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...Benyamin Ahmed’s Weird Whales sell in cryptocurrency and ownership is stored on blockchain
A 12-year-old boy had made about £290,000 after creating digital pictures of whales and selling tokens of their ownership which are stored on blockchain.
Benyamin Ahmed’s collection of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales went viral during the school holidays. His success may be a harbinger of the digital business models that could disrupt the banking sector.
Continue reading...Laws intended to tackle child abuse are resulting in young men in consensual relationships being imprisoned. Activists argue a more nuanced approach is needed
Mani*, 21, began dating Noor*, 17, two years ago. They couldn’t see each other during the Covid lockdowns, but when restrictions began to ease, they would meet on the deserted banks of a canal in a small town in Tamil Nadu. The couple hoped to marry one day, but then Noor fell pregnant, and life turned into a nightmare.
Two months ago, Mani was charged with rape under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) law. After 48 days in jail, he was released on bail. If convicted, he faces life imprisonment.
Continue reading...JCVI decision comes two weeks after body recommended against routine vaccination of children
Covid vaccines will be offered to all 16- and 17-year-olds without needing the consent of their parents, after government experts reversed their advice from just two weeks ago.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said older teenagers should be offered their first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab and advice on when to offer the second dose would come later.
Continue reading...What is really going on with virtual sex and identity politics - and when did people stop caring about snooker? Four people born in 2000 offer their advice to people in their 50s, 60s and 70s
When interaction between the generations is interrupted – and there doesn’t even have to be a pandemic; sometimes we just forget to call each other – it is easy for misunderstandings to flourish. Negative perceptions can build to such a pitch that, even if you had your grandchildren standing right in front of you, you possibly wouldn’t want to tackle them head-on. Or perhaps your perceptions aren’t negative – there are just pockets of puzzlement.
Four zoomers – Patrick Baggaley, Freya Scott-Turner, Rachel Ayo Ogunleye and Aidan Nylander, all born in 2000 – are here to clear up everything. Baggaley is a chef based in London; Scott-Turner is studying journalism and living in Cambridge; Ayo Ogunleye is studying medicine and based in Beckenham, south London; and Nylander is between two degrees and lives in Newcastle.
Continue reading...It can feel as if the generation gap is wider than ever – but not when people really talk. Here, four sixtysomethings offer advice to those in their teens and 20s
We live in an era in which, for the most part, the generations do not mix frequently. Grandparents are visited occasionally; young people seek the freedom of independent living as early as possible. On social media, intergenerational warfare is commonplace, as members of gen Z (those born between the mid-90s and the early 10s) criticise older people for hoarding wealth, while baby boomers bemoan the perceived sensitivity of the younger generation.
But what would happen if baby boomers gave the TikToking young adults of today an insight into their thinking – and threw some life advice into the bargain? To that end, we assembled a panel of baby boomers – Tayo Idowu, 64, a marketing director from London; Liz Richards, 68, a retired nurse from Derby; Paul Gibson, 63, an accountant from Arundel, West Sussex; and Maggie Tata, 65, a carer from London – to answer gen Z’s questions (even the tongue-in-cheek ones).
Continue reading...Pilot scheme hopes to discover patterns that will help prevent more deaths
Measures are being introduced to try to identify what is driving rising murder rates in the wake of a spike in teenage deaths in some of the UK’s homicide hotspots.
All homicides in London, Birmingham and south Wales will be reviewed by the authorities in an attempt to learn from the chaotic sequences of events that often preempt a death.
Continue reading...As TV revisits the scandal, the author of an acclaimed play about it asks what the media and key institutions have learned – and whether survivors are now treated any better
Journalistic parlour game question: what are the most significant news stories of the past decade? Few would argue with the pandemic and Brexit. Not far behind, perhaps, is the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Not many stories change our world. This one did. It transformed how we deal with allegations of sexual assault. We reassessed our attitude to celebrity. We saw more clearly than ever how morally corrupt institutions could be. It was the harbinger of the #MeToo movement.
