Sigalon's Alltop Soup

Women are to be allowed to attend football matches for the first time in Saudi Arabia, according to a government-run newspaper.

The country is so dangerous it's no wonder so many leave, travelling alone across the Middle East in search of a new life

Behind the security bars of a spartan, white-tiled room, 25 youths are arranging bedrolls on the floor. The workers on the Salvation Army nightshift, who watch over these lone foreign teenagers in a shelter in a gritty corner of Paris, are distributing sheets and sleeping bags; there are a couple of boys from Mali and a contingent of Bangladeshis; the rest have travelled overland, by every conceivable method, from Afghanistan.

The youngest are 13 years old, pint-sized cousins from Kabul who arrived that morning after a journey of five months. They take off their trainers and place them at the end of their bedrolls. One of them, Morteza, gingerly peels off his socks. The undersides of his toes are completely white.

I ask what happened to his feet. "Water," he says. Where was he walking in water? Mohammed, the boy on the next bedroll who knows more English, translates. "In the mountains," he says. Which mountains, I ask, thinking about the range that forms the border between Turkey and Iran. "Croatia, Slovenia, Italy,'' Morteza says. Mohammed intervenes. "Not water,'' he clarifies. "Snow."

Suddenly I understand. Morteza's feet are not waterlogged or blistered. He has limped across Europe with frostbite.

The next day I run into them watching the older Afghans play football in a park. Morteza's 13-year-old cousin Sohrab, pale and serious beyond his years, recounts, in English learned during two years of school in Afghanistan, what happened. "Slovenia big problem,'' he says, explaining how he and Morteza, "my uncle's boy'', were travelling with eight adults when they were intercepted by the Slovenian police. Two members of their group were caught and the rest made a detour into the mountains. They spent five days in the snow, navigating by handheld GPS, emerging from the Alps in Trento, in the Italian north.

Morteza acquired frostbite on the penultimate part of a 6,000km journey that detoured through the Balkans: through Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia. Their aim is to join their uncle who lives in Europe, the solution their relatives found after Morteza's father was killed in an explosion. His mother died earlier "in the war''; Sohrab lost his own father when he was 11.

Morteza and Sohrab are among the world's most vulnerable migrants. Like scores of Afghan teenagers in transit across Europe, they are in flight from violence or the aftershocks of violence that affect children in particularly harsh ways. Those who turn up in Paris have spent up to a year on the road, on the same clandestine routes as adults, but at far greater risk.

No one knows how many unaccompanied Afghan children have made it to Europe. Paris took in just over 300 in 2011 – the biggest nationality among the 1,700 lone foreign minors in its care. Sarah Di Giglio, a child-protection expert with Save the Children in Italy, says that last year the number of Afghan boys – there are almost never girls – passing through a day centre in Rome had doubled from the year before, to 635.

Asylum statistics are another measure, though they give only a rough indication since many children never make a claim. Still, at 4,883, Afghans were the biggest group of separated foreign children requesting asylum in 2010, the majority in Europe.

While some are sent out of Afghanistan for their own safety, others make their own decision to leave. Some are running from brutality, or the politics of their fathers, or recruitment by the Taliban. Others have been pushed onwards by the increasing precariousness of life in Pakistan and Iran, countries that host three million Afghan refugees.

Blanche Tax, who is responsible for country guidance at the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva, says security is deteriorating in Afghanistan, which Unicef described two years ago as the world's most dangerous place to be a child. From January to September, she said, 1,600 children were reported killed or injured, 55% more than the previous year.

A report to the general assembly of the UN security council on 13 December 2011, meanwhile, said "the killing and maiming of children remains of grave concern". "The most frequent violations continued to be recruitment and use of children, including for suicide bombing missions or for planting explosives,'' the report continued. It highlighted a recent rise in "cross-border recruitment by Taliban – as well as attacks on schools''. And it added 31,385 cases of "severe acute malnutrition" among minors to a litany of child-specific damage that already includes landmines, sexual violence and forced labour.

