Pupils 'need early porn warnings'

20 May 2013 Last updated at 10:27 GMT By Hannah Richardson BBC News education reporter The new generation of devices makes it harder for parents to know what their child is viewing online Young children should hear about the dangers of pornography as soon as they have access to the internet, leading head teachers say.

The ready availability of explicit material online has prompted serious concerns from the National Association of Head Teachers.

General secretary Russell Hobby said "the conversation should start" when children started going online.

But he stressed this was not about showing pornography in class.

He told reporters at his association's annual conference in Birmingham: "There isn't an easy answer, but as soon as children are getting access to this, it's time to begin the conversation."

Stephen Watkins, head teacher of Millfield School in Leeds, said: "Children as young as three - nursery age children - access computers. If they see something that shouldn't be there, they should know to go and tell an adult."

He recalled having to respond to a boy in class who had turned up some explicit images when researching the North Pole on the internet. And he said an approach which responded to issues when they arose in a low-key way was the option he favoured.

Mr Watkins added that many parents were concerned about the easy access of such material on other people's portable devices and smart phones, which they could not block in the same way as their home computers.

He also warned that parents were setting up under-age Facebook accounts for their children which potentially left them able to access inappropriate material. Youngsters under the age of 14 are not permitted to have their own accounts.

He said of 33 children aged ten and 11 in his own school's top year, he had discovered 24 were already on Facebook.

Mr Watkins said he had written to their parents to warn them they were going against the social network's own rules and that they were potentially exposing their children to inappropriate material.

Self-image

An independent survey of 1,009 parents for the NAHT suggested 83% felt pupils should learn about the dangers of pornography in sex education lessons.

Four out of 10 thought this should happen in the early primary school years, while 51% believed it was more appropriate to tackle the subject in the teenage years.

The NAHT said it had no official figures on the number of children accessing pornography, but an event would be held later this year "to get agencies working together on these issues and to pool data".

According to internet security firm Bitdefender, a survey of 19,000 parents worldwide suggested 1.16% of children had accessed pornography by the age of six.

The NAHT said the issue was increasingly troubling to teachers and heads as they grapple with the impact of pornography on pupils' self-image and their perceptions of sexuality.

Mr Hobby said his association had been working with a number of agencies for some time to address these concerns.

He added that his association had said repeatedly that young people must be protected from pornography, and children should receive appropriate guidance as part of relationship and sex education.

"We would also like to see improved advice for schools to help them manage these issues most effectively.

"There is no place for explicit materials in the classroom or school, even in the course of teaching about their dangers, but many young people are exposed to such materials on the internet and phones.

"In the face of this, young people need to know how to cope with and avoid these distorted views of relationships."

The vast majority of parents, 83%, had confidence in schools' ability to help their children understand the issues, the NAHT survey suggested, while 13% felt the subject should be left to parents alone.

Nine out of 10 felt all equipment allowing internet access should have a default block on pornographic websites.

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Swedish salmon sales 'breached ban'

8 May 2013 Last updated at 15:57 GMT The salmon issue again highlights the complexity of Europe's food chain Firms in Sweden have sold about 200 tonnes of Baltic salmon in Europe despite an EU ban targeting toxic chemicals in fish, officials say.

The ban does not apply to Baltic salmon sold to domestic consumers in Sweden, Finland and Latvia. But the sellers are required to give advice about safe limits for consumption, set by the EU.

Dioxins found in Baltic herring and salmon prompted the EU ban in 2002.

A French firm imported 103 tonnes of Swedish salmon, but no longer does so.

Pecheries Nordiques told the AFP news agency that its tests had found no problems with the fish, imported in 2011 and 2012. "Nobody told us it was illegal," chief executive Francois Agussol said.

Jan Sjoegren of Sweden's National Food Agency told the BBC that Baltic salmon had also been exported illegally to Denmark and the Netherlands from Sweden.

The agency has alerted the European Commission, which deals with national food safety authorities.

A firm in Karlskrona has been reported to the Swedish customs authorities over the salmon exports, and a firm in Hammaroe is also being investigated, Mr Sjoegren said.

