presented by either party, with a compulsory attempt at conciliation in the administrative headquarters by means of conciliation bodies created through agreements reached between the trade unions and employers' organisations.

As far as administrative conflicts are concerned, the conciliation process will be carried out in the presence of a conciliating lawyer assigned by the state, whose role will be limited to merely facilitating an understanding. He or she will refrain from making proposals. If the two parties fail to reach an agreement, they can call for institutional arbitration. Here, the parties, at their own will, submit their conflict to the decision of a person outside the Justice Administration (a civil servant lawyer who is appointed by the state and is not a judge). He or she will issue a binding award that must be abided by and will have the same effect as a ruling issued by a judge that cannot be appealed. If the process of conciliation and/or arbitration concludes without agreement, the following phase will be carried out in the social courts.

Finally, conflicts can be submitted to the social courts. These are organised according to their juridical competences at regional level (High Court) and at national level (the National Court and the Supreme Court).

The table below presents information on the number of collective conflicts solved through judicial mechanisms and those managed through SIMA and regional out-of-court conflict resolution mechanisms. What we can observe is that with the economic recovery, the number of conflicts solved through judicial or non-judicial mechanisms has declined very significantly.

Use of collective dispute resolution mechanisms

Source: Evolution of judicial conflicts and those managed through SIMA (2012-2017), Boletín de Estadísticas Laborales

Individual employment relations

Individual employment relations

Individual employment relations are the relationship between the individual worker and their employer. This relationship is shaped by legal regulation and by the outcomes of social partner negotiations over the terms and conditions governing the employment relationship. This section looks into the start and termination of the employment relationship and entitlements and obligations in Spain.

Start and termination of the employment relationship

Requirements regarding an employment contract

The minimum working age for starting an employment relationship is 16 years. Once the employment contract is signed, the company must tell the Public Employment Service the conditions of the contract and send a copy of it no more than 10 days later. Another copy of the contract must be submitted to the employees' representatives at the workplace.

Dismissal and termination procedures

Employers are required to notify their workforce of planned redundancies 15 days in advance. This applies for both collective and individual redundancies. This notice period applies to all the employees irrespective of their tenure. In 2010, the notice period was reduced from one month to two weeks by Royal-Decree Law 10/2010. The Spanish economy appears to be more flexible now than the average OECD countries in this area, since average notice periods in OECD countries are 3.5 weeks for workers with 9 months' tenure at the time of dismissal, 1.3 months for workers with 4 years' tenure and 2.7 months for workers with 20 years' tenure at the time of dismissal.

In the event of collective dismissal (more than five employees if the whole workforce is affected; at least 10 employees in companies with fewer than 100 employees; 10% of the employees in companies with 100-300 employees; and 30 employees in companies with more than 299 employees), legislation requires that employees are paid a minimum legal compensation of 20 days' pay for each year of service, up to a maximum of 12 months' pay.

In the event of individual unfair dismissal of an employee who has an open-ended contract, legislation requires that employees are paid a minimum legal compensation of 33 days' pay for each year of service, up to a maximum of 24 months' pay.

In the event of individual fair dismissal, legislation requires that employees are paid a minimum legal compensation of 20 days' pay for each year of service, up to maximum of 12 months' pay.

In enterprises with fewer than 25 employees, the Public Fund of Wage Warranty (Fondo de Garantía Salarial) will pay 40% of the legal indemnification of employees in collective redundancies.

Severance pay for temporary contracts was modified by Royal-Decree 10/2010, which established that as of 1 January 2015, severance pay will increase annually by one day per year of service, from the eight days per year of service paid in 2010 to 12 days. Accordingly, in 2014 severance pay for temporary contracts was 11 days per year worked. If the employer dismisses the temporary worker before his or her contract expires, severance pay will be equal to 33 days' pay for each year of service, up to maximum of 24 months' pay.

On this subject, a polemical decision was pronounced by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in September 2016 (C-596/14). Under Spanish Law, permanent employees get 20 days per worked year as severance pay, whereas temporary workers get 12 days when they are laid off, and temporary substitutes ( interinos in Spanish) do not get any compensation. In a judgment issued on 14 September 2016, the European Court of Justice established that temporary substitutes also have the right to receive severance pay, and that the amount received by temporary workers and permanent workers should not be different because of the type of their contracts, on the legal grounds of the Framework Agreement on fixed-term work (Annex of the Council Directive 1999/70/EC).

This sentence has created great uncertainty on the subject in Spain, because according to the Court decision, both temporary workers and temporary substitutes should have the same compensation as the rest of the employees (20 days, up to maximum of 12 months' pay).

Currently, the Spanish regulation is still the same (no severance pay for temporary substitutes), although more similar cases have reached the ECJ and the Spanish High Court and are awaiting sentence. It seems that the legislator will wait until these pending cases are resolved, in order to regulate the issue based on a more consolidated jurisprudence. So, in future the repercussions of the ECJ decision remain to be seen.

Entitlements and obligations

Parental, maternity and paternity leave

In Spain, maternity leave gives mothers the right to take 6 weeks of paid leave after the birth plus 10 weeks that can be shared between the mother and father. These 10 weeks can be taken full time and part time.

Law 3/2007 for the effective equality between men and women introduced an individual right to paternity leave equal to 13 days, irrespective of the mother's right to maternity leave. Social Security statistics show that from 2007 to September 2016, more than two million workers availed of this entitlement. From 2014 to 2015, a slight increase in the use of this right was observed, from 235,678 in 2014 to 238,806 in 2015.

Statutory leave arrangements

Maternity leave

Parental leave

Paternity leave

The duration of parental leave was extended from four to five weeks on 5 July 2018. In September 2017, the Popular Party and Ciudadanos agreed to extend the paternity leave to five weeks from the following year onwards. However, in January 2018, this agreement was still subject to the approval of the 2018 Budget Law, so the extension had not been applied in practice (and parental leave was still four weeks long).The Socialist government finally announced this measure as part of the Budget Law 6/2018.

Sick leave

In order to be eligible for sick leave, the employee must have contributed to the Social Security for 180 days during the five years prior to the date of leave in case of common illness. In case of a labour accident, no contribution period is required.

The benefit amount payable is determined on the basis of contributions that are established according to salaries. For the first three days of a common illness, the employee will not receive any benefit. Between the fourth day and the twentieth day, the replacement rate is 60% of the regulatory base. After the twentieth day, the replacement rate is 75% of the regulatory base. In case of a labour accident, the replacement rate is 75% of the regulatory base from the first day.

Retirement age

The retirement age was increased in 2011 (Law 27/2011) from 65 to 67 years of age. This postponement is being applied progressively between 2013 and 2027, increasing by one month per year until 2018, then by two months per year from 2019 to 2027. Workers are able to retire at the age of 65 years and benefit from maximum pension rights if the contributions they have paid to the Social Security amount to 38 years and 6 months.

The period of contribution that is taken to determine the regulatory basis of the pension has risen from 15 to 25 years. This rise is being applied gradually, increasing by one year from 2013 to 2022.

Women who have interrupted their careers as a consequence of a birth or adoption will be able to claim 9 months of contributions per child before the age of 67 years, up to a maximum of 2 years.

Pay

Pay

Pay: For workers, the reward for work and main source of income; for employers, a cost of production and focus of bargaining and legislation. This section looks into minimum wage setting in Spain and guides the reader to further material on collective wage bargaining.

In 2016, the average annual wage for men was €25,924 (€25,668 in 2011) and € 20,131 (€19,768 in 2011) for women. Since late 2014, the Spanish economy has recorded positive growth rates and employment creation; however, this economic improvement was not reflected in salary levels. The report Graphic analysis of the salary devaluation in Spain published in 2015 by the trade union CCOO concludes that internal devaluation affected particularly those groups who were already earning the lowest salaries, as well as those who lost their job and found a new one (usually with a lower salary). Moreover, the increase in part-time work levels also contributed to the decrease in average wages. Furthermore, the report states that salary devaluation was leading to a decrease in workers' purchasing power. The factors behind salary devaluation were said to be mainly employment destruction, labour precariousness and the 2010 and 2012 labour reforms. It is suggested that salary devaluation was a core strategy in the adjustment plan of the Spanish economy, used as a tool for recovering lost competitiveness.

Figures on average annual wages in 2011 and 2016 are provided in the table below.

Average annual wages per worker (in euro), 2011-2016

Source: Salary Structure Survey (Encuesta de Estructural Salarial). National Institute of Statistics (INE)

Minimum wages

The determination of the minimum wage is regulated in Article 27.1 of the Statute of Workers' Rights. It establishes that the minimum wage will be determined by taking the following four factors into consideration:

the annual consumer prices index (Índice de Precios al Consumo);

the national productivity average;

the contribution of labour to the gross national income;

the general economic context.

However, it is does not set out how every factor will be taken into consideration.

There is no distinction made between youth and adult minimum wage rates.

Even though it is standard practice is for the government to consult social partners about the increase of the minimum wage, and then approve it, unilateral government wage setting without negotiating or even consulting the social partners has been the norm in recent years. The current Socialist government set the minimum wage for 2019 at €900 per month without negotiating or formally consulting the social partners. One of the conditions of the political party Podemos to support the Socialist government headed by Mr Pedro Sánchez was the commitment to raise the minimum wage to €1,000. The Socialist party was more inclined to bring it to €850, but under the pressure of Podemos decided to leave it at €900. In an intervention in the tripartite Social and Economic Council in early December 2018, the Ministry of Employment admitted the lack of any involvement of social partners and apologised for this to the general secretaries of the main trade unions and employer organisations. The Minister justified this unilateral intervention with the need to improve significantly the situation of the worst-off in the economy.

The amount of the minimum wage in 2012-2019 was as follows:

2012: €641.40

2013: €645.30

2014: €645.30

2015: €648.60

2016: €655.20

2017: €707.60

2018: €735.90

2019: €900.00

For more information regarding the level and development of minimum wages, please see:

Collectively agreed pay outcomes

For more detailed information on the most recent outcomes in terms of collectively agreed pay, please see:

Working time

Working time

Working time: 'Any period during which the worker is working, at the employer's disposal and carrying out his activities or duties, in accordance with national laws and/or practice' (Directive 2003/88/EC). This section briefly summarises regulation and issues regarding working time, overtime, part-time work as well as working time flexibility in Spain.

Working time regulation

In Spain, working time is set up by law and collective bargaining. The law provides basic standards that must be respected by all the collective agreements with regard to maximum working hours per day, rest periods and annual paid leave. Collective bargaining regulates the distribution of working time but respects the statutory legal provisions. Sectoral collective agreements provide general guidelines for working time in the sector, and this is then adapted at company level.

For more detailed information on working time (including annual leave, statutory and collectively agreed working time), please consult:

Overtime regulation

The statutory maximum working day is established by law at 9 hours (unless the social partners have agreed on a different number, and except for workers younger than 18 years, who cannot work more than 8 hours per day). The statutory maximum working day can be changed by means of collective bargaining up to a maximum of 80 extra hours distributed throughout the year. The 80 extra hours limit will not apply in cases of emergency or urgent need to repair extraordinary damages, but the additional amount will be paid regardless to the worker.

Part-time work

In Spain, the percentage of part-time workers has traditionally been low - it was 12% before the crisis (2007) and reached 14.8% in the third quarter of 2018. The percentage of women working part time is higher (24.2% by the end of 2018). Although the number of men working part time has slightly increased in the last few years, differences between sexes are still very pronounced. However, the most important feature of part-time work in Spain at this time is its relationship with precariousness. Working part time is mainly an involuntary decision in Spain and this has been exacerbated by the crisis. According to the Spanish Labour Force Survey, in the third quarter of 2018, 52.7% of employees who work part time wanted to have a full-time job.
Persons employed part-time in Spain and EU28 (% of total employment)
Source: Eurostat Labour Force Survey [lfsi_pt_a] - Persons employed part-time (20 to 64 years of age) - total and by sex.

Involuntary part-time

Involuntary part-time workers can be defined as those working part time because they could not find a full-time job. As could be expected, the evolution of involuntary part-time work in Spain follows a counter-cyclical pattern as it increases in periods of crisis (as workers find it more difficult to find a job, and in particular a full-time job) and declines when the economy is growing.

Persons employed in involuntary part-time in the Spain and EU28 (% of total part-time employment)

Source: Eurostat Labour Force Survey [lfsa_eppgai]- involuntary part-time employment as a percentage of the total part-time employment, by sex and age (20 to 64 years of age)

Night work

The work done between 22.00 and 06.00 is considered to be night work. A night worker is a person who normally works during the night period no less than 3 hours of his or her work day, as well as a person who foresees that no less than one third of his or her annual working day will be done during the night period (Source: the Statute of Workers' Rights).

Shift work

Shift work is considered to be all kinds of teamwork organisation, in which workers take up successively the same work positions, according to a certain pace of work- continuous or discontinuous - implying for the worker the need to offer his or her services in different hours over a given period of days or weeks (Source: the Statute of Workers' Rights).

Weekend work

In the Spanish labour legislation there is no provision for weekend work. A similar figure in the legislation is work during the rest days ( Descanso semanal) (Source: the Statute of Workers' Rights).

Rest and breaks

Rest and breaks terms are defined as periods of time when the worker is not obliged to provide their services to the employer. Workers have the right to rest days, which can be accumulated in periods up to 14 days, of a day and a half uninterrupted. As a general rule, it involves Saturday afternoon, or Monday morning, and the entire day of Sunday. Also, there is the right to have a break for 15 minutes if 6 uninterrupted hours are worked during the day.

The government, on the proposal of the Minister of Employment and Social Security and having previously consulted the most relevant trade unions and employers' organisations, can establish extensions and reductions in the duration of the work day and rests, for those sectors and services that because of their particularities demand it. (Source: the Statute of Workers' Rights)

Working time flexibility

Working time flexibility is regulated by collective bargaining or individual contracts under the limits established by the law. According to the Spanish legislation, 10% of the annual working time can be distributed irregularly throughout the year, thus increasing the maximum working hours (40 hours) in some weeks. In addition, overtime can be compensated with rest.

Health and well-being

Health and well-being

Maintaining health and well-being should be high-priority for workers and employers alike. Health is an asset closely associated with a person's quality of life and longevity, as well as their ability to work. A healthy economy depends on a healthy workforce; organisations lose productivity through ill-health of their workers. This section looks into psychosocial risks and health and safety in Spain.

Health and safety at work

Health and Safety at work is regulated in Chapter X of the Workers' Statute, which details those bodies in charge of monitoring the right application of health and safety regulations as well as the employers' obligations in relation to preventing accidents at work.

According to Eurostat figures on accidents at work (see the table below), Spain has improved health and safety at work over the last few years. The number of accidents has continuously decreased since 2009, with a slight increase in 2016. The most pronounced drop in the number of accidents was recorded in 2009 and 2013. Unfortunately, in 2014, a small increase in the number of accidents was recorded. With the economic recovery and the important role of the construction sector, the number of accidents has increased again after having fallen during the crisis.

Accidents at work, with four days' absence or more - working days lost

Source: Eurostat, [hsw_mi01] and [lfsa_eegaed]

Psychosocial risks

Spain does not have specific legislation on psychosocial risks. However, Law 31/1995, which transposed the Health and Safety at Work Framework Council Directive 89/391 to Spanish law, makes some references to these risks. For instance, Article 4.7.d. states that the organisation and management can affect the magnitude of the risks the workers are exposed to. There are other provisions related to psychosocial risks too, such as the duty to adapt the job to the person (Article 15.1.d) and the need to implement prevention actions in a coherent plan that integrates technology, work organisation, working conditions, social relations and the influence of environmental factors at work (Article 15.1.g). The Labour and Social Security Inspectorate is in charge of enforcing these provisions.

More recently, the Spanish Strategy for Health and Safety at Work 2015-2020 ( Estrategia Española de Seguridad y Salud en el Trabajo 2015-2020) includes the objective of promoting the participation of social partners and Autonomous Communities, and improving working and health conditions at work, especially in sectors, activities, collectives and companies with higher risk. More precisely, it includes developing and disseminating methodologies of psychosocial risks evaluation, which could lead to a better understanding and prevention of those risks.

Skills, learning and employability

Skills, learning and employability

Skills are the passport to employment; the better skilled an individual, the more employable they are. Good skills also tend to secure better-quality jobs and better earnings. This section briefly summarises the Spanish system for ensuring skills and employability and looks into the extent of training.

National system for ensuring skills and employability

Since the Organic Law 5/2002 of 19 June on qualifications and vocational education and training was approved, the main mechanism to identify and define vocational qualifications for both the Initial Vocational Education and Training system (IVET) and the Continuing Vocational Education and Training system (CVET) is the National Catalogue of Professional Qualifications (CNCP). The General Council on Vocational Education and Training (CGFP), together with the technical body, the National Institute of Vocational Qualifications (INCUAL), are in charge of identifying and updating the qualifications of the CNCP. They follow a demand-driven approach that aims to identify the most significant qualifications needed in the productive system.

The methodology for developing the standards is rather participative. It involves employers, trade unions and administrations at both the central and regional levels and works as follows. Professional qualifications are designed by working groups comprised of experts in the professional field and in vocational training. There are 26 working groups (one working group for each professional group). The working groups are proposed by the General Council on Vocational Education and Training (CGFP) and are directed by the INCUAL. The working group's first task is to design and describe the unit of competence. The unit of competence is the minimum aggregate of competences that can be recognised. Units of competences are expressed as professional outcomes. Then the unit of competence is associated with a training module that includes learning outcomes and assessment criteria. Once the unit of competences and learning modules have been established, the INCUAL classifies and controls the outcomes. After that, the Council of Ministers can approve the qualification to be included in the CNCP after consulting with the CGFP, the Scholar State Council and the ministry affected. Qualifications must be updated at least every five years.

Training

The main national public institutions responsible for training regulation and development are the General Council on Vocational Education and Training (CGFP), the National Institute of Vocational Qualifications (INCUAL) and the State Foundation of Training for Employment (Fundae), former Tripartite Foundation of Training for Employment (Tripartita).

On 23 March 2015, the Royal Decree-Act reformed the Vocational Training System, in order to gain efficiency and transparency in the management of public resources, and established Fundae, the State Foundation for Employment Training ( Fundación Tripartita para la Formación en el Empleo). Nowadays, employers' organisations and trade unions are no longer the principal training providers, and do not directly manage training programmes (for that purpose, they are now under the same conditions as other private training centres). However, social partners do take part in the design and planning of training programmes.

The composition of the foundation's patronage has also changed, in that now the proportion of public administration representative members is higher: the state has 36 seats, Autonomous Communities 18 (one each) and social partners only 18 (representative unions 9 and main employers' organisations 9).

According to the Annual Labour Survey (Encuesta Annual Laboral), 73.7% of Spanish companies provided some form of training to their employees in 2017. This number reaches 99% in the case of companies with more than 250 employees, but goes down to 66.1% in companies with 5-9 employees.

Work organisation

Work organisation

Work organisation underpins economic and business development and has important consequences for productivity, innovation and working conditions. Eurofound research finds that some types of work organisation are associated with a better quality of work and employment. Therefore, developing or introducing different forms of work organisation are of particular interest because of the expected effect on productivity, efficiency and competitiveness of companies, as well as on workers' working conditions. Ongoing research by Eurofound, based on EurWORK, the European Working Conditions Survey and the European Company Survey, monitors developments in work organisation.

More information on:

For Spain, the European Company Survey 2013 shows that between 2010 and 2013, 49.4% of establishments with 10 or more employees reported changes in the use of technology, 40.9% introduced changes in ways to coordinate and allocate the work to workers and another 27.6% saw changes in their working time arrangements.

The Working and Living Conditions Survey ( Encuesta de Calidad de Vida en el Trabajo, ECVT) conducted by the Ministry of Employment in 2010 (the last year in which it was conducted) provides some information on work organisation and job satisfaction, but unfortunately it is not very recent.

In general, this survey, carried out in a relatively early stage of the crisis, shows that Spanish workers record positive ratings with regard to subjective indicators on job satisfaction. For instance, on a scale of 0 to 10, employees rate personal development at 7.6, 7.5 for autonomy and 7.2 for motivation. However, according to this same source, 38% of employees had a high or very high level of monotonous routine in their work tasks, 31% had a mid-level of monotony and 30.5% had a low or very low level of monotonous routine in their work tasks.

The contrast between subjective and objective factors related to job quality in Spain has been stressed by some authors (Prieto et al, 2009) who have called for multidimensional approaches to measure job quality.

The Ministry of Employment and Social Security publishes the Annual Labour Survey (Encuesta Anual Laboral). According to this survey, in 2017, some 25.5% of the surveyed companies applied internal flexibility measures. In 2013, the first year when this survey was conducted, 27% of the companies applied internal flexibility measures; however, these figures contrast with the lower percentages of 2014 (24.3%) and 2015 (20.7%). In 2016, 41.4% of all employees were working in companies which applied internal flexibility measures (46.1% in 2013; 42.2% in 2014; 37.2% in 2015). Normally, the use of this type of measure is more frequent in larger companies (54.3% of the companies with more than 499 workers applied these measures). Flexibility is mainly related to working time, whereas changes in wages have lost importance in recent years. In particular, in 2017, 14.7% of all the companies modified the type of working time (full-time or part-time), whereas 11.3% adapted/modified to some extent working time (e.g. distribution of working hours). Just 1.9% of companies changed the wage system or the wage amount (in contrast to 6.8% in 2013).

Equality and non-discrimination at work

Equality and non-discrimination at work

Article 4.2 of the Statute of Workers' Rights formally acknowledges the right not to be discriminated against at work due to sex, civil status, social origin, race, religious or political ideas, affiliation to a trade union or by reason of language.

Law 14/2003 on the treatment of migration in Spain acknowledges as indirect discrimination the adoption of criteria that discriminate against a worker due to his or her nationality, religion, ethnicity or race.

Law 3/2007 on effective equality between men and women established that gender be mainstreamed in public policies in order to achieve effective equality in all areas of economic, social, cultural and political life.

Employees' representatives at the workplace are responsible for ensuring equality at work.

Equal pay and gender pay gap

The main bodies ensuring equal pay for equal work are labour inspectors and employees' representatives at the workplace.

The observed gender pay gap (unadjusted) declined in the years previous to the crisis. There was a recorded a drop from 22% in 2002 to 16% in 2008. However, since the onset of the crisis it has risen again; it was recorded at 18% in 2012. Research conducted by Murillo and Simon (2011) shows the same trend after 2008. According to them, the main factors that explain the new increase in the gender pay gap relate to the improvement of men's wages due to the employment destruction in relatively low-wage sectors and the increase of the 'glass ceiling' effect. A more recent study by FEDEA (Anghel et al. 2018) showed that women earn on average 12.7% less (hourly earnings).

The most important legislative initiative aimed at combating gender pay discrimination was the Organic Law 3/2007, for Effective Equality between Women and Men. One of its main contributions directly affecting pay discrimination was the obligation to companies with over 250 workers to draw up and apply equality plans, which have to contain measures dealing with professional classification, promotion and training, and payroll retributions, among other issues.

An interesting social partner initiative is the Observatory of Measures and Equality Plans in Collective Bargaining, a body created by the General Workers Union (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT) and financed by the European Social Fund and the Women's Institute. This body publishes reports analysing how equality is treated in collective bargaining and in the equality plans. The last report was for 2013.

The Institute of Women, together with the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), publishes the report Women and Men in Spain (Mujeres y Hombres en España), which uses a group of indicators to review the situation of women in different aspects of society, including the labour market. The last report compiling all the data on the subject was issued in 2017.

Quota regulations

Organic Law 3/200 for Effective Equality between Women and Men introduced a quota regulation for electoral lists. Since 2007, a minimum of 40% people of each sex must be included in all the electoral lists for municipalities with a population higher than 5,000.

With regard to disadvantaged groups, Law 13/1982 regulated a quota of 2% of disabled workers in private and public companies with more than 50 employees. However, Royal-decree 364/2005 introduced some exceptions and provides alternative measures that companies can implement if they cannot hire a disabled worker.

Working life links

Working life links

Employers

Trade Unions CC.OO and Affiliates

UGT and Affiliates

Other Union Organisations

Government

Other Links

Bibliography

Bibliography

Alós, R., Beneyto, P. J., Jódar, P., Molina, O., & Vidal, S. (2015). La representación sindical en España, Fundación 1 de mayo.