It is from this maelstrom, and its spread to Afghanistan's south, north and east, that Morteza, Sohrab and others have fled. I first came across adolescents like them three years ago, when I saw them squeezing between the railings of a Paris park to sleep on cardboard among the shrubberies or in the bandstand, along with adult refugees. When the police raided the park and started to patrol it with dogs, they bedded down under the swings of a playground, or on the edges of a canal.

Subsequent raids have moved them on again, but they still play football there or under a railway bridge, in teams that sometimes take on the local boys. They find the undersized Salvation Army shelter by word of mouth, or through a reception office for unaccompanied foreign minors run by a French NGO called France Terre d'Asile (FTDA). It's the only emergency place of refuge for the children, and is oversubscribed: lately 20 or so have been turned away each evening, to sleep in a corner of a park or metro station, or walk the streets all night in order to keep warm.

In the entrance to the FTDA office for minors I stumble upon Omar, a slender 16-year-old with a ski hat pulled low over his eyes. He is leaning on the counter by himself, too tense to wait on the seats with the other boys. He is doodling with a yellow marker pen on a sheet of paper on which someone before him has pencilled the word "Tunisia".

"All my family are very worried about my father,'' Omar says. "We don't know where he is.'' This is almost the first thing he tells me. He expresses this same anxiety four times in our conversation, and I realise that what initially I took for tension was distress.

From a village in Afghanistan's Logar province, just south of Kabul, Omar says he is the eldest of five. Enmities from the Soviet era up-ended his life. "I did school in Afghanistan for three years and I wasn't able to go more,'' he said. "My grandfather said don't go to school, we have enemies who will kill you; stay in the house and don't go out in the village a lot." His father and grandfather had "done jihad with the Russians", he said; those they had sided against came back and "gave a warning". His grandfather sold their almond orchard and paid $11,000 to a smuggler to get him and his father out.

Travelling with Omar's uncle, the three made it as far as Turkey before being stopped by the police. Everyone scattered. Separated in the confusion, Omar was deported to Afghanistan. He said his uncle had contacted his grandfather to let them know he was all right; from his father they have had no word.

Omar set off again, spending the next five months on the road. He moved in and out of the hands of smugglers, was held with dozens of others in "passenger houses'', then abandoned in a deserted place on the Turkish side of the border with Greece. There, he and his companions waited, night after night without shelter, for a guide. Finally they gave up and struggled back to Istanbul.

On his second attempt Omar swam a wide canal and walked for five hours in wet clothes, heading on his smuggler's instructions towards the lights of a Greek town. There he was picked up by the police and held for three days in a room with 15 men. The next four nights he spent in a train station in the northern Greek town of Alexandroupolis, until a railway employee paid his fare to Athens. He waited 25 days in another passenger room before being crammed, with 32 others, into the back of a truck. Told to bring two packets of biscuits and no water, they spent 30 hours inside. "There was no air and it smelt very bad," he said. The driver abandoned them in Italy.

He caught trains to Milan, and then Cannes, with three other boys. "We slept on the earth next to the sea and we were so cold," he says. Arriving in Paris, he spent six nights on the street before asking at this office for help. "I want to live here,'' he says. "People don't hurt me in France." And yet, they already had. A few days earlier three men had mugged him in a Paris park. They stole his bag that contained his last €30 and the slip of paper that bore his grandfather's phone number, severing his last link to his family.

In the state of anxiety he was in, it was hard for him to think about the future. "I want to have peace,'' he said. And if he were able to stay in France? "I'd like to go to school,'' he said, "if they give us the opportunity to go." For many of the kids going to school seems like an enormous privilege, but first they have to be accepted as minors. That means going before a judge, who can order bone x-ray exams – which have a two-year margin of error – if he disbelieves their age; they may have to wait months to get formal protection.