Continue reading...Data analysis finds large-scale cuts to youth services and increase in racial disparity 10 years on
The conditions that led to riots across England 10 years ago still exist today, experts have warned, as data analysis showed significant cuts to youth services in affected areas and an increase in racial disparity in stop and search.
On 4 August 2011, police officers shot and killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old mixed-race man, in Tottenham, north London. His death sparked a wave of civil unrest that started the capital and spread to other cities, causing property damage to the value of £40m a day.
Continue reading...‘We have had people under 30 in intensive care,’ says Prof Adam Finn of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation
Young people are getting “seriously ill” from Covid-19, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has warned, as he urged them to get vaccinated.
Prof Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol, said there have been close to 200 admissions, with a mean age of 40, in the city during the Delta variant wave. England’s remaining Covid restrictions were eased on Monday and pictures of crowded nightclubs, filled with revellers not wearing masks or social distancing, have raised fears among some experts that infections could surge among unvaccinated young people.
Continue reading...Risk that low take-up by young will lead to crunch as older people get third shot
Health experts have warned the government that it needs to increase efforts to ensure more young adults are vaccinated against Covid-19 – as a matter of urgency.
They fear the current low take-up of jabs among 18- to 25-year-olds could lead to a pile-up of vaccine campaigns in September, when other groups are scheduled to get booster injections and also to be inoculated against influenza. In addition, they argue that vaccines also have a crucial role to play in protecting young adults against long Covid, which is now recognised as a serious problem associated with the disease.
Continue reading...A virtual lockdown date that blossomed, an encounter on a backpackers’ bus and a school trip to Spain – readers share their most memorable summer romances
After just one week of living in New York, the city locked down, and a summer of love seemed unlikely. I did go on a series of virtual dates, with around 20 guys over four months; some were funny, kind and smart, and some were a little weird. One or two of them became my friends. Then, I finally got a call from Mr Right on the long weekend of 4 July. We started talking and he was everything I’d hoped for – except he was in Michigan, hundreds of miles away. In early August, he casually mentioned he’d be coming to NYC to meet me, and the next day he drove for 10 hours to take me for dinner.
Continue reading...With Covid lockdowns blamed for rising rates, MPs and teachers say it’s time to ‘face reality’ and allow younger teens access to birth control
Malet*, 14, stands in the long queue at the maternity clinic in Harare. She is here for her routine checkup. Most of the people in the queue are teenage girls.
Malet fell pregnant the first time she had sex. Her baby is due in two months.
Continue reading...After our GCSEs, my first girlfriend and I took our tent to Reading festival and found levity in a very difficult year
There is a peculiar romance to British summer music festivals. Some kind of consequence-free hedonism emerges when you combine bouts of torrential rain with the rancid stench of overflowing chemical toilets, the stomach-fizz of morning beers, and the itch of last night’s glitter pressed into your unwashed skin. It makes for the perfect conditions to distract the head and, for once, indulge the heart.
It was the summer of 2010 when I camped out at Reading festival, the August blow-out that 16-year-olds from the UK’s south-east use as a putrid marker of their transition from secondary school to college; from adolescence to something approaching young adulthood.
Continue reading...Hospitalised with an eating disorder as a teenager, she recovered to become a campaigner. Her mission? To show that eating disorders aren’t always visible
Hope Virgo’s description of her descent into anorexia is so harrowing and filled with danger that meeting her in real life – in the south London flat she shares with her fiance – is like meeting the personification of triumph or optimism. “In the media, you see the same stories, the same distressed, emaciated person; you hear of people dying,” Virgo says. “We need to hear those stories, but at the same time, I really believe that a full recovery is possible. I think we lose sight of that glimmer of hope.”
