More than 4,000 sign petition to overturn decision, which aimed to appease neighbours
A national debate has been sparked in the Netherlands after a council ordered a primary school playground to be shut for being too noisy.
Questions have been raised in the Dutch parliament and a campaign has been launched to save the playground in the wake of the decision by Nijmegen council.
Continue reading...Government has said it will honour resounding result despite ministerial doubts
MPs have voted resoundingly to extend same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland, a plan the government has said it will honour despite ministerial doubts.
The Commons voted 383 to 73 to pass the amendment to a largely technical bill on the stalled Northern Ireland assembly, tabled by the Labour MP Conor McGinn, a longstanding campaigner for equal marriage in Northern Ireland.
Continue reading...Former prime minister of New Zealand Helen Clark condemns complacency as Unesco data shows one in six children won’t be in school by 2030
World leaders have “a lot to answer for” as new figures reveal that governments are failing to give all children an education, and that by 2030 one in six children won’t be in school.
The former prime minister of New Zealand and advocate for education Helen Clark said the figures showed “worrisome complacency on the part of countries which, just a few years ago, were so keen to hammer out an ambitious global agenda and make it a success”.
Continue reading...In 1947, 50,000 volunteers helped create Dimitrovgrad, a new city that symbolised the brave new world of communist Bulgaria. Many still live there
In her flat overlooking the main square of Dimitrovgrad, 90-year-old Maria Oteva casts her mind back more than seven decades to the foundation of the town in the early years of Bulgaria’s communist era.
“Back then, 50,000 volunteers built this city because they believed in something,” she says. “Nowadays, you wouldn’t find 50 people to come and clean up the dirty streets.”
Continue reading...CO2 in bedrooms and offices may affect cognition and cause kidney and bone problems
Indoor levels of carbon dioxide could be clouding our thinking and may even pose a wider danger to human health, researchers say.
While air pollutants such as tiny particles and nitrogen oxides have been the subject of much research, there have been far fewer studies looking into the health impact of CO2.
Continue reading...Bahria Town promises Pakistan’s middle classes respite from traffic, terror attacks and blackouts – local villagers are fighting to be heard by developers
Fronted by a dramatic gated arch, its roads fringed with neatly trimmed hedges, palm trees and lush grass, Bahria Town bears little resemblance to the urban chaos of nearby Karachi.
The economic heart of Pakistan is an overcrowded and often violent megacity with an official population of 15 million (closer to 20 million if the urban sprawl beyond the city perimeter is included). Infrastructure has not kept pace with its rapid expansion, and basic amenities such as water have become a commodity for criminal gangs. The city is also an organisational centre for the Pakistani Taliban, who attacked the airport in 2014.
Continue reading...UK aid projects ‘actively undermine’ efforts to tackle climate crisis, MPs and campaign groups warn
A cross-party group of MPs, backed by campaign groups, has called for an immediate ban on all investment in fossil fuels and for all UK aid to be “nature positive”.
The 28 MPs, led by Tory Zac Goldsmith and Labour’s Kerry McCarthy, with support from Amnesty International, WWF and other organisations, criticised the UK for “actively undermining” its own investment in tackling the climate emergency by continuing to fund fossil fuels through aid and export finance.
Continue reading...Vincent Lambert has been at the centre of a bitter case after becoming severely brain-damaged after car accident
The father of Vincent Lambert, a severely brain-damaged patient at the heart of a bitter right-to-die case, has denounced his son’s “murder” after a French hospital began removing him from life support.
“It’s murder in disguise, it’s euthanasia,” 90-year-old Pierre Lambert told journalists at Sebastopol hospital in the north-eastern city of Reims on Sunday, where his son has been in a vegetative state since a car accident in 2008.
Continue reading...More police on duty as tourists descend on Spanish town to watch bulls and party
One man was gored and two sustained head injuries during the first run of the week-long San Fermín running of the bulls festival in Pamplona, northern Spain, on Saturday. The injuries were not life-threatening.
During the festival the population of the small city in Navarra swells tenfold as more than a million people come from around the world. Only about 20,000 over the course of the week dress up in the traditional red and white to pursue and be pursued by the bulls along Pamplona’s cobbled streets.
Continue reading...Ifrah Ahmed refuses to let the horrific female genital mutilation she suffered at the age of eight define her. “I don’t want to be a victim. I want to be a voice,” says the 32-year-old campaigner.
She is one of the first women to publicly speak out about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia – a country where it is estimated that 98% of women have undergone the ritual – and now her journey from powerless victim to powerful role model has been dramatised in a film. A Girl from Mogadishu has just had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh film festival and will be released across the UK in cinemas later this year.
