Новости за 21.03.2017

Children are ruling the way. Heloise Godfrey-Talbot.

Children and young people’s experiences of sexual harassment in British schools has reached a crisis point. When the first parliamentary inquiry report into sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools was launched in late 2016 it included more than 70 submissions with 12 recommendations including that sexual violence “will only be reduced by a whole-school approach”.

Chutima Chaochaiya/Shutterstock.com

Flogging fish oil supplements is a lucrative business. In the US alone, 19m people take the pills, spending around US$1.2 billion annually on them. Initial studies suggested that this was money well spent. Omega-3 fatty acids were shown to help maintain a healthy heart. However, a few recent studies seem to contradict this. Does that mean omega-3 fish oil supplements are a waste of money? Let’s take a closer look at the evidence.

From the Bogside in Derry to the Queen’s residence in Buckingham Palace, the journey made by Martin McGuinness has rightly been referred to as nothing short of remarkable.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them? That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Can consumers keep driving the recovery? shutterstock.com

Inflation in the UK has surged, with the consumer price index jumping to 2.3% in the year to February – up from 1.8% in January. This is far better news for the government than it likes to admit. The early-year price rise can largely be traced to a passing-through of higher import costs following the big devaluation of the pound (by over 15% against the US dollar) after the Brexit vote, an effect that will drop out of the index within a year if sterling doesn’t slump again. Читать дальше...

The French presidential election finally began, officially, on Saturday March 18. Laurent Fabius, president of the Constitutional Council, announced the 11 candidates who have received the requisite number of endorsements for their names to go forward. Two days later and the biggest names among those candidates met in the first of three televised debates – and it proved the biggest challenge for Front National candidate Marine Le Pen.

Lifting the lid on grammar schools. shutterstock

Few subjects generate as much controversy in England as grammar schools do. Advocates uphold them as “a driver of social mobility” with the belief they can provide a ladder of opportunity for poor but able children.

This comet 67P outburst was caused by a cliff collapse. ESA/Rosetta/NavCam

It is almost six months since the Rosetta spacecraft completed its operations in a controlled dive onto the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimanko. The landing, after which Rosetta could no longer communicate with Earth, may have marked the end of data collection from the comet – but not the end of news about 67P. The archive of information amassed during the mission will be a rich source of material for many years. In fact... Читать дальше...

A lot to juggle. via shutterstock.com

Women who want some help to return to work following a career break were given a boost by a £5m investment in “returnships” in the spring budget.

Norsepower

Over 200 years after steamships first began crossing the ocean, wind power is finding its way back into seafaring. Global shipping firm Maersk is planning to fit spinning “rotor sails” to one of its oil tankers as a way of reducing its fuel costs and carbon emissions. The company behind the technology, Finnish firm Norsepower, says this is the first retrofit installation of a wind-powered energy system on a tanker.

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, some Ulster unionists blamed the Catholic education system for promoting an Irish nationalist identity among the minority population. This, they argued, helped fuel a republican insurgency from the early 1970s. As a leading figure in the insurgency, Martin McGuinness was unequivocal when asked about his own experience of being taught in the Catholic system: “They didn’t make me a republican; the Brits made me a republican.”

PJMixer/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The new Formula One season offers some reason for optimism. When the green lights flash for the opening race in Melbourne at the end of March, we will get our first glimpse of the new promised “Super Bowl-style” Grand Prix. If its recent history is any guide, Liberty Media, the group which now owns F1, should have the ability, experience and resources to revitalise the sport, and deliver on promises they’ve made.

Capital cities across Asia spent the last month rolling out the red carpet for a rarely seen visitor: Saudi Arabia’s ageing King Salman, accompanied by a hundreds-strong diplomatic entourage including senior princes, businessmen and ministers. Taking in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Japan, China and the Maldives, the king spent March leading a concerted effort to strengthen Saudi Arabia’s commercial links with Asia’s fast-growing economies.

My Country // Sarah Lee

Much has been written over recent months about the apparent bubble in which we are all now living, a kind of transparent hamster ball that encircles us and only serves to substantiate, endorse and inwardly broadcast a set of assumptions and prejudices that we already possess thanks to the quotidian role of social media. The left talks largely to the left and the right to the right, each endorsing their respective views with data sets and human narratives that operate at... Читать дальше...

My Country // Sarah Lee

Much has been written over recent months about the apparent bubble in which we are all now living, a kind of transparent hamster ball that encircles us and only serves to substantiate, endorse and inwardly broadcast a set of assumptions and prejudices that we already possess thanks to the quotidian role of social media. The left talks largely to the left and the right to the right, each endorsing their respective views with data sets and human narratives that operate at... Читать дальше...

The US Senate is in the process of examining Donald Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. His confirmation hearings are forcing the Democrats into a tricky decision: still smarting from the Republicans’ refusal to even consider similar hearings for Barack Obama’s 2016 nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, they have the votes to block Gorsuch’s appointment to the court. The question is whether they should.

Science is stepping up – what about you? Shutterstock

Bad news sells papers. Or as Elliot Carver, the media mogul set on world domination in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies put it: “There’s no news like bad news.”