By the time they turn 18, these teenagers will have to prove they speak French and have embarked on a profession in order to have a chance of regularising their status. For Afghan boys with almost no prior schooling, the pressure is enormous. "They have no time to have their adolescent crises,'' says Pauline Ferrais, head of the education service at the Maison du Jeune Réfugié (MJR), a day centre. As Pierre Henry, managing director of FTDA, puts it: "Some have spent one or two years on the roads of Asia and Europe in extreme conditions playing with the laws of survival, and we ask them to respect very strict rules in an education system that makes no allowances for them." Yet teachers remark that those who do go to school have a dynamic effect on the class. It's something that's been noted by Romain Levy, the deputy mayor for Paris with special responsibility for minors. "Because of their motivation they act as an engine and pull the other kids up," he says.

But Paris's budget for providing for minors is stretched. And elsewhere in Europe the likelihood that these boys will get a second chance at a childhood is waning. Sweden, alarmed by the 1,693 Afghan teenagers who requested asylum there in 2011, has teamed up with Britain, Norway and the Netherlands to create the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors, or Erpum, an EU-funded project that aims to send them back.

Susanne Bäckstedt, its Stockholm-based co-ordinator, denied reports that Erpum wanted to establish care centres in Kabul. She said the programme would be voluntary, and only involve minors who had exhausted asylum appeals and wanted to rejoin their families. "We are not discussing care centres,'' says Bäckstedt. "We will only send them back if their family can be traced.'' That, she says, meant "a welcoming family'' who would come to the airport to meet them.

Erpum hopes to start repatriations of 16- and 17-year-olds this year, provided the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation agrees; Bäckstedt confirmed Erpum has a target of deporting 100 Afghan minors by the end of 2014. The prospect has alarmed child-protection bodies, who fear such initiatives will push those in Europe underground. They want reassurances over how the minor's best interest would be established, stress the danger to the tracers of inaccurate information, and warn that families who have spent thousands of dollars to send a son to safety will have incurred debts in which collateral can include the betrothal of a younger sister to an older man. "Family tracing is not as innocent as it sounds," says one children's rights researcher. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles also opposes returning minors to Afghanistan.

Governments concerned about deterring minors from embarking on hazardous journeys risk missing the point about why children flee in the first place, says Judith Dennis, policy adviser at the UK Refugee Council. "We share concerns that children's journeys to safety are often dangerous,'' she comments, "but it is inappropriate to suggest that the international response should be to discourage them from escaping the threats in their country.''

Every Afghan minor who has survived the endurance test that reaching Europe entails has a story of equal parts courage and grief. Some of them are too frightened, or too traumatised, or simply too young to be able to explain the forces that have borne them here.

I meet Jalil, a round-faced 16-year-old from Kunduz, in Afghanistan's north, between classes at the MJR, where he is taught French. "This is my first school,'' he says with pride. His only education hitherto had been from a neighbour in Afghanistan who came to his house at night to teach him English, "one word at a time", from a book.

Jalil took his future into his own hands after being orphaned. He had lost his mother to "a heart sickness" when he was nine or 10 and was living with his father, who was killed "three years and four months ago". "Someone said he helped the Taliban," Jalil tells me. He didn't witness the attack. "But my brother saw that and now he is mad,'' Jalil says. "He can't talk. It is like he is finished. He is 22 years old.''

He and his younger siblings moved to his uncle's house, where he was often beaten. "He was cruel, cruel, cruel," Jalil says of his uncle. His brother-in-law helped him get away, paying $4,000 to a smuggler to get him to Turkey. Barely 15, he went first to Pakistan, then Iran, and on to Turkey and Greece. He had no money so he stayed there "a long time", living by washing windows, then crossed into Italy from the Greek port of Patras by clinging to the chassis of a truck. After a nine-month journey he reached Paris in August, and slept for a month in the street. Now he is learning the language and goes every day after class to "the library with headphones" at the Pompidou Centre. "I go there and listen to French," he says. "The plan is I study more to be a doctor, but if I cannot do a big job I will do a little job. If I can't be a doctor I will be an electrician.''

Pierre Henry of FTDA believes that Europe should be investing in these teenagers. "You don't win war, democracy, hearts with occupying armies,'' he says, pointing out that educating these minors would help create the diaspora that will one day rebuild their country. "It puts paid to all our values if we can't take care of those among the world's disinherited children who come to us."