Continue reading...World Population Day will mark a global crisis – one that is best tackled by more access to birth control, particularly in Africa
President Magufuli pulled off an intriguing feat last year when, in a single speech, he managed to affront just about every liberal cause on the planet. The Tanzanian leader told a public rally not to listen to advice from foreigners on contraception because it had “sinister motives”. For good measure, he accused women who use birth control of being “lazy” – it was their duty to have large numbers of children.
By any standards, these were outrageous remarks – and worrying ones, for they indicate there has been a deep and potentially catastrophic failure by the west in promoting a measure on which the future health of our planet depends: limiting numbers of our species. Until this basic task is achieved, virtually every measure we take to tackle global heating will be negated by the energy demands of the extra billions we have added to global populations, say campaigners.
Continue reading...Huge crowds gather on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots
Continue reading...What makes some people change their lives entirely, and how can we best become our true selves?
Alex was a bouncer when he changed his mind about who he was. Or maybe he wasn’t a bouncer. Maybe he was only pretending.
In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.
Continue reading...Tory leadership contender says English is not first language in ‘too many parts of our country’
Boris Johnson has said there are “too many parts of our country” where English is not spoken as a first language and that he would require all immigrants to Britain to learn English.
At a hustings event for the Conservative leadership race in Darlington on Friday, the former mayor of London praised the capital’s diversity but suggested some communities were not doing enough to integrate into society.
Continue reading...New approaches to disposing of the dead needed as graveyards and crematoria are almost full
From burials in pyramids to scattering ashes and even plastination, there has been no shortage of ideas about how to deal with human corpses.
But with graveyards and crematoria almost full in Britain, the conundrum of what to do with the dead has resurfaced with new urgency. Now a leading public health expert has suggested the sides of motorways, cycle paths and even brownfield or former industrial sites could be transformed to house the dead.
Continue reading...Public acceptance is improving, but in some cases Chinese authorities are moving in the other direction
It was a landmark moment for LGBT rights. When Taiwan passed a law allowing same-sex couples to marry, crowds in Taipei erupted into cheers, chanting: “First in Asia”.
For those watching from across the Taiwan strait in China, where gay couples do not have that right, the moment was heartening but also profoundly sad. Matthew, 27, an LGBT activist in Chengdu, spent the day following the proceedings online on his own. A few days later he flew to Taiwan to watch two male friends register their marriage after 14 years together.
Continue reading...It has become associated with online mobs and prudishness, but shame can be a powerful tool to change our culture and hold governments and corporations to account
“First holiday snap!” read the faux-cheery caption on the picture Laura Muldoon posted, featuring a bunch of young men on a plane, one flipping the V sign and another giving the finger to the camera.
Muldoon, who was flying on Ryanair with her girlfriend to Spain for a wedding, tweeted that she had just been called a “miserable bitch”, a “dyke” and a “lesbo” after complaining about rowdy behaviour from fellow passengers. The picture went viral and was picked up by newspapers. Before long, some of the alleged perpetrators had been identified publicly, their social media feeds combed for incriminating details, their mothers tracked down for comment – named and shamed, along with the airline whose staff Muldoon accused of failing to intervene sufficiently.
Continue reading...Biodun Fatoyinbo steps aside amid allegations of historical attack on photographer
A celebrity pastor in Nigeria is to take a leave of absence after a photographer accused him of rape.
Nicknamed “Gucci Pastor” for his expensive taste in clothes and cars, Biodun Fatoyinbo runs the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (Coza), one of the country’s fastest-growing pentecostal churches.
Continue reading...The musky aroma hits you from the car park at the headquarters of Canopy Growth, the world’s largest cannabis company.
Inside this nondescript warehouse – an abandoned Hershey’s chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, Canada – awaits the stuff of a stoner’s wildest dreams. Myriad rooms teem with row upon row of bushy marijuana plants at various stages of maturity, under intense lamplight, swaying in the breeze of dozens of fans.
Continue reading...Leeds’ managed zone for prostitution was meant to make life safer for women, but, amid a firestorm of opposition, who is benefiting from the radical approach?
During the day the Holbeck industrial zone looks pretty innocuous. Perched on the southern edge of Leeds city centre, it backs on to residential streets peppered with betting shops, newsagents and takeaways.
Yet at night this industrial zone becomes something very different. It transforms into the UK’s first designated red light zone where, between the hours of 8pm-6am, street prostitution operates openly with neither the women nor the sex buyers facing prosecution.
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