1 Crisis warning from UK steel industry (BBC) The
steel industry is "in crisis" and needs "life-saving
surgery", the director of UK Steel has warned. Gareth Stace has called on
Business Secretary Sajid Javid to honour promises he has made to address some
of the challenges facing the industry. It comes as Tata Steel is expected to
announce 1,200 job cuts at sites in Scunthorpe and Lanarkshire.
Mr Javid said "there is no straightforward
solution to the complex global challenges" facing the industry. The Tata
Steel redundancies follow the closure of the blast furnace and coke ovens at
SSI's plant in Redcar, Teesside, where 2,200 jobs have been lost.
Tata Steel is expected to significantly reduce the
workforce at its Scunthorpe site, which employs 4,000 people and is one of the
UK's largest steel plants. It may also cut jobs at Clydebridge, Cambuslang, and
Dalzell, Motherwell. Tata has not yet confirmed the job cuts but said it has
been facing challenges in the UK, including a surge in steel imports and the
strong pound.
Unions have also called on ministers to take urgent
action to save the industry, while CBI director-general John Cridland has urged
the government to work with businesses on a long-term industrial strategy.
2 Steve Ballmer takes 4% equity in Twitter (Gulf
News) Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has
bought a 4-per cent stake in Twitter, a vote of confidence in the struggling
messaging company. That makes Ballmer one of Twitter’s largest shareholders.
A Twitter account that identified itself as
Ballmer’s said that he bought stock in Twitter in the last few months. The
high-profile investment comes as Twitter is trying to win more users and turn a
profit. This month, its co-founder Jack Dorsey returned as its permanent CEO.
Then the company announced that it would lay off up
to 8 per cent of its workforce and unveiled a new feature, ‘Moments’. Those
packages of commentary, video and photos about major events are an attempt to
make Twitter more accessible and broaden its appeal.
Ballmer also said he liked that Saudi billionaire
Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal and his investment company bought more shares of
Twitter. The prince and his firm said this month the stake had doubled over a
six-week period to more than 5 per cent.
Ballmer’s holdings would make him the third-largest
individual owner of Twitter shares after company co-founder Evan Williams and
Prince Al Waleed. Ballmer, who was Microsoft’s CEO for 14 years ending last
year, is also the largest individual owner of Microsoft stock with a 4.2-per
cent stake.
3 The real risk to our kids: Mollycoddling (Viv
Groskop in The Guardian) A new, all-party parliamentary group report on what
constitutes “a fit and healthy childhood” has concluded that “risky play” is
occasionally to be recommended for children, especially “playing near
potentially dangerous elements such as water, cliffs and exploring alone with
the possibility of getting lost”. Hey, parents, leave those kids alone!
Clifftop activities are good for your wellbeing, guys! And childcare is
expensive.
Somehow, in the course of a generation, we’ve lost
all the normal rites of childhood. And in attempting to protect children (often
because we fear things happening we can’t control), we expose them to very real
and obvious dangers we could actually control.
The report cites endless research, depicting a
society where children are increasingly less likely to walk or cycle to school
or play outside. Childhood is instead dominated by “a toxic brew of adult fear
(stranger danger, traffic density) and school restriction (shortened playtimes,
‘organised’ activity, poor use of space)”. This is a world where childhood has
become “passive, sedentary and solitary”.
This isn’t only about the obesity crisis, although
that is a key issue. Earlier this year, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said
at a conference about childhood obesity that we will “go bankrupt” if we don’t
address this issue. But this is equally about more nebulous influences. Isn’t
there a danger that we’re raising a generation of children who are not
self-reliant because they’re not used to coping outside in the world on their
own? And how well socialised will these children be if their best friend is the
screen?
If you add these influences to the fact that fewer
teens and twentysomethings are able to set up on their own when they reach
adulthood (because they can’t afford to leave home)... Forget the phenomenon of
the perpetual student – we risk raising perpetual children. Some kind of
desperate measures are needed to push parents out of this false sense of
security.
As the American authority on children and obesity,
Dr Mark Tremblay, puts it: “We have lost the balance between short-term safety
and long-term health.” A generation ago, 70% of children walked to school. Now
it’s 46%.
Of course, childhood is a time when you should be
protected and looked after and some of what has happened in the past few
decades is a reaction to our not having looked after children properly in the
past. I’m not just thinking about chimney sweeping here – although that wasn’t
very nice of us adults – but now we have gone too far in the opposite
direction. It’s time to push children again. Not up the chimney this time but,
instead, closer to the cliff edge.
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