A week later I pass by the meeting point where the new arrivals gather to be chosen for the 25 places in the Salvation Army shelter. Forty-five boys are waiting in a ragtaggle line against a supermarket wall, and every one of them is new. Sohrab and Morteza, the boy with frostbitten feet, have left; they are back on the road. There is no sign of Omar. Jalil, who lined up here four months ago, now has a place in a hotel, though sometimes he stops by a nearby soup kitchen, where many Afghans gather, to speak his language again. The others have disappeared on their search across Europe for some place that will allow them to stay. They leave only their stories behind.

Hinterland, a novel by Caroline Brothers about Afghan boys in Europe, is published on 2 February by Bloomsbury, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

Firm behind leading UK brands confirms that EU fraud agency is investigating link to tyrant's cousin Rami Makhlouf

A tobacco giant behind three of the UK's leading brands is under investigation after millions of its cigarettes were shipped to a firm linked to a billionaire accused of playing a key part in suppressing the popular uprising in Syria.

The development has revived concerns about the ability of "big tobacco" to police its distribution networks – third party agents who move its product around the world.

Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which owns the Silk Cut, Mayfair and Benson & Hedges brands, faces questions over its relationship with a firm associated with Rami Makhlouf, who is subject to European Union and US sanctions.

Documents obtained by the Observer show that on 27 May 2011, JTI's Middle Eastern distributor, IBCS Trading, dispatched 90 million cigarettes to Syria Duty Free Shops (SDF) Ltd.

Makhlouf, a cousin of the country's president, Bashar al-Assad, was the main shareholder in SDF on 9 May 2011, the day the EU subjected him to sanctions for providing "funding to the regime allowing violence against demonstrators" and for being "an associate of Maher al-Assad", the feared commander of Syria's Republican Guard.

He has become the target of anti-Assad demonstrators in recent weeks as the UN attempts to agree a resolution on imposing further sanctions – strongly opposed by Russia and China.

A spokesman for JTI, which is based in Geneva, confirmed that the EU's anti-fraud watchdog was reviewing the Syria shipment as part of an investigation into the company's distribution network.

"We're co-operating with them," the spokesman said of the EU watchdog. He said SDF had never been subject to trading restrictions and that JTI suspended shipments upon learning Makhlouf was a shareholder.

"We have not received or processed any orders [for SDF] since 19 May 2011," the spokesman explained. "Neither we nor our distributor have been paid nor have we… [sought] to be paid. As a measure of precaution, the relationship with Syria Duty Free has been under review to ensure it will not benefit anyone under censure."

Makhlouf, one of several cronies bankrolling the Assad regime, whose security forces have killed an estimated 6,000 people since the uprising began, has been subject to US sanctions for three years.

He claimed to have disposed of his interests in SDF on 20 May 2011. However, the US government said it believes he is "disassociating himself" in name only from his businesses.

JTI's relationship with its distributors is now under acute scrutiny following a leaked internal inquiry. A dossier compiled by David Reynolds, a former CIA agent who became JTI's head of brand integrity, alleged its distributors were smuggling cigarettes across more than a dozen countries to avoid paying tax. Much of the product, it was suspected, went to Iran.

In April 2010, Reynolds complained in an email to Ryuichi Shimomura, JTI's legal officer, that executives were failing to tackle the problem. With regard to smuggling tobacco from Russia into the more heavily taxed EU, Reynolds wrote: "Shipments to unauthorised buyers have reached a massive scale exposing the company to fines potentially of around €30m… We have repeatedly reported our findings to JTI management… but have yet to elicit any concerted effort to halt these diversions… My team have been directed not to investigate several instances of smuggling related to specific JTI distributors – and the possible involvement of JTI employees with known smugglers."

Reynolds was sacked three days after sending the email, which was obtained by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative network backed by the UN and USAid, the American aid agency.

The allegations are an embarrassment for JTI, which owns the former FTSE 100 tobacco company Gallaher and has 39% of the UK market.

