On March 2, 26-year-old Hayley Jones changed her Facebook status from “married” to “single.” Ten days later, the mother of four and longtime girlfriend of 31-year-old Brian Lewis, was dead.

Murdered in her UK home and found by her children, aged 3 to 10, Jones had been spending more time online as her relationship of 13 years unraveled.

“Hayley started to expand her social life and was spending a lot of time on internet sites, in particular Facebook,” prosecutor Mark Evans told the court, according to the BBC.  Read more... (359 words, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)

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MANILA, Philippines – Conservation groups yesterday urged investments to protect the remaining coastal resources of Bataan, as they lamented the “dismal state” of the coral reefs in the province due to blast and cyanide fishing.

During a joint ecological immersion to survey the coastal resources of Morong town last month, the World Wide Fund for Nature-Philippines (WWF-Philippines) and Manila Ocean Park (MOP) noted the state of the coral reef fronting the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant.

Morong is a known nesting site for endangered olive-ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea), the smallest of the world’s seven sea turtle species and globally classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as vulnerable.  Read more... (168 words, estimated 40 secs reading time)

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LONDON (AFP) – – Vancouver is the world’s easiest city to live in while Harare is the toughest, a survey said Monday putting Europe and north America at the top while many African and Asian cities struggle behind.

Canadian and Australian cities hold six of the top 10 slots in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s liveability poll, which ranks cities on five factors: health-care, stability, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.

“At the other end of the ranking, most of the poorest-performing locations are in Africa or Asia, where civil instability and poor infrastructure present significant challenges,” said the survey’s authors.  Read more... (222 words, estimated 53 secs reading time)

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OTTAWA (AFP) – - Youths exchanging nude photos of themselves over cellphones, known as “sexting,” should not face child pornography charges, as some have in the United States, a humanities conference heard Tuesday.

Peter Cumming, an associate professor at York University in Toronto, presented a paper on children’s sexuality at the 78th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences defending the practice as a modern variation on “playing doctor or spin-the-bottle.”

“Technology does change things, and there can be very serious consequences” Cumming said.

“But that obscures the fact that children and young people are sexual beings who have explored their sexuality in all times, and all cultures and all places.  Read more... (129 words, estimated 31 secs reading time)

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