Anghel, B., Conde-Ruiz, J. I., & Marra de Artiñano, I. (2018), Brechas salariales de Género en España, FEDEA, Madrid.

Funcas (2015), La reforma laboral de 2012: primer balance (mayo - junio), nº 246, May 2015.

Miguélez, F. and Rebollo, O. (1999), 'Negociación Colectiva en los noventa', in F. Miguélez and C. Prieto (eds), Las relacíones de empleo en Espania, pp. 325-346. Madrid: Siglo veintiuno.

Prieto, C., Arnal, M., Caprile, M. and Potrony, J. (2009), La calidad del empleo: Una aproximación teórica y empírica, Ministerio de Trabajo e Inmigración. Madrid.

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This profile describes the key characteristics of working life in Spain. It aims to complement other EurWORK research by providing the relevant background information on the structures, institutions and relevant regulations regarding working life.

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One of the biggest challenges of the pandemic has been keeping in touch with friends with social distancing and other Covid restrictions in place.

But for some these changes instigated unlikely friendships with people they might otherwise never have met. Five Guardian readers share how these friendships have helped them get through the past year.

'I watched Star Trek Voyager with people I never met - for 172 days'

Christopher Ince, 34, a university lecturer from London, braced himself for what would become months of social isolation when the first lockdown began in March last year. He decided to comfort himself by bingeing on a favourite TV show.

"I randomly tweeted something about putting on the first episode of a TV series. I'm slightly afraid to say that it was Star Trek Voyager, but it was," he says.

"A few minutes later someone on Twitter, who I'd been friendly with, responded to suggest we watch along in sync, which led to a small gang of people joining in. Some of us knew each other, some of us didn't, but we're all part of the LGBTQ+ community. The six of us ended up watching an episode alongside each other at 7pm, every day, for 172 days. We became a crew and wound up joking about ourselves as such."

What was supposed to be "a bit of a laugh", as Ince puts it, became a support network. "The point of the show is a small group of people on one ship making their way alone through tough times for an extended period. They stick together and keep each other going.

"A year on, we've watched all sorts of films and events together, gone to online museum openings, celebrated birthdays, and emotionally supported each other through book launches and the passing of family members. Some of us met up in 'real life'. Our anniversary was a few weeks ago, and I spent it virtually with friends I made from a tweet."

'We became great friends over the phone'

David Lloyds, 63, from Hedge End near Southampton, joined a local telephone buddy scheme when he was placed on furlough last year.

"I signed up to be a telephone friend. I was assigned a gentleman, Eddie Ridler, who I was told was nearly blind, hard of hearing, lives on his own and had to self-isolate due to his age: 96. I was apprehensive but gave it a go," Lloyds recalls.

The two men overcame the initial awkwardness of talking to a stranger when they bonded over a shared disinterest in professional sports.

"That was a huge relief and we then went on to talk about current affairs. Eddie is 32 years my senior, but his mind is as sharp as anything. Although we have not yet met face to face, we have become great friends. I ring him every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. We put the world to rights, have a laugh, and share news about our families.

"I learned that 'yes, yes' means he didn't understand me. We trust each other. He's the most wonderful person. I've never met anybody this cheerful."

When Lloyds returned to work, he let the buddy scheme know. "They offered to 'assign' him to someone else. I was horrified. Our phone calls have helped me keep my sanity during lockdown. He became a continuity in my life. We still speak three times a week and I hope to meet him when we open up completely."

'We decided to move in together the day we met in person'

Rosie Wolf, 24, an artist from London, met Laura, 22, a Bournemouth University graduate, in a Facebook group for Labour supporters in March 2020.

"During one group video call we were both making the same faces over the behaviour of another person and started messaging privately," Laura remembers.

"We hit it off straight away, and in June Laura got a job offer in London," Rosie says.

"The first time we'd ever met in person was to go to a house viewing, which we immediately made an offer for. It was really amazing to finally meet. It sounds cheesy but it felt like we had met before, we are platonic soulmates."

The two friends now rent a flat together and "co-parent" their two cats.

"We're pretty much inseparable," Laura says. "We have made holiday plans for the future and joke that if we win the lottery we will buy a big mansion together and live there with our husbands."

'We forged a connection over my sad orchid in the window'

Bernie, 37, a director and arts trustee from Northampton, forged a friendship with a regular passerby under her window.

"I spent the year working in my study, which sits on the ground floor. A man started to nod [a greeting to me] on his dog walk, every morning.

"One day he started pointing through the window, gesturing something quite persistently. I wondered whether he was OK, to be honest, but opened the window. I had a rather sad orchid on the ledge and he told me I needed to trim it and take it out of the sun. I thanked him. We smiled," she says.

"We began to wave every day, and continued throughout the year. One day, at the front door, he told me he had been a prize orchid grower in his day but an infection destroyed all of his plants years ago and he lost heart.

"I would make sure I was at my desk around 10am so I didn't miss him. At some point he told me he'd lost his wife to dementia the previous year, and introduced himself and his dog.

"Around Christmas I gave him a little cake. Days later he brought me a card and one of his orchid books. I'm a single mum and it's just nice to see a friendly face, I'm always really happy when I see him. Even the people I'm in video meetings with know him, as I'd say: 'I'm waving at my gentleman friend.' He lights up when he sees me in my office.

"We still wave. My orchid has flowered."

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'We became a crew': how lockdown forged unlikely friendships

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One of the biggest challenges of the pandemic has been keeping in touch with friends with social distancing and other Covid restrictions in place. But for some these changes instigated unlikely friendships with people they might otherwise never have met. Five Guardian readers share how these friendships have helped them get through the past year.

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Equality in education... Does it matter? Compare Britain and France

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n Thursday 8 April, Emmanuel Macron announced the closure of the prestigious École Nationale d'Administration, France's elite school for turning out senior civil servants and politicians. The president's announcement sounded familiar - he had already pledged to reform the ENA, a school renowned for its conservatism and aversion to change, back in 2019 - but this time it's final: Macron said that the time had come to abolish an institution that is widely regarded as a symbol of elitism and inequality.

With just a year until the next presidential election, Macron is neck and neck in the polls with Marine Le Pen. The ENA abolition looks, therefore, as if it's part of a strategy to reconnect with "the people". It's easy to forget, given the pandemic, but before France entered lockdown in March 2020, it had been experiencing the most sustained anti-elite movement for generations in the form of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests. Macron has certainly has not forgotten this.

The president does not want to dispense with the idea of an elite school altogether but to build something that allegedly works better. A new school called the Institut du Service Public, a kind of "public management school", will replace the ENA. Unsurprisingly, Jean-Louis Debré, once a close ally of Jacques Chirac, declared that this was a "populist" measure (by which he meant it was pandering to public opinion).

His father, Michel Debré, the first of Charles de Gaulle's prime ministers, founded the ENA in 1945. Its aim was to train students drawn from all walks of life through entrance exams so jobs in the French civil service could be assigned on merit rather than wealth and personal background.

In reality, the school turned out to be a close-knit club for the upper-class, rather than a force for democratisation. The elitist recruitment pattern has worsened over the years: by 2014, 70% of students came from the upper classes, as opposed to 45% in the 1950s. ENA graduates - called énarques - land the best jobs in the civil service, but also in business and frontline politics. Alumni include several presidents, the past eight prime ministers and current CEOs of top business and banking firms. There is even a term, pantouflage(from the word for slippers), referring to the practice by which civil servants find lucrative work in the private sector - the énarques are emblematic of this tendency, which accentuates the public perception of an incestuous old boys' network.

One may think of énarques as the French counterparts of Oxford PPE graduates. Insofar as they are both effectively finishing schools for the ruling class, the comparison makes sense, although the specifics are quite different. In the UK, private education and elite universities are a fact of life. In France, the ideology of republicanism - which comes from the French Revolution - insists on the notion of equality of treatment for all and on the delivery of state-of-the-art public services owned and run by the state. The ENA is a public institution whose funding almost wholly comes from the state. This makes the way it favours students with high economic and cultural capital not just embarrassing, but a seeming contradiction of the state's republican ideals.

To get in, candidates spend a year prior to applying to the school in a classe préparatoire, an extremely demanding course. The written exam ( concours externe) tests a wide range of subjects and disciplines. Only a minority of candidates make it to the second round, which includes oral exams that essentially test their elocutionary skills. Then comes the dreaded grand oral, a long ordeal in front of a jury during which candidates are asked all kinds of puzzling and provocative questions designed to test their capacity to think on the spot.

It all has the effect of giving richer candidates who have the right social skills the edge over candidates from more modest backgrounds. Once in the ENA, it is essential to graduate in the top 10%, if graduates want to be able to choose from the most prestigious roles in the French state. The rest may be assigned to mediocre positions. Former graduates often complain about the teaching, which has a reputation for being dull and conservative, and describe the institution as a bastion of upper-class snobbery.

Back in 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy (who did not attend the ENA) mocked the "sadist or idiot" who had seen fit to include exam questions for ENA candidates about Madame de la Fayette's Princess of Clèves, a 17th-century novel. Sarkozy's mockery alluded to the idea that énarques are trained to discuss subjects as varied as politics, economics, history, arts or literature but can do so in only a superficial manner.

The modernisation of the ENA should therefore involve a comprehensive overhaul of the school's recruitment process and exam procedures, as well as a dramatic modernisation of the curriculum so it reflects the challenges of the real world. But does Macron really want this? Only he knows. Would it appease the yellow vests and people angered by his economic policies? Though the reform may be welcome and necessary,it will probably not make the slightest difference to them: énarques and ordinary citizens would carry on living on different planets.

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Why is Macron abolishing France's school for the political class? | Philippe Marlière

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n Thursday 8 April, Emmanuel Macron announced the closure of the prestigious École Nationale d'Administration, France's elite school for turning out senior civil servants and politicians.

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Migrant workers pick Europe´s vegetables

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The sun has yet to rise and two dozen migrant workers have already gathered at a roundabout in El Ejido, a town of about 90,000 people at the center of Almeria's agricultural industry. Every morning, groups gather in the hope that farmers will come and hire a few of them for a day of work in their greenhouses.

"It is the fifth day in a row that I've come here and no employer has shown up. It's very difficult to find work. We wait here every day from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and then go home," says Abderrazak, a 47-year-old migrant from Morocco.

Read more: At Spain's enclave of Ceuta, African refugees dream of Spain

Standing by his side is Lie Jallow, a former member of the Gambian police force.

"The living conditions and the opportunity for work in Europe is just like Africa. I had never worked in a field and I never thought I would have to work in a field in my life," Jallow says.

The province of Almeria produces about 3.5 million tons of fruits and vegetables annually in more than 31,000 hectares (78,000 acres) of greenhouses.

Almeria's greenhouses are visible from space

The crops grown in this giant "sea of plastic" - as the area is often referred to - are produced by a mix of small individual farmers and larger multinationals whose fruits and vegetables fill the produce sections of Europe's supermarkets in countries like Germany and the United Kingdom.

The region is also a gateway to Europe for many African migrants. According to local authorities, last year more than 400 boats with a total of around 12,000 migrants arrived in Almeria, supplying further labor for the region's 100,000-plus workforce.

Read more: Refugees in Italy get their hands dirty with own farm

According to Jose Garcia Cueva, an activist and union worker in the Andalusian Workers' Union (SOC-SAT), migrant workers are often exploited and lack the resources to demand better working conditions.

"The problem is that in the fields Spanish law is not respected," he says. "It is very difficult to change mentalities because employers are used to breaking the law. Workers often work without contracts or social security and are generally paid between €32 and €40 ($36-$45) a day instead of the €55 minimum wage. Many are exposed to pesticides in greenhouses."

Migrants wait on the roadside for farmers to hire them as day laborers

"Two weeks ago, a Moroccan worker died of respiratory arrest. Before dying he had many symptoms, like vomiting," Garcia Cueva says. "An investigation has been opened to see if his death was caused by an exposure to pesticides. He was young and had no health problems."
From greenhouses to slums
Standing by the door of his makeshift home, 28-year-old Ismail Ayaman from Morocco looks at the ruins of his former neighbors' houses. He lives in one of Almeria's many "chabolas" - slums - in the city of Nijar. In February, a fire from a gas canister used for cooking destroyed part of the slum, leaving more than 120 workers homeless.

Like the hundreds of other migrants living there, he built his house from wood and old scraps of plastic used in the nearby greenhouses. Most houses don't have running water and are unsafely powered by loose gas canisters and electricity stolen from power lines.

Ismael Ayaman lives in a shack he made himself and works in Almeria's greenhouses

"These houses are very dangerous. The men smoke, and the electricity cables are hanging, which can cause fires. But we don't really have a solution because without those electricity cables we can't cook, we can't have light at night," Ayaman says.

Located just a few hundred meters from the greenhouses where migrants work, the "chabolas" are also a constant reminder of the migrants' shattered dreams.

"We are suffering for nothing," says Driss El Mansouri, who comes from Morocco. "The bosses are always looking for more money and they choose the weak with little voice to pay them less."

Read more: Illegal immigrants provide cheap labor in Portugal's agricultural sector

"I came here because I thought that I could get a better life in Spain, but in reality life here is worthless," recounts his neighbor, Salah Akili. "I live here alone, without my wife and children. I remained undocumented for 10 years because my boss didn't want to give me a work contract. During all this time, I couldn't go back to see my family in Morocco."
Cracking down on illegal practices
According to local authorities, 30 percent of Almeria's migrant workers are undocumented.

Daniel Perez Reche is the head of the Unidad Central de Redes de Inmigracion Ilegal y Falsedades Documentales (UCRIF), a special police unit dedicated to cracking down on farmers who hire workers illegally. He and his colleagues patrol the region's greenhouses looking for illegal workers and their employers.

"Tell me the truth, okay? This is not you," says Jose Luiz Cerdan, a member of UCRIF, to a man suspected of working illegally in a tomato field as he inspects the man's laminated paper ID.

UCRIF says it's common for those with work permits to lend their papers to others who use them to work illegally

"He has been detained for working with the identity of another person," Perez Reche explains as his colleague walks the handcuffed worker to a van. "This is a very common case in the region: Migrants who already possess the relevant documentation and work permits usually lend or rent their documentation to others so that they can work. This constitutes a crime in Spain, so he will have to go before a judge."

Farmers can be fined up to €6,000 for each worker they employ illegally, the UCRIF officials say.
Farmers' hardships
Thirty-two-year-old Lidia Martinez Walbrecht and her husband, Tobias Übel, rent a 1.5-hectare field for Italian peppers and cucumbers, employing three workers from Africa and Eastern Europe.

They say that the competition from produce coming from foreign markets such as Turkey and Morocco coupled with increasing utility costs are putting a strain on Spanish farmers and forcing them to look for alternative ways to save money.

Read more: Post-industrial agriculture: France's field-to-table approach to food

"Last year we made a profit of €25,000 [$28,200]. And this year will be even worse," says Martinez Walbrecht. She asserts that her workers are paid a fair wage, showing an employee's pay statement.

Lidia Martinez Walbrecht and Tobias Übel say farmers have a tough time making a living

"Last December, the price of cucumber went as low as €0.08 per kilo. To break even, we need to sell a kilo for €0.65. It's very hard. Many farmers are forced to abandon their fields," she adds.

Her husband, a former aircraft maintenance mechanic crew chief for the German Air Force, believes that the strenuous financial situation in which farmers find themselves is pushing them to break the law.

"Employers who pay their workers less than the minimum wage and who don't pay their workers' social security can save up to €20,000 a year," Übel says. "I think that because of this, some farmers don't treat their workers the way they should. They don't pay them well, don't give them work contracts, don't pay for their social security. It's a cycle, and that's very bad."
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Spain's 'Sea of Plastic': Where Europe gets its produce, migrants get exploited | DW | 09.03.2019

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The sun has yet to rise and two dozen migrant workers have already gathered at a roundabout in El Ejido, a town of about 90,000 people at the center of Almeria's agricultural industry. Every morning, groups gather in the hope that farmers will come and hire a few of them for a day of work in their greenhouses.

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Very close to home... migrant workers in Almería

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t is the end of another day for Hassan, a migrant worker from Morocco who has spent the past 12 hours under a sweltering late summer sun harvesting vegetables in one of the vast greenhouses of Almería, southern Spain.

The vegetables he has dug from the red dirt are destined for dinner plates all over Europe. UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Lidl and Aldi all source fruit and vegetables from Almería. The tens of thousands of migrant workers working in the province are vital to the Spanish economy and pan-European food supply chains. Throughout the pandemic, they have held essential worker status, labouring in the fields while millions across the world sheltered inside.

Yet tonight, Hassan will return to the squalor and rubbish piles of El Barranquete, one of the poorest of 92 informal worker slums that have sprung up around the vast farms of Almería and which are now home to an estimated 7,000-10,000 people.

Here, in the middle of Spain's Mar del Plastico (Plastic Sea), the 31,000 hectares (76,600 acres) of farms and greenhouses in the region of Andalucía known as "Europe's garden", many of El Barranquete's inhabitants don't have electricity, running water or sanitation.

Hassan's house, like all the others in El Barranquete, is constructed from whatever he could find on rubbish dumps or the side of the road; pieces of plastic foraged from the greenhouses, flaps of cardboard and old hosing tied around lumps of wood. Under Spain's blazing sun, the temperature can reach 50C - at night the plastic sheeting releases toxic carcinogenic fumes while he sleeps.

When he first arrived in Spain, Hassan was stunned by how the workers were treated on the farms. Like other workers in El Barranquete, Hassan says he earns only about €5 (£4.50) an hour, well under the legal minimum wage. "The working conditions are terrible," he says. "Sometimes we work from sunup to sundown in extreme heat, with only a 30-minute break in the whole day."

Now, as Almería faces a wave of Covid-19 infections, workers say they have been left completely unprotected. "We pick your food," says Hassan. "But our health doesn't matter to anyone."

In August, the Observer interviewed more than 45 migrants employed as farm workers in Almería. A joint supply chain investigation by Ethical Consumer magazine has linked many of these workers to the supply chains of UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Lidl and Aldi.

Gloves and face masks in the greenhouse? Temperature checks? They don't give you anything

All claimed to be facing systemic labour exploitation before and throughout the pandemic such as non-payment of wages and being kept on illegal temporary contracts. Many described being forced to work in a culture of fear and intimidation. Some of those who complained about conditions said they had been sacked or blacklisted.

Workers employed by Spanish food companies linked to UK supermarkets also claimed that throughout the pandemic they have been denied access to adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) that under Spanish law they are entitled to as essential workers. Many said they were not given enough face masks, gloves or hand sanitiser and have been unable to socially distance at work.

One man employed at a big food company supplying the UK says that he has only been given two face masks in six months.

In response to the investigation, the British Retail Consortium - members of which include Sainsbury's, Asda, Lidl and Aldi - released a statement calling on the Spanish government to launch an inquiry.

Commenting on the Observer's findings, Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, says the situation facing migrant workers in southern Spain is a human tragedy.

"The pandemic has exacerbated the unacceptable conditions facing migrant workers and the Spanish government must urgently act. But two-thirds of all fruit and vegetables consumed across Europe and the UK come from these greenhouses and all the companies and retailers up these supply chains have a responsibility to these workers as well," he says.

Do we have to wait for them to get Covid instead of looking for a much more dignified place, with hygienic conditions?

Diego Crespo, MP

Spain is experiencing the highest numbers of new Covid-19 infections in Europe, with the province of Almería recording more than 100 new cases a day.

Despite the local government in Almería claiming that the virus has not reached the plastic settlements, there have been multiple outbreaks on farms across the province and in the cortijos, the dilapidated housing blocks near the farms in which workers live.

As Covid-19 infections rise, medical charities such as as Médicos del Mundo are supplying masks, gloves and temperature checks in the settlements in scenes more reminiscent of a disaster zone than one of the richest countries in the world.

"People want to protect themselves, but they cannot", says Almudena Puertas from the NGO Cáritas. "They are here because there is work and we need them."

In the past month, the local government in Andalucía has allocated €1.1m to create better health and safety conditions, but critics say they have yet to see any significant improvements.

"I do not understand why these people are not being rehoused in better accommodation. Do we have to wait for them to get Covid instead of looking for a much more dignified place, with adequate hygienic conditions?" says, Diego Crespo, a Forward Andalucía party MP.

Hassan knows that his work and living conditions make him vulnerable to becoming infected with Covid-19. When asked whether he is supplied with PPE at work, Hassan laughs. "Gloves and face masks in the greenhouse? Temperature checks?" he says. "They don't give you anything."

Like many of the people living in the settlements, he say he is more scared of not being able to work than they of becoming ill. If he can't send money home, his children don't eat.

One groups of workers say that they lost their jobs after testing positive for Covid-19 and quarantining at home. Muhammad, a farm worker from Morocco, said that when he and others had recovered and returned to work, some of them were told there was no work for them.

Every worker here has a family, but the only thing that matters is that we get the vegetables to Germany or the UK

"When I contracted Covid-19, I'd already spent two years working for this company without papers and two years on a temporary contract, but when I came back they said there is nothing for me here," he says. He says he and the other workers who did not get their jobs back also did not receive the sick pay they were entitled to as essential workers.

The Soc-Sat union, which represents agricultural workers across Almería, says the failure to provide farm workers with basic PPE speaks to the culture of impunity that surrounds the mistreatment of Spain's migrant workforce.

"Around 80% of fruit companies in Almería are breaking the law," says José García Cuevas, a Soc-Sat union leader. The union says that across the region, widespread fraud is being perpetrated on the farm workers. "People will work 25 days but their employers will only count 10," he says. "Or when you look at the payslips, it says €58 a day, which is minimum wage but that's not what the worker is receiving." He says that according to figures from the General Union of Workers, workers lose out on up to €50m of wages every year.

For decades, the exploitation and abuse of migrant workers in Spain has been widely condemned by UN officials and human rights campaigners, but to little effect.

Soc-Sat says that in 2019 it dealt with more than 1,000 complaints from migrant workers about exploitation and working conditions. This year it also says it has helped workers file legal complaints against food companies in Almería for breaching labour laws and not providing adequate PPE.

"If, under normal conditions, health and safety regulations are not followed, you can imagine what's happening in the current situation with a pandemic," says García Cuevas.

In its statement, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) says its members have zero tolerance for labour exploitation: "Many grocery members have funded and supported the Spain Ethical Trade Supplier Forums ... We call on the Spanish government to launch an investigation into labour conditions in the Almería region to help our members stamp out any exploitative practices."

In a separate statement, Tesco says it was aware of the issues surrounding migrant workers in Southern Spain and that the company worked closely with growers, suppliers and Spanish ethical trade forums to ensure good standards.

The Andalucían Ministry for Labour, Training and Self-Employment in Andalucía said that it had delivered training for businesses on how to protect workers against Covid-19. In a statement it says, "You cannot criminalise an entire sector that is subject to all kinds of controls by the labour, health and other authorities and that must also abide by strict regulations regarding the protection of workers' rights and prevention and occupational health."

In two weeks, the greenhouses of Almería will be at their busiest as the high season for tomatoes, peppers and salad begins. Ali, a farm worker who has been in Spain for more than 15 years, doesn't expect his situation to improve.

"If you complain, they will say: 'If you don't want to work here then go home,'" he says. "Every worker here has a family, a wife and children, but the only thing that matters is that we work to get the vegetables to Germany or the UK. It's like they have forgotten we are also human beings."

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'We pick your food': migrant workers speak out from Spain's 'Plastic Sea'

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t is the end of another day for Hassan, a migrant worker from Morocco who has spent the past 12 hours under a sweltering late summer sun harvesting vegetables in one of the vast greenhouses of Almería, southern Spain. The vegetables he has dug from the red dirt are destined for dinner plates all over Europe.

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People are protesting

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Earlier this month, the Japanese government announced plans to discharge 1m tonnes of radioactive wastewater accruing since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 into the Pacific Ocean.

To Pacific peoples, who have carried the disproportionate human cost of nuclearism in our region, this is yet another act of catastrophic and irreversible trans-boundary harm that our region has not consented to.

While Japan's plan is for the water to be diluted first and discharged over the course of about 30 years, and the Japanese government has tried its hardest to convince the wider public of the treated water's safety through the use of green mascots and backing from American scientists, Pacific peoples are once again calling it for what it is: an unjust act.

"We need to remind Japan and other nuclear states of our Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement slogan: if it is safe, dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris, and store it in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear-free," said Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, Vanuatu stateswoman and veteran activist of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, after Japan's announcement. "We are people of the ocean, we must stand up and protect it."