Dioxin hazard

The latest alert about Baltic salmon exports follows a horsemeat contamination scandal in the EU which affected many countries.

"We don't think more salmon is being exported now, but because of the horsemeat scandal we are stepping up action on food fraud," Mr Sjoegren said.

Sweden's National Food Agency says the average intake of dioxins among adult Swedes is well below the "tolerable weekly intake" set by the EU.

Children and young women, it adds, should especially limit their consumption of wild Baltic fish because dioxins pose the most risk to babies and young children.

Dioxins spread by incineration and chemical pollution can accumulate in the body over years and can trigger cancer or reproductive abnormalities.

The European Food Safety Authority says that, on average, Baltic herring and wild Baltic salmon are respectively 3.5 and five times more contaminated with dioxins than non-Baltic herring and farmed salmon.

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VIDEO: Apple chief hits back in tax row

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Fresh protests over Kunming plant

16 May 2013 Last updated at 08:01 GMT Protesters fear the refinery will pollute their environment Protesters have taken to the streets of Kunming in China for the second time this month over plans for a refinery.

The government says the plant, set to produce gasoline and petrochemicals including paraxylene, or PX, is essential to the local economy and will meet environmental standards.

But protesters fear it will end up polluting air and water.

Photos on weibo, China's version of Twitter, show people wearing masks and waving banners amid tight security.

The China National Petroleum Corporation plans to build the refinery in the nearby town of Anning. It would produce gasoline, diesel and fertilisers as well as PX.

But not all are in favour of the plan, with some residents asking for the project's environmental review to be made public.

"The refinery is too close to Kunming," a protester was quoted by the South China Morning Post newspaper as saying. "We don't want the refinery."

Reports said several hundred protesters were involved. An estimate by the Associated Press news agency put the number at about 2,000.

On 4 May, hundreds of people also protested against the plant, with some carrying posters warning against the dangers of a PX spill.

A petition has also been posted on the White House website asking the US government to "remonstrate with [the] Chinese government" over the refinery. To date it has over 14,000 signatories.

The petitioners said they feared the plant would "jeopardise human health" because reliable "scientific assessments" had not been made, and PX was potentially carcinogenic.

Two years ago, protests against a PX factory in the city of Dalian forced the city government to close the plant, though it reportedly re-opened later.

China's rapid industrialisation has brought serious environmental concerns - but in recent years public protests have forced some projects to be reconsidered.

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The Ice Age giants of North America

17 May 2013 Last updated at 04:52 GMT By Alex Campbell BBC News Eighty thousand years ago the Earth began to cool, marking the start of the last Ice Age. Experts are still discovering how the big freeze affected the giant mammals which prowled its dramatically changing landscape.

Scientists are helping to uncover the secrets of giant Ice Age beasts like the sabretooth cat - by foraging in crates of dirt which were collected during the building of a car park.

Wooden boxes were built around deposits of earth in 2006 after construction workers discovered the near-complete skeleton of a woolly mammoth while digging underground parking spaces at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Laura Tewksbury has worked in one crate for a year

The crates were designed to salvage the remains for scientists at nearby Page Museum while also making way for the bulldozers.

More than three million prehistoric fossils from 600 species have been excavated from California's tar pits, which trapped and preserved Ice Age creatures as they roamed the territory tens of thousands of years ago.

The 23 crates, which each have a resident palaeontologist, and 327 buckets of fossil material are yielding vital discoveries and are expected to take several years to examine in full.

Project 23 is just one of a series of explorations documented by a new BBC series, Ice Age Giants, which has combined cutting edge fossil studies and CGI to create lifelike footage of the prehistoric beasts.

Here are some of the Ice Age giants of North America. The continent was half-covered by an enormous ice sheet at the peak of the last Ice Age, but land south of the ice suddenly became richer than ever before.

