A tiny grain of nuclear fuel is pulled from ruined Japanese nuclear plant, in a step toward cleanup

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The Australian government announced on Thursday what it described as world-leading legislation that would institute an age limit of 16 years for children to start using social media, and hold platforms responsible for ensuring compliance.

“Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

The legislation will be introduced in Parliament during its final two weeks in session this year, which begin on Nov. 18. The age limit would take effect 12 months after the law is passed, Albanese told reporters.

The platforms including X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook would need to use that year to work out how to exclude Australian children younger than 16.

“I’ve spoken to thousands of parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles. They, like me, are worried sick about the safety of our kids online,” Albanese said.

The proposal comes as governments around the world are wrestling with how to supervise young people’s use of technologies like smartphones and social media.

Social media platforms would be penalized for breaching the age limit, but under-age children and their parents would not.

“The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access. The onus won’t be on parents or young people,” Albanese said.

Antigone Davis, head of safety at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said the company would respect any age limitations the government wants to introduce.

“However, what’s missing is a deeper discussion on how we implement protections, otherwise we risk making ourselves feel better, like we have taken action, but teens and parents will not find themselves in a better place,” Davis said in a statement.

She added that stronger tools in app stores and operating systems for parents to control what apps their children can use would be a “simple and effective solution.”

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. TikTok declined to comment.

The Digital Industry Group Inc., an advocate for the digital industry in Australia, described the age limit as a “20th Century response to 21st Century challenges.”

“Rather than blocking access through bans, we need to take a balanced approach to create age-appropriate spaces, build digital literacy and protect young people from online harm,” DIGI managing director Sunita Bose said in a statement.

More than 140 Australian and international academics with expertise in fields related to technology and child welfare signed an open letter to Albanese last month opposing a social media age limit as “too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively.”

Jackie Hallan, a director at the youth mental health service ReachOut, opposed the ban. She said 73% of young people across Australia accessing mental health support did so through social media.

“We’re uncomfortable with the ban. We think young people are likely to circumvent a ban and our concern is that it really drives the behavior underground and then if things go wrong, young people are less likely to get support from parents and carers because they’re worried about getting in trouble,” Hallan said.

Child psychologist Philip Tam said a minimum age of 12 or 13 would have been more enforceable.

“My real fear honestly is that the problem of social media will simply be driven underground,” Tam said.

Australian National University lawyer Associate Prof. Faith Gordon feared separating children from there platforms could create pressures within families.

Albanese said there would be exclusions and exemptions in circumstances such as a need to continue access to educational services.

But parental consent would not entitle a child under 16 to access social media.

Earlier this year, the government began a trial of age-restriciton technologies. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, the online watchdog that will police compliance, will use the results of that trial to provide platforms with guidance on what reasonable steps they can take.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the year-long lead-in would ensure the age limit could be implemented in a “very practical way.”

“There does need to be enhanced penalties to ensure compliance,” Rowland said.

“Every company that operates in Australia, whether domiciled here or otherwise, is expected and must comply with Australian law or face the consequences,” she added.

The main opposition party has given in-principle support for an age limit at 16.

Opposition lawmaker Paul Fletcher said the platforms already had the technology to enforce such an age ban.

“It’s not really a technical viability question, it’s a question of their readiness to do it and will they incur the cost to do it,” Fletcher told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“The platforms say: ’It’s all too hard, we can’t do it, Australia will become a backwater, it won’t possibly work.’ But if you have well-drafted legislation and you stick to your guns, you can get the outcomes,” Fletcher added.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A strong typhoon was forecast to hit the northern Philippines on Thursday, prompting a new round of evacuations in a region still recovering from back-to-back storms a few weeks ago.

Typhoon Yinxing is the 13th to batter the disaster-prone Southeast Asian nation this season.

“I really pity our people but all of them are tough,” Gov. Marilou Cayco of the province of Batanes said by telephone. Her province was ravaged by recent destructive storms and is expected to be affected by Yinxing’s fierce wind and rain.

Tens of thousands of villagers were returning to emergency shelters and disaster-response teams were again put on alert in Cagayan and other northern provinces near the expected path of Yinxing. The typhoon was located about 175 kilometers (109 miles) east of Aparri town in Cagayan province on Thursday morning.

The slow-moving typhoon, locally named Marce, was packing sustained winds of up to 165 kilometers (102 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 205 kph (127 mph) and was forecast to hit or come very near to the coast of Cagayan and outlying islands later Thursday.

The coast guard, army, air force and police were put on alert. Inter-island ferries and cargo services and domestic flights were suspended in northern provinces.

Tropical Storm Trami and Typhoon Kong-rey hit the northern Philippines in recent weeks, leaving at least 151 people dead and affecting nearly 9 million others. More than 14 billion pesos ($241 million) worth of rice, corn and other crops and infrastructure were damaged.

The deaths and destruction from the storms prompted President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to declare a day of national mourning on Monday when he visited the worst-hit province of Batangas, south of the capital, Manila. At least 61 people perished in the coastal province.

Trami dumped one to two months’ worth of rain in just 24 hours in some regions, including in Batangas.

“We want to avoid the loss of lives due to calamities,” Marcos said in Talisay town in Batangas, where he brought key Cabinet members to reassure storm victims of rapid government help. “Storms nowadays are more intense, extensive and powerful.”

In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones, left more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattened entire villages and caused ships to run aground and smash into houses in the central Philippines.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

TORONTO – Hundreds of people will lose access to supervised consumption sites in Toronto when the province closes five of them next year, which will likely mean more public drug use and more overdoses, a new study suggests.

The Ontario government announced in August that it would close 10 supervised consumption sites across the province next spring because they were too close to schools and daycares.

Five of those sites are in Toronto, leaving another five open. A sixth centre in the city may shut down once its lease runs out next year.

Ontario is shifting away from harm reduction to an abstinence-based model and it intends to launch 19 new “homelessness and addiction recovery treatment hubs,” plus 375 highly supportive housing units at a cost of $378 million.

The supervised consumption sites slated for closure are set to be shuttered by March 31, 2025.

Researchers from St. Michael’s Hospital’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network combed through supervised consumption site data and found that, on average, 1,366 people used the Toronto sites monthly in 2022.

The researchers estimate 561 of those people used the sites that are now slated for closure.

Only 35 of those clients will be within 500 metres of an open supervised consumption site next April, the study said.

“So that means that 38 per cent of current clients will lose access to a site assuming that they won’t travel more than 500 metres,” said Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, lead author and a clinician scientist at Unity Health Toronto, which runs St. Michael’s Hospital.

“There are going to be a whole lot of people who are currently using drugs in a supervised site who are now not going to have access to that site and that will likely mean more public drug use. It’ll likely mean more unsupervised drug use, so more overdoses.”

The researchers also looked at whether the sites that will remain open can handle increased visits due to the closures.

“Our best estimate was that sites would have to increase capacity by more than 50 per cent in order to take care of the majority of clients who are losing access,” Bayoumi said.

The results of the study will be published on the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions website.

Researchers will closely follow the proposed consumption site changes, which will include a ban on new consumption sites and be codified in legislation that has yet to be tabled.

“When the sites actually close, we can look at what happens in terms of EMS calls, what happens in terms of visits to hospital emergency departments and hospital admissions for overdoses and for other complications associated with injecting drugs like wound infections,” Bayoumi said.

Health-care workers, advocates and homeless people have all said the closures will lead to more deaths.

Last year, nearly 2,600 Ontarians died because of opioids, a 50 per cent increase from 2019, with fentanyl and its derivatives especially affecting users in the homeless population.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones has said no one will die because of the harm-reduction changes.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.