Many in the Pacific have lived experience of nuclear harm with the continuing irradiation of our environments, while survivors and their descendants continue to experience harrowing maladies such as lymphatic cancers, thyroid and reproductive health issues.

Since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations in 1945, 315 nuclear tests have been undertaken across the Marshall Islands, Australia, Kiribati and Maohi Nui (French Polynesia). All of which were, at the time, described by nuclear nations to be scientifically sound and safe.

Indeed, both Japan and Pacific states share the trauma of nuclear testing. However, the Japanese government has since enthusiastically embraced the nuclear power industry.

One would think that Japan's proposal to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is something novel but there is a history of precedent. The shady practice was virtually a global norm in the past for the likes of nuclear nations like Japan, America and Europe. Things came to a head in 1979, when Japan's clandestine proposal to dump nuclear waste in neighbouring Northern Marianas was exposed. Japan severely underestimated a united furore from political leaders, non-governmental groups and grassroots activists from the Northern Marianas, Micronesia and the Pacific.

On Hiroshima Day in Japan 1980 before the World Conference Against the Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, an activist from the northern Pacific country of Palau memorably asked the Japanese audience: "Are the Japanese going to change from nuclear victims to nuclear assailants?"; "Are you going to dump your own garbage in other people's back yards?"; "Are you really going to throw dangerous nuclear wastes in the Pacific which will harm not only us but our children and the following generations?". These questions rocked the conscience of those from Japanese civil society and soon bonds of solidarity were formed.

But these questions are still relevant today, as Japan prepares once again to dump nuclear waste material into the Pacific Ocean.

Pacific peoples at all levels are protesting the move. Dame Meg Taylor made a statement on behalf of the Pacific Islands Forum, the key regional body, calling for Japan to hold off discharging the water until consultations and an independent review took place.

And we, as youth activists from the region, are concerned about the potential harm this will have on the health of our ocean, which is the economic, spiritual and cultural heart of Pacific countries.

The Japanese government intends to starting dump the nuclear wastewater in two years from now. We ask them to reflect on our joint nuclear legacy and listen to their Pacific neighbours. We are saying loudly and clearly: our ocean is not your dumping ground.
Joey Tau is a campaigner with the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG). He is a Pacific media and communications specialist. Talei Luscia Mangioni is a Youngsolwara activist and a PhD candidate at the Australian National University.

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If it's safe, dump it in Tokyo. We in the Pacific don't want Japan's nuclear wastewater | Joey Tau and Talei Luscia Mangioni

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Earlier this month, the Japanese government announced plans to discharge 1m tonnes of radioactive wastewater accruing since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 into the Pacific Ocean. To Pacific peoples, who have carried the disproportionate human cost of nuclearism in our region, this is yet another act of catastrophic and irreversible trans-boundary harm that our region has not consented to.

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Participating in Summer AND Winter games!

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Participating in Summer AND Winter games!

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've never been someone to do anything half-arsed," says Greg Rutherford, as he revs up for the most dramatic leap of his career. "I'm coming back, and I intend to make history". It has been three years since the London 2012 long jump champion hung up his spikes, his body beaten up and broken down. But, incredibly, the 34-year-old returned to training last year and has secretly joined the GB bobsleigh squad as part of an audacious attempt to become the first Briton ever to win both summer and winter Olympic medals.

What makes Rutherford's story even more remarkable is that he has never sat in a bobsleigh before. But next month, Covid permitting, he will attend a team training camp in Gibraltar having been told by GB Bobsleigh coaches that he has "every chance" of making the Winter Olympics in Beijing next February.

"I know most people believe it is impossible to go from never having attempted a sport to winning an Olympic medal in under a year," says Rutherford. "But I 100% disagree. I'm not doing this merely to turn up to finish 25th. I intend to train incredibly hard, get myself on to the team, and then win a medal. And if we get the right sled, and have the perfect run, anything is possible. Even gold."

Most people would think twice about hurtling down a track at 90mph, but Rutherford is a genuine thrill-seeker who tried out the skeleton a few years ago, just for fun. "I think most people consider the skeleton as being quite nuts," he says. "So the fact I've done it and loved it puts me in good stead."

Rutherford's dream of a golden resurrection seemed impossible when he ended his long jump career in 2018. Back then he told the Guardian that he was in so much pain every time he leapt into a sand pit he was left hobbling for three days, unable to even sit on the floor to play with his kids.

So what changed? "It's a funny old thing," he says. "I was very happily retired but during lockdown I started training again because I had nothing really to do. I still have a full setup at home, including a gym and a track with a long jump pit, and my body responded really well."

Greg Rutherford celebrates winning long jump gold at the 2012 Olympics in London. Photograph: David J Phillip/AP

"My left ankle is still a bit dodgy," he admits. "But the difference is that I'm not having to prepare to jump any more. And as soon as you remove that side of movement, it makes my training a million times easier."

However the seed of a return was only planted when Rutherford's old friend, Kaillie Humphries - who won bobsleigh gold for Canada in the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics and bronze in 2018 - heard he was in shape again and urged him: "Dude, you have to try bobsleigh." In February Rutherford then began speaking to double Olympian Lamin Deen, who was 12th in last month's world championships, as well as the GB bobsleigh coaches Steve Smith and John Herbert. And what had been a pipe dream then turned into a serious plan.

"I didn't want to assume that because I was a fast and powerful athlete a few years ago that I would be able to cut it," Rutherford says. "I also didn't want to offend anyone by coming in. But the overriding feeling I kept getting was that they were very keen, too.

"There was none of this: 'Well, come down, see how you get on and we'll see.' It was very much: 'As long as you're fit, we can very much see you being a member of our team.' Of course I still have to go through a selection process. But when people tell you they can see you competing in Beijing, that's obviously a nice place to be."

Rutherford put on some weight after retiring from athletics, but counterintuitively this may actually boost his chances. It turns out that GB Bobsleigh are short of powerful yet heavy sprinters. Such athletes are vital, as sleds have to be a certain weight in competition. If the team is too light, extra weight is then added to the sled itself, which makes it heavier and harder to push at the start.

Greg Rutherford competes in the long jump final at the Rio Olympics in 2016, where he won bronze. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

"Over the last three years I've been more relaxed with diet, and gone up to around 100-101kg - which is about 14kg more than I used to be," Rutherford says. "But that's what that British bobsleigh is lacking: heavy guys who can also move quickly. The plan is to see if I can get to around 104 to 106kg, so I am eating more than ever. I'm training like a bodybuilder with the idea of leaning out in the run-up to Beijing."

Rutherford knows that some sceptics will believe his dream of more Olympic glory is so outrageous that it is impossible. But he insists that he is still fast - having run 10.26sec for 100m during his career - and actually more powerful now than when he was a track and field star. "When I squat at home I don't have a cage, so I get quite worried when I get too heavy, but I've done 210kg in recent weeks. And it's not that that feels too heavy, so I can definitely get stronger."

And Deen, who is expected to drive one of the two British sleds in Beijing, says he has been hugely impressed with what he has seen. "Greg's got a huge chance of making it for sure," he said. "He's got a fantastic attitude and he's got as much chance as anybody else within my squad of being on the plane for Beijing. Obviously he's got a little bit of a learning curve, but he's already been training with my coaches to catch up.

Greg Rutherford (right), a long jump Olympic gold medallist and former world champion, talks to double GB winter Olympian bobsleigh driver Lamin Deen. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

"What he is doing now in terms of lifting, sprinting and jumping is already on par with the guys," he added. "He is an incredible athlete. He just needs to learn the skills - and he definitely has enough time to do that."

That message was echoed by GB Bobsleigh push coach Smith, who said that Rutherford had "every chance to succeed" if he stays fit. "But I am also brutally honest with him," he added. "It's not a given that he will get in. Bobsleigh is not just about running down the ice. You also have a sled to contend with, you have got to know how to hit and load into that sled. It will be a steep learning curve."

Rutherford understands that. But there is no doubting the enthusiasm that infuses his every sentence and syllable. And, he confides, that when he walks his dogs he is already picturing himself on the start line in Beijing, crouching as he readies himself to charge down the ice - precisely the same vivid mental rehearsals he used before becoming the first British track and field athlete to ever hold all the major outdoor titles at the same time.

"We have my former GB teammates Joel Fearon and James Dasaolu, who have both run under 10 seconds for 100m, and the rest of the squad is also very impressive. Then there is me, an Olympic champion in a speed-power based event," says Rutherford, whose journey over the next few months will be filmed by Betty Productions. "This could be the fastest bobsleigh team in history. It's genuinely really exciting."

Rutherford's excitement is only tempered by the knowledge that GB Bobsleigh is no longer funded by UK Sport, which means they have to rely on a sled that was first used in the 2006 Winter Olympics - and is two-tenths of a second slower than sleeker, modern, and more aerodynamic models used by their rival teams.

"I'm training like a bodybuilder with the idea of leaning out in the run-up to Beijing." Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

"Getting something that puts us level on the technology front with the likes of Germany and the US really would be a game-changer," says Rutherford, who admits he would love a company such as Ineos to lend its support. "We all know how quickly technology changes. Can you imagine creating an F1 team and trying to race in the 2006 model? You'd get absolutely annihilated."

"But I guarantee you that when the Winter Games comes, everybody will be interested in a GB team flying down an ice track at 150km an hour - especially if we can be in the hunt for medals."

If Rutherford does make it to Beijing he realises it will be a formidable task to make history. Only one athlete, Eddie Eagan of the USA, has won gold medals in Olympics across both winter and summer sports - as a light-heavyweight boxer in Antwerp in 1920 and in the four-man bobsleigh in Lake Placid in 1932. Only four others - Jacob Tullin Thams (ski jumping and sailing), Christa Luding-Rothenburger (speed skating and track cycling), Clara Hughes (road cycling and speed skating) and Lauryn Williams (athletics and bobseigh) - have ever won Olympic medals spanning both winter and summer sports.

But that only adds to Rutherford's determination to succeed. "If it comes off it would be one of the greatest achievements in my life, only behind the Olympics in London," he says. "And I genuinely believe that if the team gets it right - probably with a new sled as well which I'm pretty sure we'll manage to figure out - there is every chance we can do really well. And for me, doing really well means winning a medal. How amazing would that be?"

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Greg Rutherford's Olympic bobsleigh dream: 'I intend to make history'

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've never been someone to do anything half-arsed," says Greg Rutherford, as he revs up for the most dramatic leap of his career. "I'm coming back, and I intend to make history". It has been three years since the London 2012 long jump champion hung up his spikes, his body beaten up and broken down.

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ack in the days of the Soviet Union, it was common to hear people on the left criticise the Kremlin for pursuing the wrong kind of socialism. There was nothing wrong with the theory, they said, rather the warped form of it conducted behind the iron curtain.

The same argument has surfaced this week amid the furious response to the now-aborted plans to form a European Super League for 20 football clubs, only this time from the right. Free-market purists say they hate the idea because it is the wrong form of capitalism.

They are both right and wrong about that. Free-market capitalism is supposed to work through competition, which means no barriers to entry for new, innovative products. In football's case, that would be a go-ahead small club with a manager trying radical new training methods and fielding a crop of players it had nurtured itself or invested in through the transfer market. The league-winning Derby County and Nottingham Forest teams developed by Brian Clough in the 1970s would be an example of this.

Supporters of free-market capitalism say that the system can tolerate inequality provided there is the opportunity to better yourself. They are opposed to cartels and firms that use their market power to protect themselves from smaller and nimbler rivals. Nor do they like rentier capitalism, which is where people can make large returns from assets they happen to own but without doing anything themselves.

The organisers of the ESL have taken textbook free-market capitalism and turned it on its head. Having 15 of the 20 places guaranteed for the founder members represents a colossal barrier to entry and clearly stifles competition. There is not much chance of "creative destruction" if an elite group of clubs can entrench their position by trousering the bulk of the TV receipts that their matches will generate. Owners of the clubs are classic rentier capitalists.

Where the free-market critics of the ESL are wrong is in thinking the ESL is some sort of aberration, a one-off deviation from established practice, rather than a metaphor for what global capitalism has become: an edifice built on piles of debt where the owners of businesses say they love competition but do everything they can to avoid it. Just as the top European clubs have feeder teams that they can exploit for new talent, so the US tech giants have been busy buying up anything that looks like providing competition. It is why Google has bought a slew of rival online advertising vendors and why Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp.

For those who want to understand how the economics of football have changed, a good starting point is The Glory Game, a book Hunter Davies wrote about his life behind the scenes with Tottenham Hotspur, one of the wannabe members of the ESL, in the 1971-72 season. (Full disclosure: I am a Spurs season ticket holder.)

Davies's book devotes a chapter to the directors of Spurs in the early 1970s, who were all lifelong supporters of the club and who received no payment for their services. They lived in Enfield, not in the Bahamas, which is where the current owner, Joe Lewis, resides as a tax exile. These were not radical men. They could not conceive of there ever being women on the board; they opposed advertising inside the ground and were only just coming round to the idea of a club shop to sell official Spurs merchandise. They were conservative in all senses of the word.

In the intervening half century, the men who made their money out of nuts and bolts and waste paper firms in north London have been replaced by oligarchs and hedge funds. TV, barely mentioned in the Glory Game, has arrived with its billions of pounds in revenue. Facilities have improved and the players are fitter, stronger and much better paid than those of the early 1970s. In very few sectors of modern Britain can it be said that the workers receive the full fruits of their labours: the Premier League is one of them.

Even so, the model is not really working and would have worked even less well had the ESL come about. And it goes a lot deeper than greed, something that can hardly be said to be new to football.

No question, greed is part of the story, because for some clubs the prospect of sharing an initial €3.5bn (£3bn) pot of money was just too tempting given their debts, but there was also a problem with the product on offer.

Some of the competitive verve has already been sucked out of football thanks to the concentration of wealth. In the 1970s, there was far more chance of a less prosperous club having their moment of glory: not only did Derby and Forest win the league, but Sunderland, Southampton and Ipswich won the FA Cup. Fans can accept the despair of defeat if they can occasionally hope for the thrill of victory, but the ESL was essentially a way for an elite to insulate itself against the risk of failure.

By presenting their half-baked idea in the way they did, the ESL clubs committed one of capitalism's cardinal sins: they damaged their own brand. Companies - especially those that rely on loyalty to their product - do that at their peril, not least because it forces politicians to respond. Supporters have power and so do governments, if they choose to exercise it.

The ESL has demonstrated that global capitalism operates on the basis of rigged markets not free markets, and those running the show are only interested in entrenching existing inequalities. It was a truly bad idea, but by providing a lesson in economics to millions of fans it may have performed a public service.
Guardian Live will host an online event to discuss the fallout from this week's European Super League controversy on Tuesday 23 April at 5pm. Book tickets here

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The European Super League is the perfect metaphor for global capitalism | Larry Elliott

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ack in the days of the Soviet Union, it was common to hear people on the left criticise the Kremlin for pursuing the wrong kind of socialism. There was nothing wrong with the theory, they said, rather the warped form of it conducted behind the iron curtain.

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By Christie

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in the ocean, seas, and other large bodies of water.

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In what might be the most attention the battery world has had since Elon Musk built South Australia's giant battery, Labor has announced that if they win the next election they will front up the cash to install hundreds of "community batteries" across the country.

But what is a "community battery" and how do they work?

What's the deal?

The kind of batteries that are used to support the electricity grid come in different shapes and sizes. There are the ones used to support electricity generation, like Elon Musk's big battery at Hornsdale in South Australia, which is used as frequency support.

There are mid-size batteries that are used in rural areas to isolate networks and provide a backup power supply in case the power goes out.

Then there are the little community batteries that can be scattered around cities and shared between households in a particular neighbourhood or street. It's this kind that is the focus of Labor's proposal. The basic idea of these community batteries is to allow households that generate their own solar power to pool their excess electricity in shared storage for later use.

Why might you need one?

In Australia one in every six households have solar, but only one in 60 have battery storage. For individual households, a community battery is a good way to lower costs by shifting the cost and the risks from installation, maintenance and replacement onto a private company or council to take care of.

For the people who run the electricity grid, these batteries are extremely useful. From the network perspective, rather than ripping out the existing cables and installing a larger one to deal with issues around peak demand, it is cheaper and more effective to put in a battery. This also helps deal with voltage and capacity issues created by concentrations of rooftop solar.

How does it work?

In principle, these batteries work like Dropbox except for electricity - though as the idea is being developed across a number of pilot programs the precise specifics tend to vary.

Sizes range from 100kW to 1MW and could be the size of a fridge or shipping container. Each household is then offered a certain amount of storage so that as energy is generated during the day, a portion of excess power is stored. During times of peak demand, this power can then be drawn on to power homes in the evening or support the grid.

There have been proposals to use the batteries in electric vehicles in a similar way but the advantage of a community battery is that both users and those who run the grid know exactly where it will be at any given time.

Has it been done anywhere in Australia?

Several trials are currently being run around the country. Among the most prominent is one by Western Power and Synergy in Western Australia, which has began its third trial late last year. Over east in New South Wales, Ausgrid has begun its own Beacon Hill pilot program among 600 houses in Sydney's northern beaches area. This is expected to be the "first of many".

What will it cost to use?

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency recently commissioned some researchers from Australia National University's battery storage and integration program to investigate the financial prospects of community battery projects.

Dr Lachlan Blackhall, who heads up the team, says it's not possible to estimate costs with any certainty as the technology is still developing, along with the business models. It largely depends on who is operating the battery, whether they are a for-profit company, what model they operate under and what the battery is being used for.

"The key takeaway is that community batteries deployed at scale would provide cost savings for consumers," Dr Blackhall said.

What is Labor talking about doing?

Promising cash. Should it win the election, Labor says it will spend over $200m to install 400 community batteries across the country to service 100,000 households. Labor says this will help encourage households to invest in solar panels.

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Community batteries: what are they, and how could they help Australian energy consumers?

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In what might be the most attention the battery world has had since Elon Musk built South Australia's giant battery, Labor has announced that if they win the next election they will front up the cash to install hundreds of "community batteries" across the country.

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Guide for environmental-friendly living: NOT BUYING STUFF

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Guide for environmental-friendly living: NOT BUYING STUFF

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At the risk of undermining the work of a certain Mr S Claus, here's a sobering thought: while the US contains just 3.1% of the world's children, its citizens buy in excess of 40% of the world's toys. Kids are effectively regarded as consumers in training and we know where that leads.

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Project Syndicate economists | Business | The Guardian

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Project Syndicate produces and delivers original commentaries by prominent economists, political leaders, scholars, business leaders, and civic activists to a global audience, including nearly 500 media outlets in more than 150 countries

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I recently received an email from Uber Eats telling me I'd made a £40 takeaway food order and that my PayPal account had been charged. The only problem is ... it wasn't me. It soon emerged that my Uber account had been hacked and, to make matters worse, the hackers had managed to set up two-step verification using their own mobile number. I was therefore no longer able to access my account, or shut it down. I've disputed the payment with PayPal but it is not certain that I'll be refunded. I have since discovered a great many other people complaining on Facebook that they, too, were hacked. The customer service I've received from Uber has been woeful. Its security has clearly been breached, but so far they are refusing to take responsibility.
Having spent a bit of time this week looking into Uber Eats, I'm starting to wonder if anyone's order actually passes off without a hitch. I'm sure most do, but the online takeaway delivery service appears to be beset with problems, of which allegedly hacked accounts is just one.

Last week a Scottish woman, whose Uber account had also apparently been hacked, was so frustrated that she spent £14 to send a parcel of dog poo to the address to which her hacker had received a £40 KFC delivery.

I went to the company and it now accepts that, in your case, it did not meet its "usual high standards of customer care". It has also apologised. You have been refunded for the order, which went to an address in west London via PayPal.

You have said you won't be using the site again. However, I'd strongly advise anyone who does use Uber to set up two-step authorisation on their account. You should also consider changing your password to one you haven't used on another website.
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions

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My Uber Eats account was hacked and I was charged, but it won't listen

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I recently received an email from Uber Eats telling me I'd made a £40 takeaway food order and that my PayPal account had been charged. The only problem is ... it wasn't me. It soon emerged that my Uber account had been hacked and, to make matters worse, the hackers had managed to set up two-step verification using their own mobile number.

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by Alvaro

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Sustainable travel has grown in popularity in recent years, but the concept goes way beyond toting your own BPA-free water bottle while you're on vacation. Eco-tourism is only a small part of sustainable travel - vacationers need to think about their long-term impact on the environment as well as the local population. When you travel sustainably, you have a chance not just to leave a destination as tidy as you found it, but also have a net-positive effect on the area.

Tourism is important to the Philippines, and this Southeast Asian nation is full of opportunities for travelers to practice sustainable travel. If you're planning on visiting, here are some ways to get more out of travel while giving back to the planet, in three popular tourist spots across the Philippines.

Boracay

Famous for its beautiful white-sand beaches, Boracay has long been one of the top tourist destinations in the Philippines. However, its immense popularity caused officials to close the beach to outsiders for six months in 2018, and there's now a limit on the number of daily visitors allowed. If you plan to visit Boracay, consider the following activities that have a net-zero impact on the area.

Kitesurfing - Kitesurfing harnesses the renewable, natural resource of wind power. Plus, you can get some serious speed when conditions are right. From December to March, try Bulabog Beach; from June to October, White Beach is a great place to kitesurf.

Ziplining - Ziplining is a fantastic way to get a bird's-eye view of Boracay, and it has zero impact on the environment.

Freediving - Freedivers learn to hold their breath for as long as possible, returning to the surface only when they need more air. Not only does this reduce the need for equipment and resources, but it is also a natural way for you to experience the wonders of the ocean. Of course, you'll need to be prepared for freediving, and local companies like Free Dive Boracay can help you learn how to do it safely.

Island Nature Tours - A walking tour is a sustainable, hands-on way to learn about Boracay and its flora and fauna while also burning calories. Tours range from casual jaunts to two-hour treks around the island. Either way, you'll learn about the natural habitat of lizards, monkeys, sea turtles, and more.

Cooking Classes - If you learn to cook authentic Filipino food, you'll be keeping a vital culture alive and taking home a most valuable souvenir: a new skill. Not to mention you'll be trying something new when you sample the local cuisine.

Manila Bay

Manila Bay is a natural harbor situated in the western part of Luzon, which is strategically located around the capital city of Manila. The harbor is famous for its beautiful sunset, rich history, and commercial activities.

Historically, Manila Bay is global in scope as it played a vital role during the Manila Acapulco Galleon Trade between Philippines and Mexico, for 250 years. Part of the Manila Bay area is also rich in biodiversity - particularly in the coastal cities of Paranaque and Las Pinas which serve as home and breeding grounds for many species of plants, fish, migratory birds, and animals. Pollution, climate change and dumping of waste are just some of the many environmental threats in Manila Bay. Organizations like PEMSEA are helping to combat these environmental problems. You can play your part in protecting the area's natural resources by picking one of these sustainable activities when you visit.

Bambike Ecotour of Intramuros - Cycle around the incredible historic neighborhoods and exciting destinations of Intramuros on a bamboo bike. Guided bike tours allow you to explore various parts of the renowned Walled City in a safe, fun, and informative way. The tours are typically done in small groups of around 5 -10 (max of 15), with a Bambassador making sure guests are taken care of throughout the entire experience.

San Agustin Church and Museum / Fort Santiago - A walking tour of the City of Manila is the best way to discover and learn the history and culture of the country. Monuments like San Agustin Church and Fort Santiago are must-see sites for all foreign visitors. The country's oldest existing church, San Agustin was originally built in 1571. It's now part of the UNESCO World Heritage List and boasts antiquated ecclesiastical arts and liturgical vestment, furniture, and an 18 th-century pipe organ. It even houses the tombs of Spanish and Filipino personages like Governor-General Miguel Lopez de Legazpi. Strategically located at the junction of Pasig River and Manila Bay, Fort Santiago was built in 1571. It served as the military headquarters of the Spanish, British, American, and Japanese regimes.

It's been declared a National Shrine and restored to its former glory.

Sagada

Sagada is tucked away in the Central Cordillera Mountains - a somewhat remote area of the Philippines. It was left relatively untouched during the Spanish colonial era and is known for its well-preserved indigenous culture and natural beauty. If you're looking for some sustainable activities, try one of the following four options.

