Exclusive: privacy concerns ‘must not delay use of neuralMatch algorithm to protect victims of abuse’
Child protection experts from across the world have called on Apple to implement new scanning technologies urgently to detect images of child abuse.
In August, Apple announced plans to use a tool called neuralMatch to scan photos being uploaded to iCloud online storage and compare them to a database of known images of child abuse.
Continue reading...Review of 14 international studies suggests long Covid symptoms in children rarely last longer than 12 weeks
Children and adolescents who are infected with Covid-19 rarely have symptoms that last for longer than 12 weeks, according to a review of international research.
The review, published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, suggests that long Covid in children and adolescents is less common than previously feared.
Continue reading...Social media firm reportedly kept own research secret that suggests app worsens body image issues
Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm.
Since at least 2019, staff at the company have been studying the impact of their product on its younger users’ states of mind. Their research has repeatedly found it is harmful for a large proportion, and particularly teenage girls.
Continue reading...UK’s four chief medical officers decide to set aside view of vaccine watchdog that benefits of jabs were too minimal to justify them
Children aged 12 to 15 can be offered Covid vaccinations, the UK’s four chief medical officers have decided, saying the likely impact in reducing disruption to schools meant such a plan could be clinically justified.
All children in the age group will be offered a first Pfizer jab as soon as possible, with the programme led by in-school vaccination services. A second injection will be potentially given once more evidence is gathered, so not before the spring term at the earliest.
Continue reading...The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse
Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”
Continue reading...US researchers say teenagers are more likely to get vaccine-related myocarditis than end up in hospital with Covid
Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim.
Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period.
Continue reading...In the developing world most people are not factory farming and livestock is essential to preventing poverty and malnutrition
The pandemic has pushed poverty and malnutrition to rates not seen in more than a decade, wiping out years of progress. In 2020, the number of people in extreme poverty rose by 97 million and the number of malnourished people by between 118 million and 161 million.
Recent data from the World Bank and the UN shows how poverty is heavily concentrated in rural communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America where people are surviving by smallholder farming. This autumn there will be two key events that could rally support for them.
Continue reading...The number of children without carers is still not known, leaving them prey to gangs and abuse
Lilian, six years old and alone, still asks when her mother will return from the market on the edge of Les Cayes in southern Haiti.
When last month’s earthquake struck, Lilian was at home, occasionally checked on by her neighbours as her mother, Genieve, was selling fruit a few blocks away. When the ground began to convulse, the market partly collapsed. Genieve was hit by falling concrete and buried under rubble. Her death has left Lilian without anyone to care for her.
Continue reading...Life for single mothers in Afghanistan has always been marred by stigma and poverty. Now with the Taliban in control, what few protections they had have disappeared
The day after Mazar-i-Sharif, the provincial capital of Balkh province, fell to the Taliban on 14 August, gunmen came for Raihana’s* six-year-old daughter.
Widowed when her husband was murdered by Taliban forces in 2020, Raihana had been raising her child as a single mother. After her husband’s death she had fought her in-laws for custody of her daughter and won, thanks to the rights she had under Afghan civil law – which state that single women can keep their children if they can provide for them financially.
Continue reading...The past 18 months have left many parents and carers feeling overwhelmed, irritable and wrung bone dry. Can balance ever be restored?
“I’m tired of how blurred the lines are between home and work,” Julia Thomas tells me as her two boys repeatedly ask for snacks in the background. Thomas lives in London with her husband, twin 11-year-old boys and a daughter, seven. She is a civil servant, but says she is feeling so burned out by childcare that she’s considering quitting her job completely. She isn’t sleeping properly, her back and hips ache from sitting at a desk all day and her constant to-do list makes life feel chaotic.
“Quitting my job feels like a big deal. I feel guilty, as if I’m letting the sisterhood down – but this situation is untenable,” she says. “The children are downstairs, while my husband and I are upstairs on Zoom meetings. We can still hear the sibling fights, even when we’re working, and when it gets bad they bring the problem to you.”
Continue reading...Amid Trump, #MeToo and rising hate crime, science writer Melinda Wenner Moyer decided it was time to learn how to stop her kids becoming ‘assholes’. Her research became an unusual, much-needed parenting book
When Melinda Wenner Moyer looked around in the autumn of 2018, she saw everywhere what she would describe as “assholes”. In the US and the UK, hate crime was – and is – rising. Across the world, #MeToo allegations continued to come. Donald Trump was in the White House and “I just felt like there was so much bad behaviour everywhere,” says Moyer. “I started thinking about my kids and worrying about ‘Who were they going to become?’ and ‘What were they learning from this behaviour?’ if they were seeing it on TV or hearing about it from their friends.” Moyer realised: “What I wanted more than anything else was for my kids to not grow up to be assholes.”