In 2007, JTI agreed with the EU that it would pay $400m to tackle smuggling after accusations that it had failed to address the problem. It claims it has "strict criteria" for identifying its duty free customers.

"In 2002 parliament's Public Accounts Committee launched a major investigation into the role of the tobacco industry in facilitating cigarette smuggling," said Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the health campaigning charity Ash.

"Following numerous hearings and the publication of a highly critical report by the committee, the industry claimed to have cleaned up its act. Yet nearly 10 years later we hear allegations senior executives of JTI/Gallaher allegedly stood by as its distributors engaged in widespread smuggling of its products in a dozen countries."

The JTI spokesman described Reynolds as a "disgruntled employee" and said a law firm had investigated the allegations and cleared it of wrongdoing. JTI accused Reynolds and his team of "conduct violations". Reynolds's supporters deny the claims and say his emails show he was always acting in his employer's interests. They point out he is now a senior officer with the FBI and would have been vetted before being allowed to join the bureau.

Two men are in court after the Observer investigation into tourist visits to view tribes people

British and international tour operators have been warned that they will face prosecution if they continue to offer "human safaris" to India.

Three Indian tour operators have already been charged in connection with the Observer's investigation into "human safaris" and two men are facing up to seven years in jail if convicted.

But the tour operators have hit back, accusing independent foreign travellers of breaking rules and giving tour firms a bad name.

Last week's Observer investigation of safaris to see the Bonda tribe of Orissa prompted an immediate response from the state's government, with the chief minister ordering an inquiry and sending a senior official to investigate.

Police in the state capital, Bhubaneswar, raided the offices of Dove Tours – named in the Observer report – and registered a case against the company for "selling products in [an] obscene manner in public". In a statement Orissa police said: "We have registered a case against a city-based tour operator after finding its brochures and website containing certain objectionable material." The company denies the allegations.

Tourists were barred from visiting Bonda villages in 1989 after reports that some had been taking photographs of naked members of the tribe. The Observer investigation found that travel agents were getting around the law by taking tourists to view them at the weekly markets they attend. Some promoted the tours with references to the scanty dress of Bonda women. Several tour companies have since removed offending offers from their websites.

Orissa's culture secretary, Ashok Tripathy, said Orissa welcomed "rich and enlightened" tourists who treated the tribe with respect. "Cheap offers mentioning that Bondas roam naked", and the prospect of photographing, them should not be used to lure tourists, he said. He warned tour operators that they would be prosecuted if they continued to use "obnoxious" methods to promote tribal tourism.

However, Gagan Sarangi, director of Dove Tours, defended local operators, putting the blame on independent travellers. He told the Times of India: "There are foreigners visiting the tribal areas independently. Since visits to Bonda areas are permitted up to the weekly markets, many avoid taking the help of tour operators. Such people are unaware of basic rules, end up hurting the sentiments of people and give a bad name to our profession," he said.

Yet in the Andaman Islands – where the Observer first exposed the scandal of human safaris to see the protected Jarawa tribe, and women being forced to dance in return for food – tourists continue to pour through the jungle, despite promises by the Indian government to crack down on tours.

On Thursday two men – Rajesh Kumar Vyas and Sarjeet Singh Guddu – appeared in court in Port Blair charged with organising a trip into the Jarawa reserve which was highlighted in the Observer investigation. They were remanded in custody for two weeks and could face up to seven years in jail.

Police said that taking a foreigner into the Jarawa reserve amounted to "intentionally insulting with the intent to humiliate a vulnerable primitive tribe of these islands".

Professor Anvita Abbi, a linguist, said the Jarawa were in danger of going the same way as the Great Andamanese tribe, who once numbered 5,000 but are now down to 56 people. Two years ago the last speaker of the Bo language – one of 10 spoken by the tribe– died.

Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, which campaigns on behalf of tribal peoples, said: "At a time when evidence of human safaris has prompted global outrage, it's vital the Indian government closes the Andaman Trunk Road." The road cuts through Jarawa territory making it easier for tourists to contact the tribe.