Homestays - One of the very best ways to explore a local culture is to stay with someone who actually lives there. You can search http://thecordilleras.ph/ for a Department of Tourism (DOT) accredited homestay. Here you'll find Sagada residents who are willing to open their homes to visitors. The rates tend to be reasonable, and you'll be helping sustain the local economy while getting to know the people of Sagada first-hand.

Bomod-Ok Waterfalls - Hiking and swimming are gentle on the environment, so try checking out the Bomod-OK Waterfalls, known locally as "the Big Falls". Bomod-OK is reachable by hike (it should take about an hour each way). At the Bangaan Information Center, you can hire a local guide who can help you find your way there.

Mountain biking - The high elevation and mountainous terrain of Sagada makes it perfect for mountain biking. Visitors who want an eco-friendly adventure with amazing views can rent a bike locally and explore the area.

Ziplining - Just like in Boracay, ziplining in Sagada is a zero-impact activity that offers great views of the local scenery. Try ziplining over Sagada's Kapay-aw Rice Terraces or near Echo Valley.

When you travel sustainably, you're not just leaving a smaller carbon footprint on the planet, you're putting yourself right in the path of adventure, self-discovery, and meaningful connections with a new culture.

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Sustainable travel has grown in popularity in recent years, but the concept goes way beyond toting your own BPA-free water bottle while you're on vacation. Eco-tourism is only a small part of sustainable travel - vacationers need to think about their long-term impact on the environment as well as the local population.

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by Ivan

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A kayaker on the Colorado River, Utah.

Photograph by Ben Horton, Nat Geo Image Collection

We rely on fresh water for drinking, food, and sanitation, and they're in trouble. But freshwater issues are becoming a higher priority for conservationists.

When Grand Canyon National Park was established a century ago, the Colorado River running through it was treated as an afterthought. In the decades following, states scrambled to squeeze every drop of water out of the Colorado for farming and drinking, with a cascade of huge dams constructed along its course.

Native fish like suckers and chubs, found nowhere else in the world, were replaced with invasive catfish and bass that were more attractive for anglers. In time, the mighty river that had once carved out one of America's most iconic landscapes was reduced to a trickle, no longer able to fulfill its destiny of reaching the sea.

What happened to the Colorado is a powerful example of a river's decline, but it's hardly an exception. Around the world, rivers, lakes, and wetlands have increasingly come under similar assault from poorly planned dams, pollution, habitat loss, sand mining, climate change, and the introduction of invasive species.

What you can do

-- Get on board

-- Don't litter

-- Demonstrate

-- Stomp your feet

The result, as laid out this week in a report by 16 conservation organizations, is that freshwater ecosystems have become the most degraded in the world, with fish populations pushed to the brink. There are more kinds of freshwater fish- 18,075 and counting -than there are fish species living in the oceans and seas. Freshwater vertebrate populations have declined by 86 percent since 1970-twice the rate experienced within terrestrial or marine ecosystems-and almost a third of freshwater fish species are now threatened with extinction.

Yet it's a crisis that has received far less attention than other environmental emergencies-like deforestation or plastic pollution-despite human reliance on freshwater systems for drinking water, food, and sanitation. As for river protection, it has long been seen as part of terrestrial protection; protect the land and you'll protect the river that runs through it, the thinking has been, even though overwhelming evidence suggests that such an approach generally does not work.

But now there are signs of change, with freshwater issues becoming more prominently featured on the conservation agenda. While a steady release of studies continue to expose the sorry state of affairs, the ecological and economic benefits of maintaining healthy rivers are increasingly clear, scientists say, as are the solutions for how to do it. They warn, however, that things need to move fast if we are going to save ecosystems crucial to the survival of both animals and humans.

"Humanity is intimately tied to the health of freshwater ecosystems," says Kathy Hughes, a freshwater specialist with the World Wildlife Fund in the United Kingdom, and the lead author of the new report. "Freshwater biodiversity is our canary in the mine and if freshwater ecosystems can no longer support thriving biodiversity, then it's a sure sign that they're not good for humanity either."

Year of the river

Historically, protected areas have been designed for terrestrial ecosystems and their species, with little, if any, consideration given to the freshwater habitats in them. This is in part because of the complexity of rivers, which can flow into and out of protected or managed areas, through different landscapes and sometimes even countries.

"It's a lot easier to draw a line around a piece of land or in the ocean than it is to do it for a river," says John Zablocki, a biodiversity expert with the Nature Conservancy who spearheads an international network of freshwater scientists devising new ways of thinking about river protection.

He points out that rivers that run through protected land areas are often not protected from upstream impacts, something that was starkly illustrated in a study published in Conservation Letters last year. It showed that there are 1,249 large dams located inside protected areas, and more than 500 dams planned or under construction within protected areas worldwide.

"We have to get away from thinking about land first and rivers second," says Zablocki, whose organization is working with multiple municipalities in the Western Balkan nation of Montenegro, where the government recently designated the lower reaches of the highly biodiverse Zeta River as a nature park.

Another movement is focused on providing legal protection for rivers. In 2017, New Zealand became the first country to grant a specific river legal rights the same as those of humans, meaning that in a court of law, they're treated like living entities. Since then, Bangladesh has done the same with all of its rivers, while the city of Toledo, Ohio, passed what's known as the Lake Erie Bill of Rights to protect its shores, making it one of several cities in the United States to pass legislation recognizing the rights of nature.

"We're going to need a multi-tiered approach to keep rivers healthy and free-flowing," says Michele Thieme, the lead freshwater scientist at the World Wildlife Fund in the United States. "There's not going to be one silver bullet."

With freshwater scientists hoping that 2021 could be the year of the river, some influential conservationists who have previously not focused on freshwater issues may be taking a keener interest, including the Campaign for Nature, the $1 billion initiative funded by Switzerland's Wyss Foundation and supported by the National Geographic Society, which aims to conserve 30 percent of the planet in a natural state by 2030.

The campaign specifically targets lands and oceans, without mentioning rivers. But that could soon be changing, according to its director, Brian O'Donnell. "All the reports describing the freshwater biodiversity crisis have provided a wake-up call for us and made it clear that explicit representation of freshwater areas needs to be part of the equation going forward," O'Donnell says.

Devastating loss

While fresh water makes up less than one percent of Earth's flowing water, it is home to 10 percent of all known species, including a third of all vertebrates.

Among the more unusual freshwater varieties are Africa's elephant fishes, which communicate through electrical signals, and the Amazon's spraying characins, which lay their eggs on land. Freshwater systems are also home to around 270 species of turtles, more than 1,300 species of crabs, and around 5,700 species of dragonflies.

A bigtooth stingray at Shark Reef Aquarium. These stingrays live in the muddy bottoms of Brazilian rivers.

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark

A critically endangered giant pangasius catfish.

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark

Conservationists say at least 80 freshwater fish species have gone extinct since counts were first taken, and 16 in the last year alone. The real number of extinctions, however, is certain to be much higher, since threats to fish are growing and many species are poorly monitored.

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Perhaps most shocking is the loss of "mega-fishes"-so called because of their enormous size-whose populations have declined by 94 percent since 1970, including many species of now-critically endangered sturgeon.

Also cited in the report are recent studies showing that only one-third of large rivers in the world remain free-flowing-meaning they have not been dammed or disrupted by humans-and that wetlands have declined globally by nearly 70 percent since 1900, three times the rate of forests.

"This almost inconceivable loss has occurred largely within our lifetime," Hughes says.

A study published in Science last week showed that rivers in which fish populations have escaped serious damage from human activities now make up just 14 percent of the world's river basins, with western Europe and North America worst off.

The lead author of that study, Guohuan Su of the University of Toulouse in France, notes that almost all of us live in river basins, since all of Earth's land mass- excluding some deserts where it never rains and the poles-are part of river basins. "You could say we live in the arms of the rivers, and we're cutting them off," he says.

Many conservationists maintain that political and economic motives routinely trump biodiversity concerns when it comes to decision-making about rivers. "Very rarely is the full value of ecosystems factored into the planning for dams, for example," says Ian Harrison, a freshwater specialist with Conservation International, and a contributor to the report released this week.

Increasingly, research shows that taking into account fisheries and the ecological health of rivers is good business, says Denielle Perry, a water resource geographer at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. "Protecting rivers is a low-cost investment with a high return, especially when you consider the ecosystem services they provide for free."

Monster fish

One reason freshwater fisheries receive less attention than their marine counterparts may be because they are concentrated in low-income countries that may not be considered important because they don't export much fish. Just 16 nations, mostly in Asia and Africa, account for 80 percent of the world's reported wild freshwater catch of 12 million tons per year, though that total is likely to be vastly underestimated, since many catches by subsistence fishers in countries from Congo to Cambodia are not documented.

For at least 200 million people around the world, freshwater fish provide their primary source of animal protein, according to the new report.

These fish may also be hampered by an image problem. While big, charismatic animals on land and in the oceans have attracted conservation resources, few freshwater fish have garnered the same attention.

"We can see and appreciate the way a gorilla cares for its young or marine turtles come up on the beach to lay their eggs, but we don't have that connection with freshwater fish, which often live in murky rivers out of sight," says Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a National Geographic Explorer.

Hogan, who leads a USAID-sponsored research project called Wonders of the Mekong, has worked in Southeast Asia's Mekong region for more than 20 years. He has witnessed the near disappearance of some of the world's largest freshwater fishes, including the Mekong giant catfish and giant barb, along with the continuous deterioration of the river, which originates on the Tibetan Plateau and runs through six countries before emptying into the South China Sea.

In the last couple of years, the decline appears to have accelerated, with Mekong water levels dropping to historic lows, threatening fish and the livelihoods of many of the 60 million people living along the river. The situation, observers say, has been caused in large part by Chinese dams built in the upper watershed, which sometimes withhold the water critical for fish to complete their lifecycles downstream, as well as drought exacerbated by climate change.

Those developments have forced at least some decision-makers into rethinking their development plans. Cambodia, for example, late last year announced a 10-year moratorium on the building of new dams on the main part of the Mekong.

Freshwater scientists say the UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference, scheduled for this fall in Kunming, China, must produce a new global biodiversity agreement that pays as much attention to protecting and restoring the world's rivers, lakes, and wetlands as its forests and oceans.

"Now is the decision point," says Harrison, of Conservation International. "If we don't make the right investments for our freshwater ecosystems, it's going to be too late. The ship will have sailed, and we won't be able to turn around."
Editor's note: The second fish photo is of a giant pangasius catfish.

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Rivers and lakes are the most degraded ecosystems in the world. Can we save them?

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We rely on fresh water for drinking, food, and sanitation, and they're in trouble. But freshwater issues are becoming a higher priority for conservationists.

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Innuit avoid falling through thinning ice

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Innuit avoid falling through thinning ice

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by Ainhoa

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On a sub-zero February morning, Rex Holwell mounted the snowmobile he rides every day to work, visit family, and run errands around Nain, a coastal town of 1,200 mostly Inuit residents in Labrador. That day he was headed on a 60-mile roundtrip to an area where many locals go to get firewood. Trailing behind his skidoo, as Canadians call it, was a sled with a mobile sensor that continually measured the thickness of the ice underneath him-to alert him when he might be in danger of falling through it.

Holwell is the northern production lead for SmartICE, a non-profit enterprise that pairs cutting-edge sensors and other technology with generations-old wisdom to help Inuit adapt to a warming planet. He manages the facility in Nain where physical components of the system are assembled, and he also travels the Arctic, training new users.

The Arctic is warming more quickly than anywhere on Earth: Its year-round temperature average is on track to warm 7.2F (4℃) by 2050. Arctic permafrost is quickly thawing. Arctic sea ice has already seen dramatic declines and by mid-century is predicted to be gone entirely in summer.

Many studies have looked at Arctic ice melt from the perspective of shipping companies, focusing on how new routes might become navigable as the ice wanes. There has been less attention to the threats the ice melt creates for small Arctic communities, or to how those dangers might be mitigated.

In 2010, a study conducted by Trent University and the local Nunatsiavut government found that 8 percent of respondents had fallen through the ice in the previous year, typically while crossing frozen seas, lakes, and rivers by skidoo. Some 31 percent reported getting stuck or stranded on their skidoo because of environmental conditions, and 68 percent reported being afraid to go on the ice.

The SmartQAMUTIK mobile sensor- qamutik means "sled" in Inuktitut, the Inuit language-was designed to change this.

How it works

The mobile sensor tracks ice thickness in real time by sending an electric current through the ice. Because sea ice and seawater have different electric properties, the current probes the distance between the sensor and where the water begins-that is, how thick the ice is.

The device alerts drivers via a steering wheel-affixed iPad when the ice is becoming too thin. But its purpose is not simply to warn individual drivers-it was created to help inform entire communities about safe travel routes, such as the route Holwell mapped to a local firewood source.

Twenty mobile SmartQAMUTIKs and 22 stationary SmartBUOYs have been deployed to gather ice thickness data in three of the four regions that make up the Inuit homeland in Canada: Nunavut, Nunatsiavut, and Inuvialuit. Once the trained SmartICE operator connects to WiFi, data gathered from the mobile and stationary devices are automatically funneled into a new app called SIKU, which means "sea ice" in Inuktitut.

Oral history has always been a strong part of the Inuit tradition, and SIKU blends satellite imagery and SmartICE sensor data with community knowledge of traditional travel routes, as well as weather and wildlife observations from hunters or other users who went on the ice recently.

After a SmartICE operator completes a skidoorun using the mobile sensor, a "run route" is uploaded to SIKU, which creates a graphic that uses colors to indicate varying degrees of ice thickness. Though only trained operators use the sensors, anyone in the community can access the run routes on SIKU; users can also attach photos, videos, and written descriptions.

Trevor Bell, a geographer with Memorial University in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and one of the founders of SmartICE, says they haven't yet calculated the exact number of ice-related injuries and deaths the technology has helped avoid since the program launched in 2016. Bell says Inuit communities across Northern Canada have embraced the program, and SmartICE says both mobile and stationary ice sensors have been set up in 20 communities to date, with three more planned this season.

SmartICE reports that its operators often receive calls from community members seeking information about a specific route that they're nervous about attempting. In some cases, they've already tried the route, but had to turn back because the ice seemed too thin to continue. Once a SmartICE operator goes out with the monitoring equipment to ride and track the questionable route, others know it's safe when they see the run route posted on SIKU.

Access to mobile devices and dependable internet connections has slowly been increasing across Inuit Canada- Nain got cell service in 2019 -but many households still don't have a reliable connection. To ensure the ice thickness information reaches as many people as possible, SmartICE asks its mobile sensor operators to take screen shots of their runs and post them on whatever is the most popular online community channel, such as a local Facebook bulletin board.

Color copies of the runs are also printed and hung in the most frequented locations, such as post offices, general stores, and supermarkets, which in small villages might all be the same place. In some communities, operators also send run information to local search-and-rescue teams, hunting and trapping organizations, and any other group that could help get the word out.

Changing times for traditional knowledge

Technology has made it easier to share information about ice thickness, but Holwell says the sensors aren't meant to replace traditional knowledge. Dangerous ice can be hard to predict, and someone without extensive ice experience may not recognize the different stages of melt. Even travelers with extensive Indigenous knowledge can fall through the ice.

"The qamutiks are a tool to use with traditional knowledge, and we warn users to not rely only on the screen," Holwell says. SmartICE only hires sensor operators who have significant experience reading ice with their own eyes. As for community members using the run routes generated by SmartICE operators, they, too, "should know traditional routes and have some familiarity with the ice," he says.

Bell says that English only uses about a dozen terms to describe ice, and most have to do with commercial shipping and ice breaking. Inuit have about 65 words for different types of ice. Bell says Inuit elders, recognizing that knowledge about ice and the land is no longer being passed on to younger generations sufficiently, have asked SmartICE to help them document it.

"Thirty or 40 years ago, everyone in the community would have been familiar with these terms because they were out on the land more with their families," Bell says.

The ice monitoring program also capitalizes on the community's strengths. SmartICE hires operators that are deeply familiar with the land and ice patterns, then pairs them with tech-savvy people as young as 16 who are eager to absorb traditional knowledge. These youth operators help build, calibrate, and test the devices on the ice, and also help to design and distribute promotional materials that raise awareness and understanding of the program.

SmartICE "has trained and employed 15 youth in our community so far," says Julius Dicker, mayor of Nain. "These youth had many barriers to employment and are now either upgrading their schooling, attending college, working at a local businesses or are continuing to work with SmartICE in the production center and ice monitoring."

According to Andrew Arreak, SmartICE's operations lead in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, sea ice is his community's "main highway" to get to hunting and harvesting grounds and to travel to other communities. Without safe ice, many Inuit would also be unable to access cabins, campgrounds, and sacred lands where they've sought refuge and relaxation for generations.

"The sea ice is our identity," says Arreak, adding that his community is thrilled to have new tools to help preserve this identity for generations to come.

Says Dicker: "It's very reassuring to know where the ice is safe to travel on, as days get longer and spring fever starts to take over."

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How Inuit avoid falling through thinning Arctic ice

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On a sub-zero February morning, Rex Holwell mounted the snowmobile he rides every day to work, visit family, and run errands around Nain, a coastal town of 1,200 mostly Inuit residents in Labrador. That day he was headed on a 60-mile roundtrip to an area where many locals go to get firewood.

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by Edu

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In Mario Cyr's 40 years as a marine photographer and expedition leader in Canada's north, he has never seen harp seal pups clustered on shore. Every December, a population of harp seals arrive in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, traveling south from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland to give birth on the sea ice around the Îles de la Madeleine in late February and early March. These harp seal nurseries attract hundreds of people each year, eager to see the fuzzy white pups bellying around the ice and getting fat on their mothers' milk.

But in recent days, hundreds of pups instead have appeared on the beach just outside the small community of Blanc-Sablon, Québec, some 350 miles northeast of the islands.

The sea ice cover in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is at its lowest since 1969, when yearly measurements first began. As ice pans dissolve into slush or crack into small pieces, seal pups forced to the seashore risk being crushed by broken-up chunks of ice, drowned, or eaten by land-based predators such as coyotes. It is expected that 2021 will be a devastating year for harp seal pup mortalities.

"This year, there is absolutely no ice," Cyr says. "These seals are out of options." Cyr spent days photographing the pups for National Geographic as they struggled in the slush at the waterline or lay on the snow banks calling for their mothers.

Unpredictable sea ice

Harp seals, which can grow up to six feet long and weigh up to 400 pounds, typically spend little time on land, preferring to cruise the chilly waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans feeding on crustaceans and fish. They remember where they were born, and each winter, they tend to return to those sites where they congregate en masse to breed and give birth.

Sea ice is the only place harp seals will give birth, but coverage in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is less predictable every year. "There's hardly anything left in the gulf," says Peter Galbraith, a sea ice expert with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Most years see about 15 cubic miles of ice across the gulf, he says. This year, the ice peaked at less than three cubic miles in February, and it's already dwindled to less than one.

"The quality of the ice is also important for harp seals," Galbraith says "They want thick floes that resist storms and give the wind nothing to grab onto." A decade-long warming trend in the Gulf of St. Lawrence continued this winter, with deep waters reaching record highs. What little ice has appeared in the gulf lacks density and breaks easily.

"Waves creep into ice floes and break them up," Galbraith says. "If you've got seals on small ice floes, with thin ice, and lots of open water, any storm can come and blow pups into the cracks or right into the water before they can swim."

Seal mothers search for a place to give birth

The seal mothers with cubs on shore in Blanc-Sablon likely traveled south into the gulf, as they do each year, to feed during the winter months, says Garry Stenson, an expert on harp seals with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But when it came time to birth their pups, they would have found themselves without the ice they usually would use for a nursery, forcing them to travel north again.

But farther north, along the northeastern parts of Newfoundland, the ice conditions also have been poor, according to marine mammal expert Mark Hammill.

The expectant seal mothers needed to find ice fast and likely settled for broken pieces near the shore. They may have discovered pockets of ice not far from Blanc Sablon, or further out near Belle Isle, only to have that ice drift towards the shore, breaking up as it was ripped at by the wind and waves.

"The ice is quite compact in a good ice year and stays together," Stenson says. "But in bad ice years, there's lots of space, the ice is much more mobile, and moves with the wind and current."

When that happens, harp seal mortality is high. The pups don't have any blubber at birth, but quickly gain weight nursing on high-fat mother's milk. They need weeks on stable ice to mature physiologically so they have the stamina required for swimming in frigid waters. A fall into the ocean without mom nearby almost certainly will be fatal.

It's unclear whether the pups washed ashore on broken ice or were born on the beach, but either way, it's unlikely any of the pups at Blanc-Sablon will survive, Hammill says. They may be crushed, drowned, or left defenseless against predators if their mothers can't find them after they've drifted to shore.

Seal expeditions to disappear with the ice

Harp seals may eventually stop returning to these waters as warmer temperatures caused by climate change delay or prevent the development of ice, Galbraith says. The cold seasons are getting shorter, and what began as occasional anomalies of ice failure in 1958 and 1969 have escalated to ice shortages in 2010, 2011, 2017, and 2021.

If the sea ice continues to fail in the gulf, the seals will eventually have no memory of their nurseries in these waters and will stop migrating to the Gulf of St. Lawrence altogether.

That would mean a crushing new reality for the communities here, particularly on the Îles de la Madeleine where seal watching expeditions draw thousands visitors and provide jobs during the winter months. "It's so strange with the ice. We can feel it, something is missing. At this time of year, walking on beach, [there's] no ice, just water, water, water," says island resident Ariane Berubé. "It's like there's a break in our life cycle. We jump from fall to spring, and a season is missing." (Nat Geo selected the Îles de la Madeleine as one of its best trips of 2020.)

Berubé is the communications director at Hotel Accents, which has been offering tours of the pupping nurseries on the ice for more than 40 years. There was a time when they could fly a helicopter out onto the ice and find a harp seal nursery with thousands of pups. She says they were shocked when the ice failed in 2010 and had to cancel all their tours, but they found opportunity in the loss that year.

Accents revised its program to include climate education and lectures on conservation, and Berubé says their visitors are now keen to find out how the sea ice can be preserved, so future generations can experience the joys of seeing the seal nurseries on the ice floes.

"We are making the harp seal pups the face of the climate crisis," she says, adding that the disappearance of these baby seals has helped underscore other climate change-driven issues faced in the region, including widespread coastal erosion caused by a lack of protective sea ice and disruptions in lobster populations, which are slowly heading north to colder waters.

Meanwhile, on the shores of Blanc-Sablon, the spectacle of harp seal pups on the beach continues to draw people from the nearby village, including classrooms of children and visitors on snowmobiles. One visitor posted a video celebrating the sighting but may have actually captured the last moments of an exhausted infant in distress. It is likely to be only one of many harp seal pups beneath the waves this year.

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Harp seal pups dying on Québec beach amid record-low sea ice

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In Mario Cyr's 40 years as a marine photographer and expedition leader in Canada's north, he has never seen harp seal pups clustered on shore. Every December, a population of harp seals arrive in the Gulf of St.

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Alejandro Payán Sánchez

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All the latest football news and results: LaLiga, Premier League, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1. Fixtures, photos, videos, goals and breaking news

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PreserveArticles.com: Preserving Your Articles for Eternity

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Mental health is the balanced development of the individual's personality and emotional attitudes which enable him to live harmoniously with his fellow men.

In 1959 W.H.O. Expert Committee on mental health reviewed the various definitions of mental health and observed that mental health is influenced by both-biological and social factors It is not a static condition but subject to variations and fluctuations in degree, It is the capacity in an individual to form harmonious relations with others and to contribute constructively to changes in his-social and physical environment. '

However, mental health of the children is much more important than that of the physical health mental fitness makes children more useful person in the world and also equipped physically, socially and morally.

Mental health is the health of the personality as a whole and the most important function of education and schools is to secure the mental health of boys and girls.

Physical fitness, is not an end in itself, but is a means' of promoting the mental and moral health of a child. The two factors which retarded the mental health are the feeling of insecurity and the feeling of inferiority It makes the child menially timid and uncreative. They lose confidence and self-initiative.

The feeling of inferiority causes in them frustration and a sense of unworthiness which is difficult to root out even with the most stimulating educational environment and schooling. This feeling of inferiority is dangerous and results in repressions and inhibitions of certain reactions which strike at the very root of harmonious development and of mental health.

Similarly the feeling of insecurity which is clearly discernible in small children gradually passes away as they grow up. But, if the feeling persists in them they will remain uncertain of himself and incapable of constructive and courageous action and will be imitative rather than creative.