Continue reading the main story

Professor Alice Roberts travels back 40,000 years in Ice Age Giants. CGI experts and wildlife cameramen have combined to recreate stunning scenes for the three-part series. The first episode airs on BBC Two at 20:00 BST on Sunday 19 May

Despite the notoriety of the sabretooth cat's seven-inch fangs, it may actually have been its muscular forelimbs and large paws which made it so deadly.

The infamous predator's long, thin teeth were surprisingly vulnerable to snapping after becoming stuck in the sinews or bones of a violently struggling victim. It forced the cat to develop a unique killing method.

Modern day African big cats such as lions usually kill their prey by suffocation - smothering or crushing the windpipe. Their teeth barely break the skin.

But their Ice Age predecessor killed by stabbing and biting with its teeth, having first held the prey steady using its powerful paws and limbs.

Dr Blaire Van Valkenburgh, of the University of California, found the sabretooth had a huge temporal bone linking its jaw and skull - allowing it to open its mouth twice as wide as a lion and deliver huge blows to the throat.

"With those canines they could drive these two things together, then pull backwards and take out a large amount of flesh," she said.

"The animal would probably bleed to death within minutes," she added.

The sabretooth thrived across North America in the Ice Age, with many specimens found in modern day Los Angeles.

A new three-part series, Ice Age Giants, saw wildlife cameramen and CGI experts combine to recreate the life of the sabretooth cat.

Scientists have used the perfectly-preserved dung of the giant ground sloth to trace its movements across the desert land of the Grand Canyon.

Huge piles of the sloth's dried waste still lie in its cavernous lairs, high in the canyon walls, where it is too dry for the deposits to decompose.

They reveal how the 500lb (226kg) sloth survived in barren conditions, chomping through tough vegetation which other creatures would have struggled to digest.

The shasta ground sloth roamed the Grand Canyon during the Ice Age

Its surviving cousin, the South American tree sloth, lives similarly. It dines on tough, toxic leaves which take weeks to digest and provide little energy - leading to its infamously languid lifestyle.

As well as being as big as a grizzly bear, the ground sloth had long claws to swipe away predators as formidable as the sabretooth cat.

Scientists have analysed layers of the dung to explain the ground sloth's demise.

There are no traces of the dung beyond the peak of the last Ice Age, 16,000 years ago. Conditions became too cold and too dry for its favourite plants to grow and its slow metabolism meant it struggled to stay warm.

The glyptodont was capable of swimming and ate water-based plants

The size of a small car and equipped with a huge bony shell, an armoured tail and a trunk, the glyptodont is described by Professor Alice Roberts as "by far the oddest mammal I've ever seen."

But as well as being a spectacle for researchers, it provides insights into life in those parts of the world which were not dry and cold during the Ice Age.

Large parts of Arizona, where the glyptodont roamed, were covered in swamps and rivers.

There have been about 20 Ice Ages over the last 2.5 million years, and the proliferation of the glyptodont reflected the impact of the advancing ice sheet on the rest of the world.

The marshes expanded every time the ice sheet grew, leading to a surge in the number of glyptodonts, while they began to die out each time the ice retreated.

Scientists believe a two-mile high ice sheet in North America was acting like a mountain range; pushing moisture-laden winds across the desert and creating a fertile marshland.

The Columbian mammoth was the greatest giant of them all.

It would have towered above the modern elephant and, with a shoulder height of 14ft (4.27m), it stood several feet taller than the woolly mammoth.

Consuming up to two tonnes of grass a week, the Columbian mammoth roamed in search of vegetation as expanding ice replaced sea water. The Ice Age global sea level was about 120 metres lower than today.

Mammoths left their traces on what is now San Francisco

Large coastal rocks just north of San Francisco have provided scientists with vital clues about the mammoth's movements.

The rocks have been worn down to a smooth, polished finish in patches which reach several metres high.

"You could have a horse sitting on the shoulder of a cow and still not do that. It's too high for domestic livestock," said archaeologist Breck Parkman.

Scientists believe the mammoths used the rocks as scratching posts for exfoliating their skin and grinding away parasites - leaving breadcrumb clues about their journey across the Ice Age world.

Watch episode one of Ice Age Giants on BBC Two at 20:00 BST on Sunday 19 May and afterwards on the BBC iPlayer.