The Association of British Travel Agents has defended tour operators, insisting that most act responsibly and that tourism can bring economic benefits to indigenous people. Spokesman Sean Tipton said: "It is important that any interaction between tourists and indigenous people happens with the prior consent of the indigenous people."

US writers attack conditions at Foxconn plant and call for consumers to act

Apple, the computer giant whose sleek products have become a mainstay of modern life, is dealing with a public relations disaster and the threat of calls for a boycott of its iPhones and iPads.

The company's public image took a dive after revelations about working conditions in the factories of some of its network of Chinese suppliers. The allegations, reported at length in the New York Times, build on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling computers and phones. Now the dreaded word "boycott" has started to appear in media coverage of its activities.

"Should consumers boycott Apple?" asked a column in the Los Angeles Times as it recounted details of the bad PR fallout.

The influential Daily Beast and Newsweek technology writer Dan Lyons wrote a scathing piece. "It's barbaric," he said, before saying to his readership: "Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies – but with us, the consumers. And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change."

Forbes magazine columnist Peter Cohan also got in on the act. "If you add up all the workers who have died to build your iPhone or iPad, the number is shockingly high," he began an article that also toyed with the idea of a boycott in its headline.

The New York Times's revelations, which centred on the Foxconn plant in southern China that has repeatedly been the subject of accusations of worker mistreatment, have caused a major stir in the US. Although such allegations have been made before in numerous news outlets, and in a controversial one-man show by playwright Mike Daisey, this time they have struck a chord.

The newspaper detailed allegations that workers at Foxconn suffered in conditions that resembled a modern version of bonded labour, working obscenely long shifts in unhealthy conditions with few of the labour rights that workers in the west would take for granted. It also mentioned disturbing events elsewhere in China among supplier firms, such as explosions at iPad factories that killed a total of four people and another incident in which 137 workers were injured after cleaning iPhone screens with a poisonous chemical.

Apple has come out fighting, which is no surprise given the remarkable success that the company has seen in recent years.

Through the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad tablet computer, Apple has revolutionised lifestyles across the world and built up a cult of worshippers. It has also generated billions of dollars in profits, in part due to the cheapness of Chinese labour.

But much of the firm's success rests on its reputation for "cool" among hip urban professionals and a generally positive corporate image. Stories of worker abuse at Chinese firms are a direct threat to that winning combination.

In a lengthy email sent to Apple staff, chief executive Tim Cook met the allegations head-on. "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern," Cook said. He went on to slam critics of the company. "Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us… accusations like these are contrary to our values."

Earlier this month Apple took the unusual step of releasing a list of all the firms in its worldwide supply chain as part of its 2011 audit of human rights conditions at factories where it has partnerships.

However, the company's own list made for grim reading. It revealed that a staggering 62% of the 229 facilities that it was involved with were not in compliance with Apple's 60-hour maximum working week policy. Almost a third had problem with hazardous waste.

Cook insisted in his email that Apple did not turn a blind eye to conditions in its supplier network. But he did warn that the firm was likely to discover more problems. "We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues," he said.

Shadow health secretary warns David Cameron against middle class aspirations at a time when people are struggling

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, says the government's goal of measuring happiness is in danger of promoting "middle-class" materialistic aspirations and ignoring the urgent need to help people cope with life's peaks and troughs.

In a world where communities are fragmented, the economy is flat-lining and people are living longer, but often in isolation, Burnham says that encouraging "resilience" should be the ultimate objective for the government.

Last year David Cameron announced that a "happiness agenda" would see ministers using a number of methods to measure how happy Britain is, including a survey of 200,000 people. The results will allow each local authority to compare and contrast the happiness of their residents, and Cameron wants government policy to react to the results.

But Burnham believes that by promoting happiness as a goal – all too often defined by wealth and possessions – the prime minister and his Liberal Democrat deputy, Nick Clegg, are setting people up for a fall.

The former Labour leadership candidate, who will make a major speech this week explaining how the NHS can promote better mental health, told the Observer that the "modern condition" of fragmented families and communities, together with job instability, means that the priority should be to provide support. The health service was designed to deal mainly with physical frailties, but should do more to help protect people from the stresses of modern living.