Healthy mindedness is essential for constructive and productive work and its cultivation is one of the important tasks of the educator. So all possible measures of exercising their instinctive powers and their sublimation should be provided by the teacher For the saneness of our thinking, health and physical strength are absolutely necessary.

However for developing mental health of the children following measures should be taken in to consideration:

(i) The primary responsibility of the teachers in this connection is to infuse in pupils an attitude of loyalty towards school Through example and precept they should show that they are interested in pupils welfare and development, and that they are their sincere well-wishers. An attitude of friendship towards the pupils should be developed by the teacher. Because, love, affection and friendship are the positive forces for the manifestation of latent potentialities that is there in child

(ii) The teacher should give freedom within their limitation to the children for exercising their powers of choice and judgment and treat all children equally and impartially. They should try to assure pupils emotional stability and eliminate undesirable maladjustment from which they suffer

(iii) Proper situations should be provided to the pupils for cultivating the qualities of punctuality sincerity, self-reliance, co-operation, sympathy and good will. The children should be trained to adjust themselves with the environment, to be cheerful, to avoid worrying and to see things in the right perspective.

(iv) Individual attention should be given to the children and their problems should be dealt by the teacher sympathetically.

(v) Parental co-operation should be sought for understanding children and giving them the confidence that both the teacher and parent are interested in their welfare.

(vi) As far as practicable the evil influence of the external environment should be protected and controlled. Proper emotional attitudes should be inculcated. Sex instinct should be properly sublimated specially in the delicate and stress period of adolescence.

(vii) The school programme should be interesting and sufficiently extensive to keep the pupils engaged and help them to cultivate good habits and cherish healthy ideas.

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Short essay on the importance of Mental Health

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Mental health is the balanced development of the individual's personality and emotional attitudes which enable him to live harmoniously with his fellow men. In 1959 W.H.O.

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he story of modern royalty might go something like this: once upon a time, there was a beautiful woman who met a prince. They married, and everyone said it would bring the royal family into the future. The young boy who suffered after the terrible death of his mother seemed to have finally found happiness. But the racist and sexist media coverage of his wife increased, and after she became pregnant, it only grew worse. So they decided to leave the country.

And now Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have told their story. What we saw in their interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired last night on CBS and will tonight be shown on ITV, was a series of bombshells. Under Oprah's expert and insistent questioning, Meghan and Harry spoke of animosity, racism and a dearth of support from the "firm". We learned that Meghan experienced a severe mental health crisis while she was pregnant, but was denied support because it would make the royal family look bad. When Harry asked the palace to use its existing relationship with the tabloids to "call the dogs off", he was told "this is how it is".

Most alarming of all were revelations of racism towards their son, Archie, the first child of colour to be born into the succession. Meghan said that a senior member of the royal family had "concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born". She noted that he had not been made a prince, and therefore would not be given a security detail, unlike other younger royals, yet the titles of princess and prince were bestowed on Charlotte and Louis of Cambridge at birth.

This will be remembered as one of the most explosive royal interviews in history. The picture that the Sussexes painted of the British monarchy is of a family that gives little support to those who marry into it, where a woman of colour finds the ensuing abuse "almost unsurvivable".

One can draw striking parallels between the Oprah interview and that given in 1995 by Princess Diana, which rocked the royal family at the time. As Harry said in a clip that was widely shared before the interview was screened, he was afraid of history repeating itself. His mother had spoken of the suicidal thoughts she experienced while pregnant with Harry, and the lack of support she received. Like Diana, Meghan felt trapped and alone, and said she wasn't even permitted to go out for lunch with friends sometimes.

When Diana died in a car crash that a jury ruled was partly the fault of the paparazzi, aged just 36, the British public vowed that this would never happen again. Yet we appear to have learned nothing from her death. If doing the job is so miserable, and if the press coverage is so incessant and unfair, that a confident, vibrant and successful young woman is reduced to tears, don't we need to change the job?

All women who marry into the royal family are attacked. But Meghan has had it worse, because coverage of her has been infused with racism. Many more column inches have been devoted to criticising her choices of clothing, nail varnish, and even her baby bump, than the allegations made against Prince Andrew. Journalists have questioned Meghan's racial identity, and suggested that both she and Harry deserve to have their citizenship revoked.

It's an ugly case of double standards. Despite Prince Andrew's friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he retains his military titles; Harry lost his, and faced calls to lose his title and place in the succession. While the FBI say Prince Andrew failed to respond to requests for an interview (claims that Andrew denies), the royal family launched an investigation into Meghan's alleged bullying.

Britain has a toxic relationship with its royals. On the one hand, polls suggest we want a constitutional monarchy. The Queen is popular; we turn out for jubilees; children paint cards to mark her birthday. But those who marry into the family are tormented by a barrage of media abuse. Did we ever want Harry to be happily married? Or did some always hope he would remain the sad little boy at his mother's funeral?

Clearly, his love for a biracial woman set parts of this country on fire. And so the duke and duchess left, after attempting to negotiate a half in/half out arrangement with the royal family. Although this plan was derided by the British tabloids, it could have worked. This is how some of the European royals work, such as Princess Madeleine of Sweden, who lives in America and works for a non-profit while retaining her royal title. It's also how minor royals in the British royal family live; they make their own living, and support the Queen at major public events.

Meghan and Harry are popular and charismatic. They charm the public, and connect with crowds. They would have been hugely successful ambassadors on royal tours. But perhaps this was always the problem. Like Diana, whose outshining of Prince Charles on their Australian tour was recently dramatised in The Crown, Meghan and Harry would have dazzled too much, and outshone other royals. Of his attempts to discuss the half in/half out arrangement with his father, Harry said that Charles stopped returning his calls.

So where now for the monarchy? It seems likely that republican sentiment will only swell after these allegations. Oprah concluded the interview by telling Meghan that her story with the prince "does have a happy ending - because you made it so". For Harry and Meghan, the interview seems to mark a new beginning, and membership of a different form of royalty:that of global philanthropy.For Britain's royal family, despite their castles and coaches, the possibility of a happy new beginning seems more remote.

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The behaviour towards Meghan shows Britain learned nothing from Princess Diana's treatment | Kate Williams

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he story of modern royalty might go something like this: once upon a time, there was a beautiful woman who met a prince. They married, and everyone said it would bring the royal family into the future. The young boy who suffered after the terrible death of his mother seemed to have finally found happiness.

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March 20, 2007 - The European Court of Human Rights held today, for the first time, that governments have a duty to establish effective mechanisms for ensuring that women have access to abortion where it is legal. The case centers on the tragic story of Alicja Tysiąc, a Polish woman who nearly went blind because she was forced to continue a pregnancy that threatened her health. Numerous doctors had advised Tysiąc that pregnancy and delivery posed the risk of irreversible eye damage, but they refused to issue a certificate authorizing an abortion. She was left with no choice but to carry her pregnancy to term, with devastating consequences.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a nongovernmental organization that uses the law to advance reproductive rights globally, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. The Center argued that under international law and national-level laws in Europe, states have a duty to establish effective procedures to ensure that women legally entitled to abortion are able to effectively exercise their right.

"There are thousands of women who are denied access to abortions they need and are legally entitled to in Poland every year," said Christina Zampas, Senior Legal Adviser for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights. "This decision means that the Polish government-and other governments in Europe-must take steps to make sure that women like Tysiąc don't needlessly suffer at the whim of doctors."

By law, Poland allows women to have abortions when their health is in danger. For Tysiąc, the state clearly failed to meet its legal obligation. The mother of three is now unable to work, wholly dependent on public assistance, and in need of constant care for day-to-day activities and for her children. The court awarded damages specifically in recognition of her "anguish and suffering."

"Today the European Court joined other international human rights bodies in sending a clear message to governments that where abortion is legal they have to make sure that women can get them," said Pardiss Kebriaei, Legal Adviser for International Litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

In the Center's case KL v. Peru, the U.N. Human Rights Committee ruled in 2005 that the rights of a 17-year old Peruvian woman had been violated when health officials denied her a therapeutic abortion. In March 2006, as a result of another case brought by the Center, the government of Mexico admitted that it had violated the rights of a 13-year-old girl who became pregnant as a result of rape and was denied an abortion.

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Center for Reproductive Rights Applauds Landmark Abortion Decision by European Court of Human Rights

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March 20, 2007 - The European Court of Human Rights held today, for the first time, that governments have a duty to establish effective mechanisms for ensuring that women have access to abortion where it is legal.

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The CJEU clearly suggests that the French general ban on cannabidiol (CBD) is contrary to European Union (EU) law unless French regulations were to be considered appropriate and proportionate for the protection of public health by the referring court (the Court of Appeals of Aix-en-Provence).

In its judgment, the Court confirms, as did the Advocate General, that "the CBD at issue in the main proceedings is not a drug within the meaning of the Single Convention" given that "CBD does not contain a psychoactive ingredient in the current state of scientific knowledge [...] [and] it would be contrary to the purpose and general spirit of the Single Convention to include it under the definition of 'drugs' within the meaning of that convention as a cannabis extract." The Court concluded that "[the EU provisions on the free movement of goods] must be interpreted as precluding national legislation which prohibits the marketing of CBD lawfully produced in another Member State when it is extracted from the Cannabis sativa plant in its entirety and not solely from its fibre and seeds, unless that legislation is appropriate for securing the attainment of the objective of protecting public health and does not go beyond what is necessary for that purpose". In this respect, the Court underlined that the fact that the French "prohibition would not affect the marketing of synthetic CBD that has the same properties as CBD extracted from the Cannabis sativa plant in its entirety and that could be used as a substitute for the latter [...] would be such as to indicate that the legislation in the main proceedings was not appropriate for attaining that objective in a consistent and systematic manner."

Allen & Overy is representing Antonin Cohen, former manager of Kanavape, in the proceedings for a preliminary ruling before the CJEU. Antonin Cohen is being prosecuted in France since 2014 for selling vaping products manufactured with natural CBD, a non-psychotropic substance contained in the hemp ( Cannabis sativa) plant. France, which is the largest hemp producer in Europe, however, currently prohibits the marketing of products derived from the whole plant, and therefore of all products containing natural CBD.

Eveline Van Keymeulen, Head of Allen & Overy's Cannabis practice, who is assisting Antonin Cohen in these proceedings, comments: "This long-awaited decision is a landmark decision for the CBD industry in Europe, the development of which has been hindered seriously by the fragmented and inadequate legal framework to date. Not only does Europe's highest Court unequivocally - for once and for all - confirm that CBD is not a narcotic in light of the spirit of the international conventions, it also strongly suggests that the French ban on hemp-derived CBD is contrary to EU law, while leaving the final word to the French judge. If the French court indeed confirms that the French ban is contrary to EU law, France will have to change its regulations in order to provide an adequate and proportionate framework for the marketing of CBD extracted from the whole hemp plant.

However, the impact of this decision goes way beyond France. The Court's decision sets a binding precedent with European reach: its interpretation of EU law is binding on the European institutions - including the European Commission - and will require other EU member states to assess their national rules applicable to the marketing of natural CBD in light of the clear criteria provided by this decision. Today's judgment should therefore lead to more regulatory harmonisation and legal certainty which is indispensable for the further development of the CBD industry in Europe. Most importantly, a clear and proportionate regulation of CBD-based products will ultimate benefit EU consumers."

Antonin Cohen, founder and CEO of Harmony and former co-director of Kanavape, comments "This verdict is an important step in ensuring the safety of consumers of CBD products. In 2014, I created the first CBD vaporiser. Since then, demand has grown strongly and hundreds of companies have launched their products. The lack of clear regulations prevents the market from developing in a safe way. It is essential to develop strict quality standards in the interest of consumers to avoid the circulation of adulterated products. My objective is to improve access to the benefits of these plants, within a legal and secure framework. It is not right to limit research and prevent legal access to certain natural molecules that do not present risks, and to plants that have been used for thousands of years by mankind. According to the WHO, the CBD does not seem to present any potential for abuse, nor to be harmful to health. There is an urgent need to harmonise European regulations to guarantee the safety of European consumers."

The Court decision and press release are available in English ( here and here) and in French ( here and here).

Xavier Pizarro represented Sébastien Béguerie, former co-director of Kanavape, in the proceedings before the CJEU.

Allen & Overy is one of the first major law firms to have built a multidisciplinary and international team dedicated to cannabis market. This cross-disciplinary group, composed of some twenty lawyers from various Allen & Overy offices across the world, actively monitors regulatory developments relating to cannabinoid-based products, and studies both their impact on market developments, and the investment opportunities they create. The Allen & Overy team dedicated to the cannabinoid market assists key players in the cannabis industry by providing strategic and practical legal advice on regulatory and compliance matters, investments, M&A and strategic alliances, intellectual property, distribution, licensing, marketing and advertising, employment and criminal law.

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Highest European Court confirms that cannabidiol is not a narcotic drug and that EU Member States may not prohibit its marketing - Allen & Overy

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Today, on 19 November, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its long-awaited decision in Case C-663/18 (Kanavape) ruling that a member state may not ban the marketing of cannabidiol (CBD) when extracted from the Cannabis Sativa plant in its entirety. Written by: Eveline Van Keymeulen

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or the past four months, two-thirds of Britain's prisoners have been in quasi-solitary confinement, locked in cells for at least 23 hours a day. According to the Prison Reform Trust, evidence indicates this does permanent mental health damage. At this point, prison becomes a life sentence. On any basis, it is barbaric.

Britain's prison record is currently, like its public health record, among the worst of any country in Europe. It is vulnerable to the same disease: politics. If the much-vaunted radicalism of Boris Johnson's aide Dominic Cummings is to mean anything, he should turn from easy targets, such as civil servants and local democracy, and tackle something hard, like prisons.

British addiction to incarceration has been raging for decades. Were it not for coronavirus, the UK prison population would now be approaching 100,000. In 1939 it was little more than 15,000. It topped 40,000 under Thatcher and soared to 80,000 under Tony Blair. This reflects not rising crime, but a political craving to appear tough on crime, for the wider criminalisation of social misbehaviour and for ever longer sentences.

I do not expect QCs to be radical on punishment. It brings them good money at the taxpayer's expense. But Chris Daw QC, after a career at the bar, is clearly in despair. "Almost everything we think about crime and punishment is wrong," he writes in his new book, Justice on Trial, and "a devastating waste of money". I was an occasional prison visitor and, like me, Daw cannot see the point of prison. Except for dangerously violent individuals, imprisonment is a medieval hangover, a world of clanging gates, yelling guards and filthy cells, the sole purpose being to "teach 'em a lesson". It is one they seldom learn.

Much of Daw's book is taken up with what is anathema to Whitehall policymakers: observing experience abroad. He tells of a tough woman governor of a North Dakota prison on a visit to Norway who broke down in tears seeing prisoners with private rooms chatting with staff, rather than being packed into cages, as at her institution. On returning to the US, she ordered her officers to converse with inmates twice a day and "implement our humanity". Recidivism in Norway is 20% after two years, against almost 50% in England and Wales after one year. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, prisons are simply going out of use.

Daw would follow many of those sentenced in his courts to see what became of them. He was appalled. Why imprison otherwise law-abiding drug users, when prisons are seething with drug addiction and even states across the US are now decriminalising marijuana? As for Britain's age of criminal responsibility at 10, this compares with 13 in France, 15 in Sweden and 18 in Luxembourg. It is utterly primitive and indicative of how, Daw suspects, we routinely breach the 1989 UN convention on the rights of the child.

To add to the horror, British young offender institutions (YOI) are some of the worst prisons in the land, with a suicide almost once a month on average. To Daw they are a form of state slavery, "closely replicating the feral violence of custodial institutions in the Victorian age". At Feltham YOI, an academy for a life of crime, teenagers can find themselves locked up for 23 hours a day.

Daw is not naive. But fewer than 100 prisoners are so dangerous as to be on "whole life" sentences, while he reckons a further 10,000 require incarceration to maintain public safety. They do need something like a prison. For the rest, Daw wants them kept in their homes and in the community, monitored by the plethora of electronic devices now available to the police and probation services. Some will reoffend, but they are more likely to do that on release from prison.

A massive reduction in the prison estate on a Dutch or Scandinavian scale would liberate resources for parole and what at least one-third of convicts need, which is mental healthcare. There is no evidence this would lead to a rise in crime: rather the reverse. To be sent to prison at all, when what often follows is family breakdown and unemployability, is already a sentence to a life of crime. The greatest danger to the public comes from imprisonment without rehabilitation on release - the British way.

One question Daw does not answer is: why? In many respects, Britain is a liberal north European country, its social mores tolerant and its welfare generous, compared with most places. Yet as Rutger Bregman points out in his new ode to social wellness, Humankind, its penal tradition is vicious. Norway's prime minister responded to the horrific massacre of 2011 with a calming call for "more democracy, more openness, and more humanity". It is unimaginable that a British politician would dare make such a plea. They would demand a thousand more police and extra prisons.

This is a matter of pragmatism, not ideology. Daw is not leftwing. Britain is suffering a glaring disconnect between what penology and foreign experience show should be done, and a thuggish politics intent on charging towards America. Ministers murmur, "the Daily Mail would slay us ... The risk is too great ... what about the victims?" Anything but the sensible thing. In Britain there is mileage in idiocy if you call it tough on crime.

Lockdown seems to have triggered a deep psychological response in British officialdom. The opportunity for petty restrictions, for inexplicable - at least unexplained - curbs on personal freedom, have brought out Whitehall's inner autocrat. The last people who might expect sympathy are prisoners. But is Cummings a man or a mouse? British prisons are not just scandalous, they are dumb. Most of them should go.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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British prisons are inhumane and do not prevent crime - most of them should go | Simon Jenkins

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or the past four months, two-thirds of Britain's prisoners have been in quasi-solitary confinement, locked in cells for at least 23 hours a day. According to the Prison Reform Trust, evidence indicates this does permanent mental health damage. At this point, prison becomes a life sentence. On any basis, it is barbaric.

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You can watch it on Filmin: https://www.filmin.es/pelicula/que-invadimos-ahora

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It's not a very good time to be a prisoner in the United States.

Incarceration is not meant to be fun, of course. But a combination of strict sentencing guidelines, budget shortfalls and a punitive philosophy of corrections has made today's prisons much more unpleasant--and much less likely to rehabilitate their inhabitants--than in the past, many researchers say.

What is the role for psychologists? First and foremost, they are providing mental health services to the prison population, which has rates of mental illness at least three times the national average.

More broadly, they are contributing a growing body of scientific evidence to political and philosophical discussions about the purpose of imprisonment, says Craig Haney, PhD, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Psychology as a discipline now has a tremendous amount of information about the origins of criminal behavior," says Haney. "I think that it is important for psychologists to bring that information to bear in the debate on what kind of crime control policies we, as a society, should follow."

The punitive turn

Until the mid-1970s, rehabilitation was a key part of U.S. prison policy. Prisoners were encouraged to develop occupational skills and to resolve psychological problems--such as substance abuse or aggression--that might interfere with their reintegration into society. Indeed, many inmates received court sentences that mandated treatment for such problems.

Since then, however, rehabilitation has taken a back seat to a "get tough on crime" approach that sees punishment as prison's main function, says Haney. The approach has created explosive growth in the prison population, while having at most a modest effect on crime rates.

As a result, the United States now has more than 2 million people in prisons or jails--the equivalent of one in every 142 U.S. residents--and another four to five million people on probation or parole. A higher percentage of the population is involved in the criminal justice system in the United States than in any other developed country.

Many inmates have serious mental illnesses. Starting in the late 1950s and 1960s, new psychotropic drugs and the community health movement dramatically reduced the number of people in state mental hospitals. But in the 1980s, many of the mentally ill who had left mental institutions in the previous two decades began entering the criminal justice system.

Today, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of people in prison are mentally ill, according to U.S. Department of Justice estimates.

"Prisons have really become, in many ways, the de facto mental health hospitals," says former prison psychologist Thomas Fagan, PhD. "But prisons weren't built to deal with mentally ill people; they were built to deal with criminals doing time."

The mentally ill

The plight of the mentally ill in prisons was virtually ignored for many years, but in the past decade many prison systems have realized--sometimes with prodding from the courts--that providing mental health care is a necessity, not a luxury, says Fagan.

In many prison systems, psychologists are the primary mental health care providers, with psychiatrists contracted on a part-time basis. Psychologists provide services ranging from screening new inmates for mental illness to providing group therapy and crisis counseling.

They also provide rehabilitative services that are useful even for prisoners without serious mental illnesses, says Fagan. For example, a psychologist might develop special programs for substance abusers or help prisoners prepare for the transition back to the community.

But they often struggle to implement such programs while keeping up with their regular prison caseloads. "We're focused so much on the basic mental health services that there's not enough time or emphasis to devote to rehabilitative services," says Robert Morgan, PhD, a psychologist at Texas Tech University who has worked in federal and state prisons and studies treatment methods for inmates.

Part of the problem is limited resources, says Morgan: There simply aren't enough mental health professionals in most prisons. Haney agrees: "Many psychologists in the criminal justice system have enormous caseloads; they're struggling not to be overwhelmed by the tide."

Another constraint is the basic philosophical difference between psychology, which is rehabilitative at heart, and corrections, which is currently punishment-oriented.

"Right now there's such a focus on punishment--most criminal justice or correctional systems are punitive in nature--that it's hard to develop effective rehabilitative programs," says Morgan.

Relevant research

To help shift the focus from punishment to rehabilitation, psychologists are doing research on the causes of crime and the psychological effects of incarceration.

In the 1970s, when major changes were being made to the U.S. prison system, psychologists had little hard data to contribute.

But in the past 25 years, says Haney, they have generated a massive literature documenting the importance of child abuse, poverty, early exposure to substance abuse and other risk factors for criminal behavior. The findings suggest that individual-centered approaches to crime prevention need to be complemented by community-based approaches.

Researchers have also found that the pessimistic "nothing works" attitude toward rehabilitation that helped justify punitive prison policies in the 1970s was overstated. When properly implemented, work programs, education and psychotherapy can ease prisoners' transitions to the free world, says Haney.

Finally, researchers have demonstrated the power of the prison environment to shape behavior, often to the detriment of both prisoners and prison workers.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, which Haney co-authored in 1973 with Stanford University psychologist and APA Past-president Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, is one example. It showed that psychologically healthy individuals could become sadistic or depressed when placed in a prison-like environment.

More recently, Haney has been studying so-called "supermax" prisons--high-security units in which prisoners spend as many as 23 hours per day in solitary confinement for years at a time.

Haney's research has shown that many prisoners in supermax units experience extremely high levels of anxiety and other negative emotions. When released--often without any "decompression" period in lower-security facilities--they have few of the social or occupational skills necessary to succeed in the outside world.

Nonetheless, supermax facilities have become increasingly common over the past five to ten years.

"This is what prison systems do under emergency circumstances--they move to punitive social control mechanisms," explains Haney. "[But] it's a very short-term solution, and one that may do more long-term damage both to the system and to the individuals than it solves."

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Psychologists are not only providing treatment to prisoners; they're also contributing to debate over the nature of prison itself.

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Is prison an effective punishment? Write an opinion essay (C1 - very difficult)

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Is prison an effective punishment? Write an opinion essay (C1 - very difficult)

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Check out my specific Padlet

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DEBATE SCHOOLING: Are Our Kids Tough Enough?

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DEBATE SCHOOLING: Are Our Kids Tough Enough?

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British students in South Korea

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Interesting articles on many topics related to mental health

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Psychology is a diverse discipline grounded in science, but with nearly boundless applications in everyday life. Scientific research conducted by psychologists can inform and guide those seeking help with issues that affect their professional lives, family relationships, and emotional wellness.

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Psychology is a diverse discipline grounded in science, but with nearly boundless applications in everyday life. Scientific research conducted by psychologists can inform and guide those seeking help with issues that affect their professional lives, family relationships, and emotional wellness.

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Dear Mariella | Life and style | The Guardian

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Mariella Frostrup, the Observer's agony aunt, offers words of wisdom

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Any problems with love and relationships... ask Counsellor Uncle Eli

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Rainbow Counsellor Elijah Michel is here to help with your problems. Today he tackles questions about phone addiction and child adoption. Hi Eli, my partner and I are keen to have a family. As two men, we would like to adopt and give a child that needs it a good home. We recently started talking about this with friends and they have all said it's extremely difficult to do in NZ and our only chance is if we were willing to take on a child who had a severe disability or was suffering severe trauma. While we would obviously love that kid just as much, this feels like it would be too big a step, when neither of us have parenting experience. Any advice?
It's fantastic you are wanting to share your love and nurturing with a child already in this world without parents. Keep in mind, many first-time parents around the globe give birth to children with disabilities, or offspring that experienced trauma early in life, and do a wonderful job at raising them, so no need to doubt your parenting abilities! You could always consider fostering as a starting point if you wanted to strengthen your hearts and home in advance. Agencies like Key Assets, Barnados, and Immerse (who offer training in trauma-informed care) are same-sex couple affirming and will support you all the way. If you're able to provide a safe and stable environment and you fall in love with your foster kids, this might solve your family creation problem right there.