In her book Stand Tall Little Girl, she gives the figures to back this up: 40% of people who have had an eating disorder never think about it again; 15% are unable to fight it off and are stuck in it; and 45% of people find a way to live with it, using coping mechanisms. Virgo’s pioneering work has an overarching purpose: to say, in her words and through her actions, that recovery is possible. It’s a rescue mission launched from regular life into a world of crisis – in which no one is seen as irrecoverable.
Continue reading...Regions speed up plans to vaccinate under-30s as more than 1,000 cases traced to Mallorca school trip
Authorities and health experts in Spain have called for prudence and responsibility amid a surge in cases among young people who are still waiting to be vaccinated after more than 1,000 Covid cases across the country were traced back to an end-of-year school trip to Mallorca.
Although more than a third of Spain’s 47 million people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, case numbers have been rising over recent days – most notably among younger people still waiting to get their shots.
Continue reading...Nick Broomfield returns to the deaths of the two titans of 90s gangsta rap, and the disturbing influence of record label boss Suge Knight
Nearly 20 years ago, Nick Broomfield released his sensational documentary Biggie and Tupac, in which he uncovered hidden facts about the violent deaths of US rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, and found that intimate witnesses to this murderous bicoastal feud were willing to open up to a diffident, soft-spoken Englishman in ways they never would to an American interviewer. Since then, there have been two very unedifying movies about Tupac: the sugary docu-hagiography Tupac: Resurrection (2003), produced by the late rapper’s mother, and the similarly reverential drama All Eyez on Me (2017).
Now Broomfield returns to the same subject, updating his bleak picture of the 90s rap scene, a world in which energy, creativity and radical anger were swamped with macho misogyny, drug-fuelled gangbanger paranoia and a poisonous obsession with respect. Marion “Suge” Knight, head of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, cultivated a violent gang-cult image by associating with the Bloods, and encouraged his acts and proteges to do the same, including Tupac – and Biggie’s perceived oppositional identity condemned him. But even more disturbingly, the LAPD allowed its officers to moonlight at Knight’s firm as “security” (a term that euphemistically covers all manner of paramilitary violence and intimidation).
Continue reading...MP to take over private member’s bill proposed by Sajid Javid to raise legal age to 18, after his promotion to health secretary
The MP Pauline Latham will step in to adopt Sajid Javid’s private member’s bill to end child marriage after his promotion to health secretary.
Javid presented a bill raising the minimum legal age of marriage to 18 in England and Wales to parliament earlier this month, but is not able to take it forward because he is no longer a backbencher.
Continue reading...As party girl Marissa in The OC, Barton found fame at a time when young female stars were being hounded by the press. She talks about strength, resilience and her battle against revenge porn
For some actors, the roles they have played stick to them like shadows, long after they should have been left behind. Just ask Mischa Barton. It is 15 years since she starred as Marissa Cooper in the teen drama The OC, and yet still she can’t shake her off. When Barton appeared in the reality show The Hills in 2019 – inspired by The OC’s privileged young Californians but featuring real-life people – she was supposed to be herself, but the producers expected Cooper. “It is the constant mistake,” she says wryly. “They were even calling me by my character name. Seriously? Like, this far down the line they can’t get my name right?”
The parallels, though, are irresistible. Marissa was a troubled party girl with a love of fashion who met a tragic end. Mischa (even their names are similar) was also a troubled party girl with a love of fashion, whose life at times seemed out of control. There was the extreme fame, the breakdown, the reported threats of suicide, estrangement from her parents and a “revenge porn” court case. Barton has weathered it all with a sense of humour and now, at 35, a bit of perspective.
Continue reading...Covid-19 policies risk leaving psychological and socioeconomic scars on millions of young people across Europe, with far-reaching consequences for them and society, a wide-ranging Guardian project has revealed.
Taking a snapshot, the Guardian asked five members of Europe’s Generation Z how the worst global pandemic in a century has affected their lives, what they have learned and how they see their future after the pandemic