Moyer, a science journalist and parenting columnist, decided to go through the research and ended up writing a book with the pleasing title How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes. In the vast realm of parenting advice, there was plenty on diet, sleep and how to turn your child into a superhuman genius, but not a great deal on how to create a kind, compassionate person.
Continue reading...Hundreds of millions of children fell behind around the world as schools closed during the pandemic. We look at four countries as pupils try to resume their education
Children’s mental health suffers as schools remain shut
Continue reading...Covid, climate breakdown, poverty and war threaten return to school after pandemic kept 1.5bn children out of classes
The education of hundreds of millions of children is hanging by a thread as a result of an unprecedented intensity of threats including Covid 19 and the climate crisis, a report warned today.
As classrooms across much of the world prepare to reopen after the summer holidays, a quarter of countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa – have school systems that are at extreme or high risk of collapse, according to Save the Children.
Continue reading...She won a Bafta for Alma’s Not Normal – and that was just the pilot episode. As the full series launches, the ex-standup talks about growing up in care, getting the comedy bug in Ibiza and finally hitting the big time
Earlier this year, Sophie Willan went through an extraordinary run of extreme highs and lows. She was filming her sitcom Alma’s Not Normal, a project she started working on years ago, when her grandmother died. She had brought Willan up for part of her childhood and inspired a character in the show. The day after, Willan found out she had been Bafta nominated for comedy writing.
A few weeks later, while she watched the ceremony on a laptop on a picnic bench outside the converted barn she was staying in, Willan was named the winner. Her response, posted on Instagram by castmate Jayde Adams, is the most joyous thing you may see all year: Willan takes off on a victory lap, magnificent red sequinned dress matching a tractor in the background, sprinting and shouting “What the fuck?” over and over. “I woke up all the kids that had been put to bed in the house next door,” says Willan, laughing. “It was fabulous. It was surreal.”
Continue reading...Companies recalling staff this month have been accused of not offering flexitime and failing to protect employees
Before the pandemic, every morning and night was a cycle of stress and rushing around for single mother Emma Woodburn, getting her two young sons to and from school, childcare before and after work and staying on top of housework.
But when, 18 months ago, the 39-year-old from Lancashire was told by her employer she could work from home, everything changed. “It was like a weight was lifted. It was less rush in the morning. I could put the washing on throughout the day and hang it out on my dinner break. It just felt easier.”
Continue reading...Actor and activist says her experiences made her realise importance of children’s rights
Angelina Jolie has told the Guardian she feared for the safety of her children during her marriage to Brad Pitt and criticised the US government for not doing more to protect the rights of minors.
In an interview with Weekend magazine, the actor and activist said her experiences in her relationship with Pitt made her realise the importance of children’s rights, which she is supporting with a new book, Know Your Rights.
Continue reading...Analysis: The JCVI would not back vaccination of all 12 to 15-year-olds, but the impact on schools will now have to be considered
It was, the scientists said, a very finely balanced decision. On the one hand, Covid vaccines undoubtedly help to reduce infection and illness. On the other, Covid vaccines – like every other vaccine in medical history – are not without their risks. In children aged 12 to 15, the threat of serious Covid is tiny, but so is the risk of serious side-effects from the vaccine.
After much deliberation, the government’s independent vaccine advisers concluded that, on the strength of evidence so far, there was a marginal benefit to vaccinating healthy children aged 12 to 15 years old. But that benefit was deemed so very marginal the advisers would not give the green light to mass vaccination of healthy children in the age group.
Continue reading...My Kid Could’ve Done That! invited 15 artists to create work alongside their children. From leaking breasts to hours in front of childrens’ TV, the results are admirably honest
At five years of age, Astrid might well be the youngest exhibition curator of all time.
“I’m really looking forward to deciding where the art goes,” she says, demonstrating a natural instinct for her new role. “And I’ve really enjoyed working with Daddy too!”
Continue reading...Under-18s will be allowed to play online games for one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays
China has ordered its online gaming companies to further reduce the services they provide to young gamers, in a move intended to curb what the authorities described as “youth video game addiction”.
Under the new rule, young gamers are only allowed to spend an hour playing online games on Fridays, weekends and holidays, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Continue reading...A study in Burkina Faso and Mali suggests combining anti-malarial drugs and vaccination could reduce deaths and hospitalisations
A trial combining vaccinations and prevention drugs has substantially lowered the number of children dying of malaria in two African countries, according to researchers.
The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, have been hailed as “very striking”, especially at a time when decades-long progress on combating malaria has stalled in some countries.
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