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Dear Eli, I just can't seem to get off my phone. I focus on a task for a few minutes and then my phone is back in my hand. Whether it's Grindr, Instagram, Twitter or porn, my day goes and I haven't got half the tasks done and I am falling asleep late. I have tried disconnecting and I feel lost, isolated and lonely without it. I now enjoy getting on my phone more than I like hanging out with friends and family. What can I do?
I recommend watching the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. It shows

you are certainly not alone in your behaviour and your self-awareness around it is commendable. Scrolling the internet is a distraction from our worries, an esteem booster, a social connection tool, a voice platform and an adrenalin rush, and provides instant gratification. It's becoming harder to get away from - especially when connected to our work - but at the end of the day, it is not genuine face-to-face or heart-to-heart reality. Be mindful internet addiction is becoming more prominent and is just as damaging as other addictions that affect our mind, body and behaviour. Try and schedule times to put down your phone, go for walks, meditate and see friends in the flesh.

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Advertisement Rainbow Counsellor Elijah Michel is here to help with your problems. Today he tackles questions about phone addiction and child adoption. Hi Eli, my partner and I are keen to have a family. As two men, we would like to adopt and give a child that needs it a good home.

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Plastic in our Oceans

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Bali's famous beaches are being strewn by plastic rubbish in what experts say is becoming an annual event thanks to monsoon weather, poor waste management and a global marine pollution crisis.

Authorities are struggling to keep up with the tide of rubbish washing up on beaches at Kuta, Legian and Seminyak, where about 90 tonnes of rubbish was collected on Friday and Saturday.

Wayan Puja, from the Badung area's environment and sanitation agency, said: "We have been working really hard to clean up the beaches, however the trash keeps coming. Every day we deploy our personnel, trucks and loaders."

He said more than 30 tonnes of rubbish was removed on Friday from beaches in Kuta, Legian and Seminyak and the amount doubled to 60 tonnes on Saturday.

The Indonesian government launched a national strategy in April 2020 to combat the "looming crisis" of plastic waste that was affecting the country's marine environment and economy.

Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at Australia's CSIRO science agency and an expert on global plastic pollution, said there was a "tremendous amount" of plastic currently being collected from the beaches and it was getting worse each year.

"It's not new and it's not surprising and it happens every year, and it's been growing over the last decade," said Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at Australia's CSIRO science agency and an expert on global plastic pollution.

Hardesty has worked with marine pollution researchers in Indonesia and is one of the experts working with the Indonesia government on its action plan.

The rubbish had likely not travelled far, she said, and there would be many other beaches on the Indonesian archipelago suffering a similar fate.

Bali's beaches in the southwest tended to catch rubbish when monsoonal rains and winds blow each year from west to east.

But Hardesty said the increasing amount of plastic washing up was in line with the global rise in the production of plastic.

Beaches around the globe were seeing an increase in waste, "but in monsoonal countries we do find a much stronger seasonal affect."

Hardesty said community groups and individuals were becoming more active in trying to cut the use of plastics and there was a suite of approaches being used to tackle the problem.

CSIRO was also hoping to roll out a new method in Indonesia that uses remote cameras and artificial intelligence to track litter and identify hot spots.

Dr Gede Hendrawan, the head of the centre for remote sensing and ocean sciences at Bali's Udayana University, said a major problem was Indonesia's ineffective rubbish handling systems.

"The biggest problem is actually the trash handling hasn't been effective in Indonesia. Bali has just started to reorganise it, also Java has just started," he said.

Bali's governor, Wayan Koster, urged serious action to clean up the beaches which are a huge tourist drawcard.

More than a million Australians visit Bali every year, and the island is also popular with Chinese visitors.

"The Badung administration should have a trash handling system at Kuta Beach that is complete with adequate equipment and human resources so they can work quickly to clean up the trash washed onto the beach," the governor said.

"Moreover, in the rainy season when there are tourists visiting, the trash handling systems should be working 24 hours a day. Don't wait for tomorrow."

Thousands of tourists would normally be in Bali at this time of year, but the coronavirus pandemic has halted overseas travel and there are few visitors.

Indonesia has also closed its borders to all foreign arrivals for two weeks from 1 January in a bid to halt the spread of the new strains of Covid-19.

Bali's economy has been hit hard by the pandemic which has decimated its tourist industry with only domestic arrivals.
Topics

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Bali's beaches buried in tide of plastic rubbish during monsoon season

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Bali's famous beaches are being strewn by plastic rubbish in what experts say is becoming an annual event thanks to monsoon weather, poor waste management and a global marine pollution crisis. Authorities are struggling to keep up with the tide of rubbish washing up on beaches at Kuta, Legian and Seminyak, where about 90 tonnes of rubbish was collected on Friday and Saturday.

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avid Oyelowo is tired of talking about racism. After all, he has spent a professional lifetime doing so - not surprisingly, as this has been the focus of many of his films. So it was with some relief that he found himself starring in an escapist children's movie that has nothing to do with it. Yet two months before its release, Come Away hit the headlines - as a racism story.

Come Away is a fantasy about a fantasy; the whimsical tale of parents bringing up young children who just happen to be Peter Pan and Alice from Wonderland. Oyelowo plays the father, while Angelina Jolie plays the mother. Astonishingly, the fact that Alice and Peter are mixed-race has fuelled a campaign against the film.

In October, it was reported that IMDb, the online database of film information, had taken down user ratings for Come Away after it had been "review-bombed" - a group of people had left negative feedback to artificially lower its ratings. Many films that get review-bombed are about race or gender and feature non-white or female leads.

Oyelowo is appalled but not surprised. What type of things were the bombers saying? "The comment I read that made me realise I had to call the IMDb website to make them aware that we were being subjected to these racist comments was: 'Here we go again - Hollywood seeking to erase our whiteness.'"

The irony is, Oyelowo says, these people are treating Peter Pan and Alice as if they were historical figures. "This is around a story that is fictional, fantasy and a fairytale." His voice rises in disbelief at the madness of assuming Peter or Alice have to be white. "You just put your hands up and say OK, this is why people have a problem with John Boyega being a stormtrooper or with Halle Bailey being cast as the mermaid in The Little Mermaid. This is why an all-female version of Ghostbusters is a threat to certain men because it's an encroachment on what they deem to be their territory." All the movies he mentions were review-bombed.

This wasn't the first of Oyelowo's films to be attacked. A United Kingdom is a powerful biopic, released in 2016, about Seretse Khama, who became king of the British protectorate Bechuanaland (which became Botswana) at the age of four, then went on to renounce his throne for the love of a white woman. Khama eventually became Botswana's first president in 1966. As well as the inter-racial relationship, Oyelowo believes there was something else that made the film a target. "You're seeing an aspirational black character, someone you might admire, someone your young child might look at and say: I want to be like them. Seventy-five per cent of the comments we got on our Facebook page for that film were racist and Fox Searchlight had to take the page down."

Oyelowo, aged 44, is at home in the San Fernando valley of Los Angeles when we Zoom. The actor, who was born in England to Nigerian parents, has lived here for 13 years. His family - wife, Jess, and four children - are now naturalised Americans, and Oyelowo's accent has morphed into an urbane transatlantic hybrid. He shows me around his office. It wouldn't be much of a challenge if you were playing Through the Keyhole. There are posters from his films (Come Away, Selma, Gringo and Don't Let Go) and one from a Royal Shakespeare Company theatre production of Henry VI. He was 24, only two years out of drama school, when he became the first black actor to be cast as a king in a major production of Shakespeare.

He made his name in the BBC spy series Spooks, and is a quietly remarkable actor. He inhabits his characters profoundly and with subtlety. Oyelowo has given so many fine performances - unravelling army veteran Peter Snowden in one-man movie Nightingale; supercilious reporter Yardley Acheman in The Paperboy; impassioned chess-teacher Robert Katende in Queen of Katwe, Khama in A United Kingdom. Then there is his note-perfect Martin Luther King in 2014's Selma, the historical drama about the voting-rights marches in the US south.

Even more amazing than his performance was the fact that he didn't win an Oscar for the role. How did he feel when he heard he hadn't even been nominated? "I felt I had failed the legacy of Dr King." Did you swear? "No, I did not. Maybe in my head. I went into my walk-in closet and sat on the floor for a while."

Is it true he wasn't nominated for an Oscar because he was wearing an "I can't breathe" T-shirt at Selma's premiere? "There is no way of us knowing whether us protesting the murder of Eric Garner had a discernible impact on the film in terms of the Oscars," he says. "But we did have incoming phone calls to our producers saying: 'What the hell are they doing stirring shit?' And [one Academy member] was bold enough to say that to one of the trade papers."

His non-nomination (along with the snubbing of Ava DuVernay in the best director category, and the fact that all 20 acting nominations went to white actors) led to the founding of the influential #OscarsSoWhite protest movement. Oyelowo has been one of its beneficiaries. "I became an executive member of the Academy and have had a massive hand in the wave of black and brown people who have now been admitted to the Academy." This has irrevocably changed the way the Academy votes, he says. "I have no doubt that Get Out and BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther and many other films that have now been celebrated may have also been marginalised."

Like King, Oyelowo was raised in the baptist church. He was born in Oxford, spent his early years in south London and moved with his family to Lagos at the age of six. Oyelowo descends from a regional royal family, but he has often compared being a Nigerian prince to being prince of Islington, where the family lived on their return to the UK when he was 14. His father was treated like anything but royalty in England. "He was subjected to statements like: 'Go back to where you came from.' He was spat at and had hot coffee poured on him."

Britain might be more diverse than it used to be, Oyelowo says, but he's not convinced it's less racist. "My brother, who is a healthcare professional in the UK, was on the train not long after the Brexit decision and that exact phrase was used to him on the tube. 'Go back to where you came from.' So no one can tell me Brexit wasn't at least in part about race."

At school Oyelowo was bullied for being a swot - other black students called him a coconut. His faith kept him going throughout. He joined a drama group because he fancied a girl, and that's where he met Jess, also an actor (she has featured in a number of his films) and born-again Christian. By the time he was 20 and at drama school, they were engaged. They told friends that they would not have sex with each other till they married two years later. Drama schools are not renowned for restraint, I say - did your fellow students think you were a strange couple? "Absolutely. There was utter bemusement. I had a friend who mocked me so mercilessly. He would shout from across the set: 'You going to take her off and pop her cherry, are you?' Just the most awful things. But yes, Jess and I were virgins when we got married. It's tied to our faith, but it's also who we are, and what we connected over."

They promised each other they would never be apart for more than two weeks because they had seen too much "divorce and dysfunction" in the acting world. "So much we have done in our life together was mocked. And to be perfectly frank we're having the last laugh." In what way? "I love my wife even more than I did 24 years ago. Our marriage is strong ... because of some of the foundational choices we made early on." He has always insisted on the two-week rule being written into his contracts, and he says it has started a trend. "We've seen other people emulate that, which is the greatest compliment they can pay us."

Oyelowo describes himself as a missionary. "I have an incredible platform in telling stories," he says. "Jesus used parables consistently to make his point. He was a storyteller. I'm not here to proselytise Christ and be a preacher in that sense, but I do like to think of myself as a bringer of good news." This does not mean saccharine narratives, he insists. "The Bible is a violent, R-rated book, not a Disney sort of book. I like to think I'm bringing the good news, the redemptive news in narratives that do not shy away from darkness and reality."

Oyelowo has always believed that to be a successful missionary he has to be proactive. So he moved to the US with the family in 2007 because he thought there were more opportunities for a black actor. Even with Donald Trump in power, he would take the US over Britain. "Nowhere on earth has been better at covering up racism in my opinion than Great Britain. The thing I like about living in America is that racism comes at you head on. In the UK it sneaks up behind you. I constantly came up against the old boys' network in the UK - this Oxbridge clique that I wasn't a part of and felt patronised by. Here the class system is money and success. If you succeed, people will invite you in, not because they are so egalitarian but they are so scared of missing out on something."

For Oyelowo, the fight for diversity does not end with race. Few big-name actors have worked with as many female directors, from Brenda Chapman (Come Away) and Amma Asante (A United Kingdom), to Mira Nair (Queen of Katwe) and DuVernay. "Women get to the emotion of the film a lot quicker." He pauses. "I hope that doesn't sound in any way diminishing of what women bring, but if my job as an actor is to hold a mirror up to humanity, a huge part of that is the emotion of the character, and I want a director who is unafraid of looking at the emotion."

Oyelowo has started producing, directing and writing in recent years to ensure he gets to tell the stories he thinks need to be heard. As a producer on Come Away, he convinced Jolie to take the part. His directing debut, The Water Man, which premiered at the Toronto film festival in September, is a family adventure that nods to Spielberg. And he is set to star in and produce an adaptation of the former Guardian journalist Gary Younge's portrait of gun violence, Another Day in the Death of America.

Five years ago he claimed he could only get a lead role in a studio movie if Ryan Gosling couldn't play it. Is that still true? He thinks about it, and smiles. "That has changed. Come Away is evidence of that."

Our time is up, but Oyelowo continues talking. He says he dreads the thought of seeing another interview with him banging on about racism. "But I recognise the need to still talk about it because I am standing on the shoulders of others who were denied the chance. I'm jealous of my peers. Benedict Cumberbatch never has to talk about his race, neither does Tom Hardy." Ah, but they have to talk about their poshness, I say. "I feel so bad for them having to talk about their poshness!" He laughs. "Look, the day I know I don't have to talk about racism is the day I'll know we have real progress."
Come Away is released in the UK on 18 December

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David Oyelowo: 'Nowhere on Earth has been better at covering up racism than Great Britain'

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The actor is tired of talking about race, but the trolling of his latest film shows why he still has to. He talks religion, the secret of his happy marriage - and why he worried he had failed the legacy of Martin Luther King

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The Guardian view on food parcels: stop these hunger games | Editorial

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Children need to eat. In England, at least 1.4 million of them, or 17.3%, are entitled to a lunch paid for by the government as part of the school day. In the north-east of England, the proportion is closer to 25%. These figures exclude reception classes and years 1 and 2, where all children's meals are free.

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s Susan Bro watched the footage of a mob of white Trump supporters breaking into the US Capitol and halting the official count of the 2020 election results, she was "mad as hell", but she was not surprised.

Bro's daughter, Heather Heyer, was murdered in 2017 while protesting against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump had responded to Heyer's death by saying there were "very fine people on both sides".

On Wednesday, Trump responded to open insurrection in the halls of Congress, which left at least four people dead, by repeating false claims about having the election stolen from him and telling the mob: "Go home. We love you. You're very special."

"This path has always been predictable," Bro said from her home in Virginia. "For people to now go, 'I never knew this would happen,' why not? How would you not see this happen?"

"This is sort of an inevitable conclusion," she added. "It's been coming, at least openly, for months, but the trajectory was set years ago."

It's been coming, at least openly, for months, but the trajectory was set years ago

Susan Bro, mother of Heather Heyer

The playbook for the Maga invasion of the nation's Capitol building on Wednesday has been developing for years in plain sight, at far-right rallies in cities like Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland, and then, in the past year, at state Capitols across the country, where heavily armed white protesters have forced their way into legislative chambers to accuse politicians of tyranny and treason.

"No one should be surprised," said Sarah Anthony, a Black state lawmaker who was on the legislative floor in Michigan's Capitol on 30 April when hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters, including white militia members with guns, tried to force their way inside. "This has been escalating in every corner of our country for months."

From screaming matches in the lobby of the state house in Michigan to looting the office of speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, the demonstrators have grown bolder and their aims more ambitious.

But many elements of these incidents repeat each time: the chaotic mix of well-known extremists and unknown Trump supporters who showed up to participate; the strikingly soft and ineffectual response from the police; the expressions of shock from Republican lawmakers that any of their supporters would take action in response to the lies they had been repeating; and of course, the behavior of Trump himself, who first openly incites the violence, and then, when it spirals out of control, praises it instead of condemning it.

It's a political playbook based on one assumption: impunity. So far, there have been no consequences for most of the president's supporters, no matter how illegal their actions, and no consequences for Trump himself.

It was past time for America to change that, Bro, Heather Heyer's mother, said on Wednesday.

"I think we're going to have to have some accountability of actions here, otherwise this will be attempted again and again," she said. "There needs to be accountability, and it needs to be commensurate [for white protesters] with what you would see handed people of color.

"I'm all for talking across divides. But that's with rational people, not with people who are seeking violence, not for people who are attempting to overthrow a democracy."

A year of rightwing rallies

The mob that stormed politicians' offices and the Senate floor in Washington DC on Wednesday did not appear to be a disciplined cadre of extremists, but instead a "mishmash of random people", said Hampton Stall, a researcher who monitors American militia groups and who spent the day analyzing video footage, photographs, and news reports.

There were known extremists, including white supremacists who had marched in Charlottesville; QAnon conspiracy theory adherents; members of the Oath Keepers militia; members of the Proud Boys, a far-right street-fighting group; and rightwing media provocateurs. Others appeared to be "random people who are committed to whatever Trump means to them", many of them wearing Trump hats or carrying Trump flags, Stall said.

This volatile mixture of rightwing activists had been coalescing in the past year at protests across the country, from anti-lockdown demonstrations to Maga car rallies to "Stop the Steal" protests, Stall said.

The first major protest last year took place in Virginia, after Democrats won control of the state government and promised to pass stricter gun control laws. An estimated 22,000 people, many of them armed, demonstrated at the state Capitol in Richmond in January, chanting "we will not comply". Young men wore t-shirts that read "Make politicians afraid again", and someone set up a model guillotine in the street.

Trump had tweeted his support for the Virginia protesters: "That's what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away."

Argumentsthat democratically elected politicians were "tyrants" who should not be obeyed gained further traction among rightwing Americansduring the coronavirus pandemic. In furious, chaotic rallies at state Capitols across the country, from Michigan to Idaho to California, they rejected public health measures to prevent the spread of the virus as an unacceptable infringement of their freedoms and called the police officers who held them back " traitors". The protests would embolden a nascent domestic terrorism movement, the "Boogaloo Bois", who were obsessed with the possibility of an imminent US civil war.

"Liberate Michigan!" Trump tweeted, attacking states with Democratic governors. "Liberate Virginia!"

This fall, federal prosecutors announced charges against several of the armed militia members photographed at the Michigan Capitol during an April anti-lockdown protest, alleging they had been part of an elaborate plot to kidnap Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and put her on trial for treason. Trump's response to the alleged domestic terrorism plot targeting one of his political enemies was to tweet more insults at Whitmer.

When Trump lost the 2020 election, he refused to concede and instead boosted wild conspiracy theories about fraud. He urged his supporters to take part in "Stop the Steal" protests, and they complied. Demonstrations again took place in cities across the country.

The broad idea of Trump supporters storming the Capitol to overturn the election certification in his favor had been circulating among a range of supporters well in advance of 6 January. Rioters had circulated their plans publicly on social media for weeks, and Trump himself promised Wednesday's protest would be "wild".

It was less clear whether many of the people who had forced themselves inside the Capitol building had a clear strategy for what to do afterwards, some researchers said. "I don't think they had a plan once they got inside the Capitol," Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said. "If you were organized, you would have occupied, you would have had food, you would have had supplies, you would have demanded things."

However strategic they had been in their planning, the Maga supporters breaking into the Capitol appeared to be more organized than law enforcement officers who were supposed to keep them out. Capitol police seemed unprepared to counter an assault on the building by Trump supporters. Instead of disciplined rows of officers in riot gear blocking key doors and stairs, some footage showed scattered lines of officers melting away before the onslaught of Trump supporters, or a lone officer outnumbered before an advancing crowd.

Reporters who had covered the police response to Black Lives Matter protests from Ferguson to Minneapolis noted the enormous disparity in police treatment of white pro-Trump insurrectionaries, compared with Black Americans protesting against police killings in their own neighborhoods.

As law enforcement made few arrests on Wednesday, Yamiche Alcindor, a PBS NewsHour reporter, tweeted: "People were being arrested by the hundreds in Ferguson for peacefully protesting the killing of an unarmed Black teenager."

The CNN reporter Omar Jimenez, who covered the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, made a similar point: "I saw more arrests during protests in Minneapolis this summer than I have watching people storm the US Capitol," he wrote. Jimenez, who is Black and Latino, was himself arrested live on air while covering the Minneapolis protests, despite clearly stating that he was a reporter.

Emily Gorcenski, an activist from Charlottesville who was among the local people violently assaulted by neo-Nazis during the 2017 Unite the Right rally, said that this kind of police response had contributed to the escalation of rightwing violence in the US.

"The refusal of the police to enforce the law in the same away against white supremacist and rightwing and pro-Trump demonstrators as they do against leftwing demonstrators has opened the door to this kind of behavior," she said.

"It green-lighted it," she said. "It's all part of the same pattern of: 'Nothing bad will happen to us, so why don't we just do it?'"

Many Americans questioned whether the Capitol police saw themselves as on the same side as the pro-Trump protesters, who often vocally described themselves in standoffs with the police as supporters of law enforcement.

In one widely shared video clip, one officer appeared to pose for a selfie with one of the men who had invaded the Capitol.

Anthony, the Black state representative from Michigan, said the image of the officer taking a selfie was nauseating - and familiar.

"We saw law enforcement here in Michigan posing for pictures with some of the armed gunmen who were shouting, who were brandishing weapons, who were waving Confederate flags. They were literally posing with our state police officers," she said.

"The level of, I would say, deference to several of the domestic terrorists that were going into the US Capitol building is just really unsettling to me. Many folks in my community look at the images, and they have to wonder, why is there so much deference?"

It wasn't just the behavior of individual officers that concerned her, Anthony said, but the way law enforcement at the Michigan Capitol had failed to communicate security concerns with elected officials before the protesters tried to force themselves in, and how lawmakers were left to fend for themselves after seeing armed men stage shouting matches with the officers guarding the Capitol and looming in the gallery over lawmakers as they worked.

On Wednesday, as she watched Trump supporters at the US Capitol replicate what happened in Michigan, but more aggressively and on a bigger scale, she heard the newly elected congresswoman Cori Bush, a Black woman from St Louis, voice the same concerns she had felt in April: why had they been they so ill-prepared for what happened? Why had police at the Capitol not done more to proactively protect lawmakers?

Nine months after a confrontation that made international headlines, she asked, why had Michigan's Republican-controlled legislature still refused Democrats' push to ban the carry of firearms inside the state Capitol?

Anthony said she had also grown familiar with another trend: "these perfectly curated statements after the fact" from Republican colleagues, who "quote unquote, 'condemn this behavior', but at the same time fan the flames.

"Every single Republican leader that has either been silent about the election results or has continued to flame the flames of these extremist groups, they should have been using their platform to promote truth and facts," she said.

'This is so far from over'

The rage and scorn against the federal government on display as Trump supporters broke into the Capitol building Wednesday, trashed politicians' offices, and looted the speaker's podium has deep roots in American culture, and it has been strategically cultivated by the Republican party for decades.

But the fury of the Trump supporters breaking windows and shouting "this is our house" and "we're home" is also a "consequence of having misinformation at scale", Donovan said.

For Americans who consume media from rightwing sites and certain segments of social media, the most principled behavior in the current moment demands a dramatic response, Donovan said.

"If you live in a media ecosystem where four to six state elections have been thoroughly corrupted by mismanaged ballots, by wanton collusion, by communist algorithms - once you've bought into the idea that the election has been stolen, then it becomes a duty to defend democracy."

And some of the protesters were not simply angry about what they believed to be a stolen election. Some videos of Trump supporters spending hundreds of dollars to fly to Washington for a protest included people saying, "There are pedophiles we're going to fight," a reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents believe that elite Democrats are torturing children.

"Twitter is very good at keeping Isis propaganda of their platform, but QAnon, they have allowed to thrive. Facebook, too, and YouTube," said Travis View, an expert on the QAnon conspiracy theory. "Social media companies decided to allow this content. They decided this content was acceptable for this platform, and now, you know, people are dying and democracy is crumbling."