"Cameron and Clegg have done this whole thing about happiness, and I am not against the principle, but I think that is the wrong word. There is a slight danger that it sets people up: 'You have got to be happy. If you are not happy, you are failing'," he said. "So talking about mental health in terms of happiness has become the modern way of talking about mental health: 'Mental health is happiness'. And I don't think it is. It is slightly in danger of being a middle-class construct there, builds a bit of materialism into it. I think what we are talking about is resilience. Are you coping? Are you getting by? That is the bottom line."

The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2030 more people will be affected by depression than any other health problem. Yet most developing countries are spending less than 2% of their national budgets on mental healthcare, and Britain spends about 1.7%.

Burnham said the NHS needed to "wake up" to the challenge in an age where people did not always have the support networks that previous generations enjoyed. "Some people aren't able to call on that sort of emotional strength from other places and don't cope. It is the modern condition."

It is not an argument that completely convinces Lord Layard, the economist, who has set up the Action for Happiness movement to promote wellbeing. While agreeing with Burnham that resilience is an important part of the answer to society's ills, he counters that even in difficult economic times it is only a means to an end and that part of the battle is to redefine happiness so people do not associate it with material success.

"I think resilience is very, very important and I am promoting a programme in schools to build resilience among children," he said. "The problem with the word 'resilience' is it has a slightly dour sense to it and comes from handling adversity and there is something more positive to say.

"It is all too easy to get distorted priorities, because some things are very salient, like money, promotion or success, and we are always likely to go to the straightforward goals at the expense of human relationships. But happiness measurements have been done for 50 years in the UK and the US and they are no higher than when they started, which is a serious indictment of the priorities we have allowed ourselves to acquire. But if we can get the right priorities of the feeling of happiness, then we can move to a higher plateau."

A similar argument is proposed by author Tal Ben-Shahar, whose book, Happier, is given away in today's Observer. He believes there are clear ways to be happy and that happiness can be encouraged and nurtured. "If we defined happiness as the experience of pleasure, then I think [Burnham] is right, it isn't worth prioritising as an individual goal, let alone as a national policy. But if it has a deeper meaning, more like resilience, then it is worth striving for."

Filed under: Performance, Videos, Crossover, BMW, Design/Style, Luxury

BMW has released two promo videos of its revised-for-2013 X6 M. From the looks of things, Team Bavaria has opted for a very subtle facelift that includes new headlights and a lightly tweaked grille. Otherwise, the mighty performance utility looks much as it did last year. Word has it the interior will receive similarly slight changes, with the option sheet getting a few more leather choices and little else. Likewise, the freshened BMW X6 M is expected to make use of this year's 4.4-liter, twin-turbo V8 engine.

Buyers can expect to relish the same 547 horsepower and 502 pound-feet of torque as last year, which should be good enough to scoot the beast to 62 mph in a scant 4.7 seconds. Hit the jump to take a look at the two videos for yourself.

Continue reading Updated BMW X6 M previewed in videos

Updated BMW X6 M previewed in videos originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sanho had its Kickstarter-funded CloudFTP at Macworld | iWorld 2012 this year, and the project has generated a lot of excitement.

Sanho's Daniel Chin originally sought $100,000 in funding through Kickstarter, but wound up with more than 2,700 backers and more than $262,000 by the time the pledge drive ended three weeks ago.

CloudFTP is an adapter that turns any USB storage device into a wireless file server. It can share files with any WiFi-enabled device and will back up data to cloud storage on the Internet. It creates its own ad-hoc wireless network to share data, and it can be accessed from a web app, iOS app (there's one for Android as well) or via FTP.

CloudFTP is expected to ship in early February to Kickstarter participants and will cost $99.95 retail. Check out the video below to discover CloudFTP can do.

Sanho previews CloudFTP at Macworld | iWorld 2012 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When an award-winning Californian surf journalist called Michael Scott Moore decided to take a break from the business of catching waves, he told friends that he intended to visit Somalia to write a book about the country's headline-prone professional pirates.