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China joins Arctic 'coldrush club'

15 May 2013 Last updated at 11:00 GMT By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News Environmental changes all across the Arctic are driving up global interest in the region China is one of a number of countries that has gained permanent observer status on the Arctic Council.

At a meeting in Sweden, the eight members of the Council accepted India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

However following dissent from Canada, a decision on the EU's application has been deferred.

The permanent observers have no decision making powers.

The opening up of the Arctic to shipping and oil and gas exploitation has fuelled worldwide interest in the region.

Continue reading the main story

As ministers said, what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic, so it's a good step to make the Arctic Council open to new voices”

End Quote Ruth Davis Greenpeace With a changing climate allowing ships to travel more cheaply and quickly across the Northern route, Asian countries with ship building industries are particularly interested in closer links to the region and the Council.

Talking shop

The Arctic Council was set up in the 1990s and has been mainly concerned with environmental matters including climate change and pollution, both of which are being felt more heavily in the Northern regions.

It has eight permanent members made up of the five coastal Arctic countries, Norway, Russia, Canada, US and Denmark - it also includes three other non coastal members, Finland, Iceland and Sweden.

It has limited powers, issuing non binding protocols on member states - but as the ice recedes and the wider exploitation of the region becomes possible, the rest of world has taken notice and wants to be involved.

Already six European countries are permanent observers. Now the Council has accepted some of the world's most important emerging powers into what has been dubbed the "coldrush club", a name that reflects the opportunities many see for the exploitation of oil and gas resources in the region.

Up to 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil reserves, and 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits are said to lie above the Arctic Circle.

The new observers will have no voting rights and must also confirm they will not challenge the ownership of the five Arctic coastal states.

The meeting in Kiruna, Sweden also agreed on a new manual that will govern the activities and roles of the observers. They will not be able to directly raise issues but will have to bring them forward through one of the eight core members.

But the Council was unable to agree on the application from the European Union. It is believed that Canada, which has now assumed the chairmanship of the Council was strongly opposed to the EU getting a permanent observer seat.

The oil and gas potential of the region is huge with almost a third of the world's undiscovered gas deposits

There have been ongoing disputes between the two over an EU ban on seal fur and other products. The EU is also poised to restrict imports of oil produced in the Alberta tar sands.

The Council said that the application of the EU for observer status was received affirmatively, but it deferred a final decision until the concerns of members are resolved. It is believed that negotiations are now ongoing over the seal fur issue between the Council and the European Commission.

The influx of new permanent observers has been cautiously welcomed by environmental campaigners.

"There are lots of things going on up here that are genuinely of legitimate concern to the rest of the world," Ruth Davis from Greenpeace told BBC News.

"As ministers said what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic, so it's a good step to make the Arctic Council open to new voices. But really the question is are the voices of those who are on the receiving end of rapid environmental change in the Arctic, are they being heard in the council?"

Spill plans

The growing interest of countries like China and India in joining the Arctic Council reflects the changing nature of the body say observers. Another decision that reflects the beefing up of the Council's activities was the acceptance of an oil spill preparation plan.

According to the Council this legally-binding agreement will substantially improve procedures for dealing with oil leaks in the Arctic.

Speaking during the meeting, US Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed the idea.

"As the US was reminded painfully in the Gulf of Mexico, we need strong partnerships and shared operational guidelines before a disaster occurs - We need to prevent disasters happening in the first place," he said.

Leiv Lunde is the director of the and a former special envoy on energy and climate change at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He says that the role of Council in the world is growing significantly.

"The Arctic Council has until now been an organisation for the environmental sectors of government - but you are moving into an area where there are bound to be tradeoffs and big fights about what will going to happen," he said.

"We are going from symbolic postures to real politics and that's a different game."

The Council meeting also published a new scientific report from the Stockholm Environment Institute on the resilience of the Arctic. It suggests that rapid and even abrupt changes are occurring on multiple fronts across the region, raising the risk of crossing thresholds that would cause irreversible changes.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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