The QAnon conspiracy theory came with built-in heroes, including Trump, who were supposed to save the day, View said. "But there was going to come a time when they stop having faith, they stop trusting the plan, and they feel like they need to take matters into their own hands. That was always the concern, that they'll just run out of patience. And when they run out of patience, they do things like storm the Capitol building."

Gorcenski, the Charlottesville activist, who went on create First Vigil, a project that tracks far-right individuals and groups, said that the mainstream media also had responsibility for failing to report clearly on threat in front of their faces.

"The refusal of the media to name the problem of white supremacy as white supremacy, to name fascism as fascism, and to insist on playing this 'both sides' has given incredible cover to these groups to continue to operate in this way," Gorcenski said.

Lawmakers also failed, she said: "The moment Donald Trump said 'there were very fine people on both sides' should have been the moment his presidency ended."

The fact that there was no serious attempt to hold Trump accountable after Charlottesville "shows how weak our system of government is to combat the threat of white supremacy", she added.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism, wrote on Wednesday: "If there are not severe consequences for every lawmaker & Trump government official who backed this, every member of the Capitol Police who collaborated with them, this 'strategy of disruption' will escalate in 2021."

Stall, the militia researcher, said more militia groups were organizing for planned events on Inauguration Day.

"This is so far from over," he said.

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From Charlottesville to the Capitol: how rightwing impunity fueled the pro-Trump mob

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s Susan Bro watched the footage of a mob of white Trump supporters breaking into the US Capitol and halting the official count of the 2020 election results, she was "mad as hell", but she was not surprised. Bro's daughter, Heather Heyer, was murdered in 2017 while protesting against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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BEAUTIFUL poem at Biden´s inauguration

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The Hill We Climb: the Amanda Gorman poem that stole the inauguration show

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No power, no water, no hope: inside Europe’s largest shanty town

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Freezing weather from Storm Filomena, and Spain’s third wave of Covid, compound dire situation in settlement outside Madrid

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ina Cummings has worked three 12-hour shifts every week at Amazon's gargantuan New York City warehouse, called JFK8, on Staten Island since it first began operations in late 2018. As a sorter on the outbound ship dock, her job is to inspect and scan a mandated rate of 1,800 Amazon packages an hour - 30 per minute - that are sent through a chute and transported on a conveyor belt before leaving the facility for delivery.

Workers such as Cummings helped Amazon achieve its best ever Christmas this year. Faster shipping drove Amazon's revenues to $87bn for fourth quarter of 2019, adding another $12.8bn to founder Jeff Bezos's $128.9bn fortune. Amazon has just signed a deal to take another 450,000 sq ft of warehouse space on the island to speed delivery to its New York-area consumers.

But while New York customers, and Amazon's shareholders, may be happy, some workers are not. In November, as the holiday rush got into full swing, Cummings was one of 600 workers at the Amazon warehouse who signed and delivered a petition to management calling on Amazon to improve working conditions.

The petition called on Amazon to consolidate workers' two 15-minute breaks into a 30-minute one. Workers say it can take up to 15 minutes just to walk to and from the warehouse break room. Workers also called for Amazon to provide more reliable public transit services to the warehouse. They also called attention to reports of high injury rates at the facility there, which were found to be three times the national average for warehouses, based on the company's injury reports to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Cummings first became involved with Amazon worker organizing efforts after witnessing several cases where, she claims, her colleagues were treated unfairly - and the safety concerns she works through during her own shifts at Amazon.

A worker sorts through items and places orders at the Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island. Photograph: Kathy Willens/AP

"There are days I say I'm just at the mercy of God," said Cummings. She said the only changes Amazon implemented after the high injury report was published was to install video monitors around the warehouse that tell workers safety is the company's number one priority.

"There has been no real change. There are still injuries. They were saying the report is not accurate, but it's just a way for them to avoid responsibility," she said.

Cummings said injuries are common among her colleagues, and she often experiences close calls. A few weeks ago, a pin sticking out of the conveyor belt tore off one of her work gloves, almost taking her hand with it. She also said some packages that drop on to her conveyor belt from the chute are either too large to be on it or improperly packaged, so the package's contents burst open on the belt, which she said recently injured one of her colleagues.

When packages, especially envelopes with liquid, burst on the conveyor belt, Cummings often has to stop the belt to clean up the mess, but is still expected to hit her hourly rate. She's been written up once for missing her rate because several of these incidents happened in the same week.

"People get fired regularly," she said. "It just takes two or three write-ups, depending on the severity. You can get fired for anything."

Cummings has impaired vision and is required by law to receive disability accommodations for her job. But she said new managers consistently try to place her in other departments she is unable to do the work in.

"I had a manager ask me: are you sure you can't see?" said Cummings. Her mobility counselor sent Amazon a detailed email with suggestions on safety improvements, such as painting safety lines in the warehouse brighter colors and installing yellow safety strips on all stairs. But Cummings said all the suggestions were ignored.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company has a comprehensive medical accommodations process.

Raymond Velez worked as a packer at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse from October 2018 to November 2019. He was required to pack at a rate of 700 items per hour. He said workers are regularly fired for missing rates.

"That's all they care about. They don't care about their employees," Velez added. "They care more about the robots than they care about the employees. I've been to Amcare [the company's on-site medical unit] a couple times for not feeling well, and you'd get an aspirin and sent back to work."

Juan Espinoza, who worked as a picker at the Amazon Staten Island warehouse, quit because of the grueling working conditions.

'They don't care about their employees. They care more about the robots than they care about the employees.' Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

"I was a picker and we were expected to always pick 400 units within the hour in seven seconds of each item we picked," said Espinoza. "I couldn't handle it. I'm a human being, not a robot."

Ilya Geller, who worked as a stower, told of the pressure workers face from being surveilled by computers to ensure productivity rates are met.

"You're being tracked by a computer the entire time you're there. You don't get reported or written up by managers. You get written up by an algorithm," said Geller. "You're keenly aware there is an algorithm keeping track of you, making sure you keep going as fast as you can, because if there is too much time lapsed between items, the computer will know this, will write you up, and you will get fired."

An Amazon spokesperson told the Guardian in an email: "Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazonian and we measure actual performance against those expectations."

The spokesperson said coaching is provided to under-performing workers.

Jimpat Lacewell started working at Amazon in Staten Island in November as a sorter, but quit after three days because it reminded him of prison - not least because of the 20-minute wait to get through security in and out of the facility.

"I would rather go back to a state correctional facility and work for 18 cents an hour than do that job," Lacewell said. "I'm sure Mr Bezos couldn't do a full shift at that place as an undercover boss."

Other Amazon workers at the New York City warehouse were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retaliation, but also reported unaddressed safety concerns and frequent worker injuries.

"I've been out of work twice in the past year due to knee pain," said an Amazon order picker. They explained their second injury was a result of their manager ignoring medical restrictions from surgery on his right foot.

Another order picker said they are constantly dealing with chronic lower back pain and knee pain due to the job.

"I take Tylenol or Aleve two to three times a week," the worker said. "Almost every night when I wake up, I have really bad, sharp, needle-like lower back pain. I've had to use my paid time off a lot just to recover or work half days."

An Amazon associate who transferred to the New York City warehouse to help train the new workers said they transferred to a different warehouse because their safety concerns and suggestions were repeatedly ignored by upper level managers.

"It has terrible safety for powered industrial truck (PIT) operators and pedestrian traffic, which is why I left," said the worker.

"I reported several violations to safety there - only to get brushed off and pushed aside."

They characterized the PIT lane as a highway for equipment such as forklifts and electric pallet jacks.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company recently installed guard rails across the dock at JFK8 to eliminate all pedestrian interaction with the PIT lane.

The spokesperson added: "It's inaccurate to say that our FCs are unsafe and any effort to paint our workplaces as such based on the number of injury recordings is misleading given the size of our workforce. While many companies under-record safety incidents in order to keep their rates low, Amazon does the opposite - we take an aggressive stance on recording injuries no matter how big or small.

"We believe so strongly in the environment provided for fulfillment center employees, including our safety culture, that we offer public tours where anyone can come see for themselves one of our sites and its working conditions first-hand."

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'I'm not a robot': Amazon workers condemn unsafe, grueling conditions at warehouse

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ina Cummings has worked three 12-hour shifts every week at Amazon's gargantuan New York City warehouse, called JFK8, on Staten Island since it first began operations in late 2018.

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A Madrid mural honouring the lives and achievements of 15 pioneering women, including Nina Simone, Rosa Parks and Frida Kahlo, has been saved from destruction after city councillors stepped in to thwart far-right attempts to have it removed.

The 60-metre (197ft) mural, emblazoned with the slogan: "Your ability doesn't depend on your gender", was commissioned by the local council in the Ciudad Lineal neighbourhood and painted on a sports centre wall in 2018.

Also included in the artwork are the tennis player Billie Jean King, the Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the veteran civil rights campaigner and academic Prof Angela Davis, the cosmonaut and politician Valentina Tereshkova, and the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Last Thursday, the far-right Vox party introduced a motion to have the mural removed on the grounds that it featured a "political message" and should instead be replaced with one related to sport. The motion was supported by the conservative People's party (PP) and the centre-right Citizens party, and the local council voted to replace it with a mural honouring male and female Paralympians.

The decision angered local residents, who protested against the move on Sunday, and triggered an online petition that attracted more than 55,000 signatures.

On Tuesday, the leftwing Más Madrid party brought an urgent motion before the city council calling for the mural to be protected. The move succeeded thanks to the support of the Socialist party and the centre-right Citizens party, which reversed its stance and backed the motion.

Madrid's deputy mayor, Citizens' Begoña Villacís, said that while she was not a fan of the mural, she respected the wishes of others. "Our politics is about doing things, not erasing things," said Villacís. "I want a city that's diverse. I don't just govern for the people who voted for me, and respecting things you don't like comes with being deputy mayor of the city as a whole."

Vox accused Citizens of "a lack of loyalty" to its own members, while PP said Villacís and her colleagues should have left the decision in the hands of the local council.

Jorge Nuño, a member of the Unlogic collective, which created the mural, said it was delighted by the city council's decision.

"I think some people have had trouble understanding that the women featured in the neighbourhood mural are not there for political reasons," he told the Guardian. "They're all there because of their social contribution to equality and because each and every one of them fought for proper equality and a fairer society."

Nuño said that while the collective hoped the mural would remain where it was for many years, it was in favour of another mural to commemorate Paralympians and their achievements.

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Madrid feminist mural saved from removal attempt by far right

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A Madrid mural honouring the lives and achievements of 15 pioneering women, including Nina Simone, Rosa Parks and Frida Kahlo, has been saved from destruction after city councillors stepped in to thwart far-right attempts to have it removed.

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Princess locked up in a golden tower, but not free. Still today, roles for women are limited...

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nce upon a time, a beautiful princess rebelled against her father's wishes and was locked up in a tower. But nowadays, of course, there are laws against that sort of thing. The Victorians may have shut women away in asylums to spare male embarrassment over what we would now regard as understandable rage, frustration or postnatal depression. But these days we supposedly know better. Nor do parents teach little girls any more that life is a fairytale in which a prince will set you free if you just let down your long blond hair. Yet those old patriarchal ghosts fade surprisingly slowly.

The US documentary Framing Britney Spears,investigating whether pop's own Rapunzel is now being held prisoner by a legal guardianship imposed after her breakdown 13 years ago, hit British screens this week like a flashback to a bad dream. Watching these old clips through 2021 eyes makes you rub them in disbelief. Did the sexagenarian male host of a TV talent show on which she was singing, aged 10, really ask teasingly on air if he could be her boyfriend? But it happened.

As a 16-year-old pop star, her virginity really was the subject of excruciatingly public debate. And she genuinely was ambushed on camera, aged 21, with a clip of the wife of the then governor of Maryland suggesting that "if I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I think I would" for the example she supposedly set young girls. That's how it was for countless young women, cranked through the sausage machine for our entertainment and someone else's profit, and the only real surprise is that more weren't broken by it.

Charlotte Church, another wholesome child star who transitioned into adult singer judged for her sexuality, once argued that the music industry only ever packaged women into one of three boxes: feminist-lite girl power heroine, tortured ballad singer, or unattainable sex bot. Those who didn't fit the boxes were forced into one anyway, because that was how everyone got rich. Hence pigtailed Britney in her hoicked-up school uniform, lip-syncing ...Baby One More Time like a cross between some grim middle-aged man's St Trinian's fantasy and the high-school cool girl of teenage dreams. She was as much a part of the cultural wallpaper as Madonna, only much more defenceless.

Two babies in quick succession were followed by what her mother would later identify as a bout of postnatal depression; then came an ugly divorce, contested custody and a public breakdown mercilessly documented by the cameras forever in her face. Most strikingly, the princess shaved off her long blond hair, saying she no longer wanted people touching it. She was 26 when her father secured a form of legal guardianship - more usually applied to people with dementia - over his multimillionaire daughter, turning the child star who briefly became an autonomous woman effectively back into a child again. At 39, Spears still doesn't have control over her own fortune, despite having been well enough to earn it through albums and touring for more than a decade.

Yet she's probably still better off than this week's other 21st-century princess in a tower - the ruler of Dubai's daughter, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid. Having briefly fled her family in 2018, Princess Latifa was recaptured and (at least according to a video filmed on her phone and smuggled out to Panorama journalists) has been under effective house arrest ever since.

Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who flew to Dubai to check on her welfare in 2018, says she was told then that the princess had bipolar disorder and was being discreetly protected from further trauma. Now Robinson fears she was " horribly tricked ". Was she merely fed a version of the lie so often given for stripping women of their freedoms, namely that it's for their own good? So much safer to hide yourself away, in case other men make passes at you; so much more relaxing to stop work, and just let the patriarch provide.

Except in Spears's case, of course, she's been providing handsomely for everyone even from within a succession of gilded cages. Her career has sustained legions of paparazzi, lawyers, media moguls, music industry executives and even fellow artists. Her ex, and fellow child star, Justin Timberlake finally apologised this week to both Spears and Janet Jackson, whose career imploded after he tore off part of her costume while both were performing at the 2004 Super Bowl, for "the times in my life when my actions contributed to the problem" of misogyny and racism. It was the barest possible acknowledgment that his relationship (and breakup) with Spears in her late teens made his reputation but shattered hers.

While the media sniggered about Timberlake getting " into Britney's pants ", as one magazine cover put it, she was deemed a slut for letting him, and it was Jackson, not Timberlake, who was shamed for an escaped breast on primetime TV. But there have been few gestures of contrition from the industries fattened on such distress. The fan-led movement to "free Britney" from her legal conservatorship is a heartening sign of changing times, but this was never her only prison.

So when female celebrities now are ridiculed as control freaks, communicating only through heavily manufactured images and engaging only on their own overprotected terms, it's perhaps worth remembering that they've seen an alternative, and it involves being chewed up and spat out for profit. The lesson young women took from Britney Spears is that you can either be the manufacturer or the product; control or be controlled. Better to be demonised for pulling strings, perhaps, than to be the puppet who is jerked around until she snaps.

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Control or be controlled: the lessons of Britney Spears's grotesque story | Gaby Hinsliff

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nce upon a time, a beautiful princess rebelled against her father's wishes and was locked up in a tower. But nowadays, of course, there are laws against that sort of thing. The Victorians may have shut women away in asylums to spare male embarrassment over what we would now regard as understandable rage, frustration or postnatal depression.

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Listen to teenagers talking about growing up in Spain

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The Compass - Waithood: Trying to Grow Up in Italy and Spain - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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CITY: MOVING OUT OF TOWN because of COVID

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CITY: MOVING OUT OF TOWN because of COVID

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"We didn't realize how difficult it was to live in so few square meters until the lockdown," says Javier M., a 35-year-old lawyer from Granada who lives with his wife in Madrid. When he talked to EL PAÍS at the beginning of December, the couple of "committed urbanites" were about to leave their 32 square-meter rental apartment in the center of the city and move to a 300 square-meter house in Villanueva de la Cañada, around 30 kilometers west of the capital. Javier is just one of many Spaniards who have decided to move to a larger home outside the city. Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a sharp rise in the sale of houses. Javier is pleased with the decision, explaining that his new house has "a room for remote working " and a "terrace where you can go outside."

Clients are looking for much larger homes, with more light, that have a space to work remotely, balconies, gardens

Mar Herranz, sales manager of the real estate agency Engel & Völkers in Madrid.

Javier and his wife are not the only Spaniards who are looking for (and can afford) a larger house with a garden. Demand for detached, semi-detached houses and townhouses is defining the new normality of the real estate world. According to statistics compiled by the Notary General Council from notary offices across Spain, the sale of houses is at record-high levels. While the sale of apartments fell 0.1% in September and 13.9% in October, according to the latest data published this week, the sale of single-family homes is far above last year's average, rising 25.9% and 13.2%, respectively.

The rise in sales has not escaped the attention of property developers or real estate agencies, especially given the current economic uncertainty. In October, 27.8% of all properties sold were stand-alone houses, up from 22.6% a year ago. "In June, when we began to come out [of the coronavirus lockdown], everything began to rise," says Mar Herranz, a sales manager at the real estate agency Engel & Völkers in Madrid. She oversees properties in the northeast of Madrid, an area traditionally home to residential developments. In this area, detached house sales represented 80% of all property sales in the last few months. The remaining 20% are "attics or ground-floor apartments, which are also in demand," she says.

Herranz is clear about what her clients now want. "They are looking for much larger homes, with more light, that have a space to work remotely, balconies, gardens... at the end of the day, the quality of life is better because there are more square meters and more open spaces," she says. Herranz adds that a new type of client is now interested in buying a house outside of the city. "It's not about changing one detached house for another," she explains, in reference to the typical profile. "We have sold detached homes in the mountains to people who are leaving the center of the city." Price is another important factor behind the move outside of the city. According to Herranz, the cost of a property is closely related to how close it is to Madrid. That said, the price of houses is falling less than all properties as a whole, recording a 2% drop in October, upon last year's figures, compared to 4.7% for the latter, according to data from the Notary General Council.

A "solid" trend

"It's clear that there has been a change in demand, although it's too soon to quantify if it is going to be a permanent or circumstantial change," says Mario Lapiedra, the property director general of Neinor Homes. "In the short term, it is a solid trend and it is going to last for the next five years," he argues. That's why his company, which has 1,000 detached houses in its portfolio, "is looking for land for this product." Neinor Homes carries out market surveys to get a better understanding of what characteristics are considered most important to have in a home. According to the real estate agency, double the number of respondents now consider balconies and private spaces to be important.

It is not the only study that has highlighted this trend. A recent analysis by the real estate site Fotocasa shows that interest in property ads for single-family homes has skyrocketed between April and September, with respect to 2019. Requests to contact owners for more information have risen 86% for semi-detached houses in municipalities in the Madrid region and 30% in the province of Barcelona. And this phenomenon is not exclusive to Spain: "Homebuyers are increasingly looking for larger properties where they can work far from the city center," reads the latest housing report from financial services company Moody's. To underscore this trend, the report pointed to the connection between the sale of houses in the Paris metropolitan area and population density: the higher the concentration of people, the greater the fall in property sales in the first months of the pandemic.

According to Moody's, the trend to move outside the city was present before the coronavirus pandemic, but has been accelerated by the health emergency. This, in turn, is likely to have driven up the sale of houses, which are not typically found in city centers. As Lázaro Cubero, the head of analysis at the real estate company Grupo Tecnocasa, explains: "One has to take into account that not all areas have this type of housing; in the cities of Barcelona and Madrid, the availability of this product is low."

For Javier M. and his wife, it is clear that their priorities have changed. The lawyer recognizes that they don't know anyone in their new neighborhood, but says: "We have more space for the price of a smaller apartment in Madrid; that's what convinced us."

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The coronavirus exodus: Spaniards looking to buy larger homes outside the city

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"We didn't realize how difficult it was to live in so few square meters until the lockdown," says Javier M., a 35-year-old lawyer from Granada who lives with his wife in Madrid.

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A baby at a hospital in Granollers (Catalonia). Siqui Sanchez / Getty

Since the economic crisis of 2008, the country has seen a steady trend of increasingly fewer births. The only exception was in 2014, when the number increased by 0.1% compared to 2013.

The survey also found that there were fewer deaths (7.8% less) and fewer marriages (2.7% less) in the first half of 2016 than in the first half of 2015.

By 2066, Spain's population will have shrunk by around 5.4 million, studies suggest

The dearth of newborns was especially acute in Catalonia and Aragón, as well as in the exclave city of Melilla. In the first half of 2016, Catalonia had 9% fewer births, Melilla saw a baby decrease of 7.4% and Aragón had 6% fewer births than in the first half of last year.

On the other hand, the Balearic Islands, Ceuta and Asturias all saw slight increases in the number of births - between 0.6% and 1.5%.

In terms of deaths, all of Spain's regions saw a decrease in mortality except for the exclave city of Ceuta. Significantly, the regions of La Rioja, Aragon and Extremadura all experienced around 10% fewer deaths this year.

More as a result of greater longevity than increased fertility, the regions of Madrid, Andalucía, Murcia, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands saw more births than deaths, according to the study.

The INE explained that generally the first months of the year tend to see more deaths and fewer births than the final months, noting that this trend may not continue into the second part of the year.

In any event, the experts say that Spain isn't getting any younger. By 2066, Spain's population, currently around 46.4 million, will have shrunk by around 5.4 million, suggests another study released by the INE in October.

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Why Spain's population is shrinking by 72 people every day

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Since the economic crisis of 2008, the country has seen a steady trend of increasingly fewer births. The only exception was in 2014, when the number increased by 0.1% compared to 2013. The survey also found that there were fewer deaths (7.8% less) and fewer marriages (2.7% less) in the first half of 2016 than in the first half of 2015.

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Almost 50 years ago, the American philosopher John Rawls published a celebrated account of what fairness looks like in a liberal democracy. Though scrupulous in its safeguarding of individual freedoms, Rawls's groundbreaking A Theory of Justice incorporated an important rider. His so-called "difference principle" stipulated that resulting inequalities were justified only if they benefited the least well-off in society.

It is doubtful that Rawls would have judged the pay of Tim Steiner, the chief executive of Ocado, to fall into this category. A report by the High Pay Centre thinktank has revealed that Mr Steiner last year earned £58.7m. This astonishing rate of remuneration is 2,605 times the average wage of one of his employees, which stands at £22,500. Put another way, 24 hours of Mr Steiner's time is allegedly worth about 10 years of toil from an average Ocado worker.

The Covid pandemic has, of course, been a boom time for digital businesses. An online grocery delivery company, Ocado has profited hugely from an accelerated shift to internet shopping. This came on top of years of steady growth. No doubt, Mr Steiner's talents and judgment have played a part in this success story. It is, however, equally certain that he has simply ridden the good fortune of having a top job in the right sector at the right time. In a fair society, no slice of luck should ever be worth this much.

The High Pay Centre's analysis reveals that the biggest pay gaps in the British economy are found in retail, where the CEO/employee ratio is 140:1. But the figures reflect more broadly an explosion in executive pay over recent decades. In the UK's 100 biggest stock market-listed companies, chief executives pocket 73 times the amount paid to workers on average. Forty years ago, the ratio was 18:1. Since the financial crash, this shameless self-enrichment by the wealthiest in society has taken place as average wages have stagnated and, in many cases, fallen in real terms.

Most recently, of course, Covid-19 has tipped millions into economic crisis. The details of Mr Steiner's pay were disclosed on the same day that it emerged that 800,000 people have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic. As the working poor resort to food banks in ever larger numbers, Unicef has launched an emergency response in Britain for the first time. The UN aid agency will channel over £700,000 to food insecure households across the country.

This gulf between the top and bottom of our society is not inevitable. It is immoral. Last spring, it was generally recognised that delivery drivers, along with care workers, supermarket staff and refuse collectors, were crucial to the nation's wellbeing, but poorly paid. The public mood - expressed in those Thursday night rounds of applause - suggested there was a desire that something should eventually be done about this.

It is therefore depressing, at this year's end, to note that while Ocado van drivers were merely earning plaudits, their CEO was sitting on the more tangible reward of £58.7m. The notion of regulating the pay ratio between chief executives and employees has been mooted in the past. If a better, more cohesive Britain is to emerge post-Covid, it urgently needs to be revisited.

* This article was amended on 17 December 2020. A previous version said that Ocado's chief executive, Tim Steiner, was paid as much as the average Ocado worker's yearly salary for just one day. In fact he is paid about 10 times as much as an average salary in one day.

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The Guardian view on shameless CEOs: because they're worth it? | Editorial

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Almost 50 years ago, the American philosopher John Rawls published a celebrated account of what fairness looks like in a liberal democracy. Though scrupulous in its safeguarding of individual freedoms, Rawls's groundbreaking A Theory of Justice incorporated an important rider. His so-called "difference principle" stipulated that resulting inequalities were justified only if they benefited the least well-off in society.

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Although cities are supposed to be built for everyone, they are in most of the time, thought, planned and designed by men: " Cities are supposed to be built for all of us, but they aren't built by all of us."

With basic different needs, men and women expect different outcomes from their urban surroundings. A city should be able to fulfill everyone's essentials. Lately, the topic that has everyone's attention revolves around cities designed by women. With a female mayor onboard and a feminist agenda, for the past four years, Barcelona has been undergoing major transformations on this subject.

In this podcast, reporter Stephanie Hegarty speaks to many experts in urban planning and design, working on the case of Barcelona, to draw guidelines that could help cities become "better" for women and paint a picture of what the future can look like. Actually, she discusses design strategies with Punt 6, a feminist collective of urban designers, she argues the use of public space with Equal Saree, a design trio, and she converses with Janet Sanz about the superblock initiative.

Read on to discover the 6 ways that can improve a city for women.

1- Toilets

Women physiologically need to use the bathroom more often than men, spending on average 3 times as long in the toilet. Usually, public bathrooms, are not abundant in cities, have very narrow spaces, with limited toilets and do not offer many amenities. Even mothers, a major part of the female population, cannot get in with their strollers, move around and keep their kids close.

2- Play Fair

Redefining needs where everyone feels equal is more than just a question of security and services. In fact, it's about thinking how each of us uses space differently.
The spaces we use are often segregated, where usually design is not thought to accommodate everyone. Equal Saree has created a playground that generates different types of activities at the same time, giving everyone access to the space.

3- The Way She Moves

Women and men, in terms of transportation, undergo different journeys in the city. More women, according to statistics travel on foot and use public systems. Therefore, when cities think about public transportation, they should think more about women.

4- Kill the Car

Superblock is an initiative in Barcelona to reclaim streets from the domination of cars. Formed from 9 blocks, the superblock is closed off from traffic, with restrained accesses to vehicles. The streets are dominated therefore by parks, benches, green areas, playgrounds, and they are given back to pedestrians and cyclists.

5- Take a Seat

The superblock project started by surveying what women in specific wanted and needed. Mainly requesting benches, it seemed that women more than others think that this seating system is a major entity for mobility and not just for social interactions.

6- Say No to Sleaze

Barcelona, known for its party scene, generates more dangerous risks for women. In fact, the city is creating anti-machismo stands to provide women with advice and consultations. A new application was also released by the town hall, where anyone can anonymously report sexual aggression, in order to generate a map and help the city put an end to this.

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What Can Cities Imagined by Women Look Like? The Case of Barcelona

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Although cities are supposed to be built for everyone, they are in most of the time, thought, planned and designed by men: " Cities are supposed to be built for all of us, but they aren't built by all of us." With basic different needs, men and women expect different outcomes from their urban surroundings.

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The aggressor was young and promising...

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It has been just over three weeks since Chanel Miller allowed her name to become public and the 27-year-old is still trying to adjust. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. "Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!" she'd read. Or: "Hey, I always knew you'd write a book!" She smiles at the bleak comedy of a situation which no one, least of all Miller herself, knows quite how to handle. At some point in the emails, every sender would jettison the pleasantries and make the awkward turn towards saying: "I'm sorry."

Around midnight on 17 January 2015, Miller was spotted by two students at Stanford University being sexually assaulted by a third student as she lay unconscious on the ground behind some bins. She was 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in her first job at a tech firm and living with her parents in Palo Alto. Earlier that evening she had, on a whim, agreed to accompany her younger sister to a fraternity party at Stanford University, a 10-minute drive from the house. By the early hours of the morning, Miller was in a hospital having her vagina and anus swabbed by police doctors - and 19-year-old Brock Turner was in custody.

What happened next has become a textbook example of the double standards applied to sexual assault victims and their assailants. While Turner was characterised as a champion swimmer, conscientious student and upstanding young man surely incapable of assault, Miller became the "drunk girl at the party".

In that moment, her life split in two. To the majority of her friends and family, she was still Chanel - an anglicised version of her Chinese name, Zhang Xiao Xia - albeit a more muted version of the woman they knew. Within the legal system, and in a small, dark chamber of her own mind, she was "Emily Doe", the pseudonym of the "Brock Turner sexual assault victim", a woman reduced to the sum total of what someone else had done to her. After Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault and sentenced to just six months in prison - of which he ultimately served three - Miller read out a victim impact statement in court. "You don't know me," she said, addressing Turner directly, "but you've been inside me, and that's why we're here today." Over 12 subsequent pages, Miller delineated, with devastating precision, the experience of being sexually assaulted by a man for whom the legal system had more sympathy than his victim. In June 2016, when the statement was published by BuzzFeed, more than 18 million people read it.

Three years later, Miller is sitting opposite me in a conference room at a publishing house in New York, her memoir, Know My Name, on the table before us. Miller is slight and softly spoken, with long hair and a mildly sardonic air, the kind of details that the victim in a sexual assault is used to having raised. Since the trial, every decision Miller makes - what to wear, how to comport herself, the extent to which she should smile or not smile, where she should go and what route she should take to get there - has, for a split-second, been refracted through what she calls "the lens of court", a reflex audit of how her most trivial choices might be levelled against her by lawyers. "I know how to dismiss and turn down the volume on those voices, that question and reprimand," she says, "but it's all there and it is really inhibiting."

Know My Name is written in vivid, punishing detail. The fraternity house has "a sour, yeasty atmosphere, where you could hear the soles of your shoes unpeeling from sticky floors". After the assault, Miller's body is "a nerveless mannequin". She is bitterly funny about the dehumanising absurdity of the rape processing suite, where, after being swabbed and photographed ("I wondered if I was suppose to smile with teeth, where I should be looking") she is given some sweatpants and a pamphlet, which together seem to say: "Welcome to the club, here's your new uniform. In your folder you'll find guidelines that will lay out the steps of trauma and recovery which may take your entire lifetime."

The amazing thing, says Miller, is that at the time, the circumstances of her assault seemed so open and shut that in her innocence she imagined there was no case to be answered. "If someone is found humping an unmoving body, what is the case?" she says now. The case was one of consent; Turner pleaded innocent and claimed not only to have asked Miller "if she wanted me to finger her", but to have asked if she liked it and heard her confirm: "Uh-huh."

You get to choose how the experience serves you; what you draw from it. I use my anger as fuel, my grief as strength

More broadly, however, the case turned less on the specifics of Miller's conduct that night and more on her credibility as a victim. Miller's sexual history, relationship status and the question of whether or not she "did a lot of partying in college" were all considered permissible points of access for Turner's defence, as was the fact that, prior to blacking out and waking up in the hospital, she had peed outside. A man who drunkenly takes a leak under a tree is unremarkable; a woman who does so is lewd.

There were other biases at work, among them the broad assumption that alcohol excuses sexual assault, particularly on campus. Oddly, this presumption is nowhere more starkly on display than in journalist Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Talking to Strangers - the publicity for which promises to examine a "series of encounters and misunderstandings" between people and in which he quotes extensively from Miller's case.

Set aside, for a moment, the ethics of a man using the raw transcript of a woman's sexual assault trial to prop up his theory about communication, and focus on Gladwell's assertion that: "People v. Brock Turner is a case about alcohol." The entire case, Gladwell writes, "turned on the degree of Emily Doe's drunkenness".

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Brock Turner leaves the Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters

From a narrow legal point of view, Gladwell is correct. But in answer to the question: "How did an apparently harmless encounter on a dancefloor end in a crime?" Gladwell describes the assault as a "transparency failure on steroids", and offers the apparently blithe summary: "A young woman and a young man meet at a party, then proceed to tragically misunderstand each other's intentions - and they're drunk." Little credence is given to the possibility raised at the trial that Turner, far from "misunderstanding" the signals from Miller, could have understood them perfectly, nor that the pivotal disinhibiting agent in this case may not have been alcohol but misogyny. An unconscious woman cannot object when a man inserts his fingers and foreign objects into her vagina; what Emily Doe did or didn't want was irrelevant.

At mention of Gladwell, Miller smiles and zips her mouth. Who needs it? But a moment later, she says: "We say alcohol is the cause, but to me it's such a small way of thinking. Alcohol could never be the root of something that is part of such a greater pattern: when you look at the thousands of cases [of violence against women], the common thread is not that we are drinking too much. The fact that we continue to minimise and rationalise violence is so insanely damaging. This is not an intellectual conversation; it's not a time for posturing. And it's not OK that, in Gladwell's book, I was treated and regarded as a case, as something locked in, and not as a person who is actively functioning and speaking and writing and prepared to provide my opinion."

She says: "You have trolls, then you have this very sophisticated way [of writing]; it's the same amount of damage, but disguised as this reasonable [critique]. It's so easy for someone to copy and paste these sections from the transcript, to take my statement and analyse it however they may please, but it's so difficult to live it. I'm not interested in making excuses any more. When a drunk man beats a woman, we don't say: well the alcohol affected his decision-making. You're accountable for that behaviour. It's a crime."

It's infuriating how much victims have to sacrifice, how we have to speak in gruesome detail about private things

Over the past 18 months, Miller has been emboldened to speak out and ultimately shed her anonymity by the examples of the women testifying against Harvey Weinstein, and by Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. "I watched them literally sacrifice themselves for the greater good, with the single hope that it's going to help someone. It's infuriating when we see how much victims have to sacrifice and give away from themselves, and how much we have to speak in gruesome detail about things that feel very private, in order to make this apparent to people. How many times we're caught in that cycle of saying: 'Doesn't this mean something to you? Why can't you see me? Why doesn't this hurt you? Why aren't you alarmed?' Each one has propelled me forward, and has cleared out a little more space in order for me to step out today. I think it would have been a much slower process for me coming to terms with going public had they not laid that groundwork."

Does she think Kavanaugh should be impeached? Miller smiles. "I think a lot about that. Hmmm. I think when Christine Blasey Ford or Debbie Ramirez comes forward with their story, it is our job to create a space for them to speak the truth without being automatically converted into political punching bags. And, yes, I do think that people in power need to be held to a higher standard of behaviour. So many of these conversations feel so absurd."

The point about gruesome detail is particularly relevant in Miller's case; she writes about how it felt to discover, after the fact, that a huge closeup of her exposed genitals had been flashed before the court as part of the presentation of evidence, moments before she walked in to testify. To attach her name to that image; to invite people to imagine her being assaulted was grotesque and terrifying and, in the first instance, she says: "Anonymity was essential to self-preservation and processing." She was also fearful for her safety. At every stage of the trial and its aftermath, she has received death and rape threats from random men set on defending Turner online.

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Chanel Miller. Photograph: Ali Smith/The Guardian

Know My Name by Chanel Miller review - memoir of a sexual assault

Over time, however, she began to think that the anonymity was cauterising her ability to heal. "When you keep something so contained, it restricts you from getting the help and support you need," she says. "You're keeping out the bad but the good comes in through that same door." And what of shame? "Oh, of course. Shame loves growing in a contained environment, that's the only way it can fester and thrive. You have to let your story breathe in order for some of that shame to be cleared out."

The panic attacks have not gone away, and neither has the depression. She is still subject to bouts of anger and despair. At the end of the trial, Turner's father read out a statement in which he said harsh punishment of his son would be "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life". Those 20 minutes have cost Miller most of her 20s.

She tries to be gentle with herself, and to "accept this is going to dominate major chunks of my life". She has also come to understand that what happens now "is not eternally out of my control. I've realised that each time I revisit this story, I'm changing. And I'm growing stronger, and becoming more clear-headed and assertive and articulate. So I'm not wasting time by returning to the story; that is my way of moving forward. Once I realised that, I could breathe a little easier."

Besides which, she says: "There are no deadlines for healing. Ultimately this experience will always be a part of you, but you get to choose how it serves you; what you draw from it. I get to use my anger as fuel, I get to use my grief as strength, and my ability to empathise with anyone who's going through this; I'm thankful for the ability to do that."

The awful truth is that by the standards of most women who are raped or sexually assaulted, Miller's has been a "good" experience; according to some analyses of Justice Department data, fewer than 1% of rapes in the US result in felony convictions. Turner was found guilty of sexual assault with intent to rape and, after a campaign online, the judge responsible for his light sentence was removed. Miller had sympathetic cops and a great district attorney. She was one of the lucky ones. To which she can only laugh and say, as women have been saying repeatedly for years: "If this is what's considered a smooth trajectory through the system, it is my duty to report that it's not working."
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Chanel Miller on why she refuses to be reduced to 'Brock Turner's victim'

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It has been just over three weeks since Chanel Miller allowed her name to become public and the 27-year-old is still trying to adjust. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. "Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!"

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Excellent documentary by Timothy Garton Ash

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BBC Sounds - Free Speech - Available Episodes

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Listen to the latest episodes of Free Speech on BBC Sounds

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A lot of the articles for the External Exam (Selectividad) are taken from "The Guardian". And it´s one of the few newspapers without a paywall.

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News, sport and opinion from the Guardian’s global edition | The Guardian

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Latest international news, sport and comment from the Guardian

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Long-standing economy newspaper. Has got a paywall, but older articles are free.

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A letter from Tom Standage, editor of "The World in 2021"

DO YOU FEEL lucky? The number 21 is connected with luck, risk, taking chances and rolling the dice. It's the number of spots on a standard die, and the number of shillings in a guinea, the currency of wagers and horse-racing. It's the minimum age at which you can enter a casino in America, and the name of a family of card games, including blackjack, that are popular with gamblers.

All of which seems strangely appropriate for a year of unusual uncertainty. The great prize on offer is the chance of bringing the coronavirus pandemic under control. But in the meantime risks abound, to health, economic vitality and social stability. As 2021 approaches, here are ten trends to watch in the year ahead.

1 Fights over vaccines. As the first vaccines become available in quantity, the focus will shift from the heroic effort of developing them to the equally daunting task of distributing them. Vaccine diplomacy will accompany fights within and between countries over who should get them and when. A wild card: how many people will refuse a vaccine when offered? See article

2 A mixed economic recovery. As economies bounce back from the pandemic the recovery will be patchy, as local outbreaks and clampdowns come and go-and governments pivot from keeping companies on life-support to helping workers who have lost their jobs. The gap between strong and weak firms will widen. See article

3 Patching up the new world disorder. How much will Joe Biden, newly installed in the White House, be able to patch up a crumbling rules-based international order? The Paris climate treaty and the Iran nuclear deal are obvious places to start. But the crumbling predates Donald Trump, and will outlast his presidency. See article

4 More US-China tensions. Don't expect Mr Biden to call off the trade war with China. Instead, he will want to mend relationships with allies to wage it more effectively. Many countries from Africa to South-East Asia are doing their best to avoiding picking sides as the tension rises. See article

5 Companies on the front line. Another front for the US-China conflict is companies, and not just the obvious examples of Huawei and TikTok, as business becomes even more of a geopolitical battlefield. As well as pressure from above, bosses also face pressure from below, as employees and customers demand that they take stands on climate change and social justice, where politicians have done too little. See article

6 After the tech-celeration. In 2020 the pandemic accelerated the adoption of many technological behaviours, from video-conferencing and online shopping to remote working and distance learning. In 2021 the extent to which these changes will stick, or snap back, will become clearer. See article

7 A less footloose world. Tourism will shrink and change shape, with more emphasis on domestic travel. Airlines, hotel chains and aircraft manufacturers will struggle, as will universities that rely heavily on foreign students. Cultural exchange will suffer, too. See article

8 An opportunity on climate change. One silver lining amid the crisis is the chance to take action on climate change, as governments invest in green recovery plans to create jobs and cut emissions. How ambitious will countries' reduction pledges be at the UN climate conference, delayed from 2020? See article

9 The year of déjà vu. That is just one example of how the coming year may feel, in many respects, like a second take on 2020, as events including the Olympics, the Dubai Expo and many other political, sporting and commercial gatherings do their best to open a year later than planned. Not all will succeed. See article

10 A wake-up call for other risks. Academics and analysts, many of whom have warned of the danger of a pandemic for years, will try to exploit a narrow window of opportunity to get policymakers to take other neglected risks, such as antibiotic resistance and nuclear terrorism, more seriously. Wish them luck. See article

The coming year promises to be particularly unpredictable, given the interactions between the pandemic, an uneven economic recovery and fractious geopolitics. This annual will, we hope, help you improve your odds as you navigate the risks and opportunities ahead.

And it's not all doom and gloom. Our special section, "Aftershocks", considers some of the lessons, and chances for positive change, that have emerged from the crisis. So let the dice fly high-and, whatever cards 2021 may end up dealing you, may the odds be ever in your favour.

Tom Standage: Editor, The World in 2021 ■

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A letter from Tom Standage, editor of "The World in 2021" DO YOU FEEL lucky? The number 21 is connected with luck, risk, taking chances and rolling the dice. It's the number of spots on a standard die, and the number of shillings in a guinea, the currency of wagers and horse-racing.

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The latest breaking news, comment and features from The Independent.

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Here are some magazines you might find interesting...

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Magazines for children, tweens and teens, including comics and newspapers for children. This list features recommended titles suitable for use in primary and secondary school classrooms and libraries in the UK. Suggested titles include subscriptions for publications suitable for pupils aged 3-6, 7-12 and 13+; and also periodicals for teachers, Heads of Departments, subject coordinators, school leaders, and school librarians.

For children's magazine subscription prices and ordering, click on the cover image.

Magazines for children aged 2-6, including comics

Here's our list of recommended magazines for EYFS and KS1 pupils in primary school.

Magazines for children aged 6-12, including children's newspapers and comics

Here's our list of recommended magazines for KS2 children in primary school.

Aquila

Packed with science, history and geography, each edition aims to inspire curious children aged 8+. There's plenty in each issue to encourage independent learning at school or at home, and to stir KS2 children to think for themselves. We particularly liked the monthly topic approach. This makes Aquila a useful resource in the primary classroom, for cross-curricular work, and it will help teachers to provide extension ideas for gifted and talented pupils. Back issues are available and there's also a free sample copy.

More magazines for children in KS2

Science and Nature - from the Week Jr team, this magazine is aimed at children aged 8-15 and looks in-depth at STEAM news and topics from around the world. The layout is really bright and engaging, and this magazine is highly recommended for upper KS2 and lower KS3 libraries. There's a video here to show readers what to expect.

Cocoa Girl - launched in July 2020, Cocoa Girl was inspired by founder Serlina Boyd's vision to "empower black girls around the world". Aimed at girls aged 7-14. Also, launched in September 2020 was Cocoa Boy.

Stories Magazine - news, activities and games for children aged 6-11. Here's a free online sample. (New for 2021)

The Pathmaker Club - an exciting free online magazine for children aged 7+, linked to the Alya The Pathmaker Book by Yasemin Allsop. Each issue contains a diverse wealth of science, STEM, humanities, and coding activities.

Cubic Magazine - for "inquisitive kids" aged 8-12, this monthly publication examines a different topic in detail each month. Previous issues have covered flying machines, Australia, cats and dogs, ball sports and the Earth, the Moon, the sun and space.

The Phoenix comic - a super colourful magazine for children in fun comic style with high-quality writing. There are some free samples here.

Hoo's Writing Corner - an exciting creative writing magazine and website for primary aged children. The website includes writing prompts and exercises, and the monthly subscription magazine includes story construction ideas and spelling worksheets.

Storytime magazine - great stories to appeal to boys and girls in KS2.

How it works - for children interested in science, STEM, transport, and history. Good for upper KS2 and lower KS3.

Kookie - aimed at girls aged between 8-12 and full of inspiring creative content and positive role models. No ads, fashion or beauty.

Adventure Box magazine - ideal for children aged 6-9 engaged by adventure and real-life stories. Features longer chapter stories.

Science+Nature magazine - fun and vibrant articles with attention-grabbing content and graphics. From the publishers of The Week Junior. A great science magazine for children, suitable for school pupils in KS2 and lower KS3.

Simpsons Comic - monthly 76-page comic strip with several stories per issue. Ideal for reluctant readers and a great fun magazine for kids.

Discovery Box - perfect for children and tweens aged 9-12 with inquiring minds and interested in science, nature and natural history.

Minecraft World magazine - good for cross-curricular activities involving Minecraft.

Owl - Hands-on and focused on tech, with quizzes, interviews, infographics, and in-depth articles and reviews. Good for KS2 classrooms and libraries.

Home Cool Kids - an online lockdown learning magazine packed with child-friendly activities written by and for 8-14-year-olds.

ChickaDEE - aimed at 6-9-year-olds, this magazine is packed with fun activities, stories, and science experiments.

Beano magazine - the legendary comic aimed at children aged 7-12.

Asian Geographic junior magazine for kids - ideal to present the world to UK children from a different viewpoint.

Produced in Canada, myDeen 'makes learning about Islam fun'. Aimed at children aged 3-12, in three age categories, these magazines include activities, lessons, knowledge and Arabic lessons. There are free sample magazines available on their website.

Epic magazine - fun and visually bright magazine with lots of activities.

Whizz Pop Bang magazine - Award-winning science magazine for children. There's a free copy to view here.

Lego Star Wars - a magazine for children filled with comic stories, activities, a lego project to build and competitions. Very popular with reluctant readers in Years 3&4 and children interested in Lego.

Online newspapers for children aged 7-11 in KS2

First News Live - the online version of the popular newspaper for children. The site includes child-friendly news videos, polls, and competitions.

Magazines for teenagers, including teen newspapers and comics

Here's our list of recommended magazines for KS3 and KS4 students in secondary school.

National Geographic - the world-renowned periodical examining modern geography, science and natural history. An ideal monthly magazine for teenagers.

Shout - an aspirational teen magazine featuring celebrity interviews, music and internet reviews, and fashion and beauty advice.

Wonk! Magazine - a monthly science magazine for teens that aims to foster a greater interest in STEM subjects. Lively, contemporary and interesting.

Online newspapers for teens aged 13-18 in KS3, KS4, and KS5

The Day - a daily online newspaper for teenagers, collating stories from around the world into news categories and curriculum areas. An ideal subscription resource for secondary school libraries and English departments.

The Burnet News Club is run by the Economist magazine and offers an online children's news service that leans towards economic, social and political current events in the UK and worldwide. Its particular strength is the way it challenges young readers to think and develop their ideas and opinions. There are also lots of opportunities to interact with the site, through competitions, polls and a school leaderboard. With extensive free resources to download, this site could form the basis of a great extracurricular club.

A regularly updated fake news quiz. This makes an excellent engaging lesson starter for KS3 or KS4 on an interactive whiteboard.

The Student View is a news website written by teens and designed to promote discussion and debate about current events. Ideas for teens aged 13+.

The Guardian offers a course for secondary English and media studies teachers to improve the teaching of media and journalism. They also offer free curriculum workshops for KS3 and KS4. and an extensive collection of resources for secondary schools.

Magazines for teachers, staffrooms and subject departments

Here's our list of recommended magazines for teachers of pupils in EYFS, KS1, KS2, KS3 and KS4.

Kindle newspapers and magazines for school libraries

An accessible way to read newspapers and magazines for children and teens. Ideal for use on tablets, in libraries, and for research.

International magazines and newspapers for school libraries and modern languages departments

For more nonfiction books, why not have a look at our nonfiction books for topics?

About Tom Tolkien

Tom Tolkien is an experienced teacher and educational consultant who taught for 20 years in primary and secondary schools, including Woodleigh School in North Yorkshire, where he was Head of English and ran a 4000 book prep school library for pupils aged 3-13. He now reviews books for children and teens. Social profiles: Twitter | Linkedin

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Magazines and newspapers for children and teenagers

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Magazines for children, tweens and teens, including comics and newspapers for children. This list features recommended titles suitable for use in primary and secondary school classrooms and libraries in the UK. Suggested titles include subscriptions for publications suitable for pupils aged 3-6, 7-12 and 13+; and also periodicals for teachers, Heads of Departments, subject coordinators, school leaders, and school librarians.

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Mutual Aid Reproductive Justice Mental Health Native Leadership Reparations YES! Crossword