Is it wrong to have sex with a pupil?

Paedophiles – or merely guilty of poor professional judgment? Last week, the leader of a teaching union argued that a member of staff who’d had an affair with a student aged over 16 should not be prosecuted. “This isn’t a person who is showing any tendencies for being a sex offender; this is a person who’s made a serious mistake of professional judgment,” said Chris Keates in an interview for the ITV programme Tonight. She wants ministers to change the law which has resulted in 129 teachers being placed on the sex offenders’ register since 1997.

Is she right? Yes, according to Julia Pascal, who had a fling with her teacher, Don Shiach, 28, when she was 17. Writing in The Times, Pascal – now a playwright – said: “Consensual sex between consenting adults is not the same as paedophilia.”

It’s a view shared by Jess Anderson, 16, who is now living in Cornwall with her former RE teacher, Clive Richards, 50. “We are a normal couple who happen to have an age gap between us,” Anderson argues.

It was left to the children’s charities to argue for the status quo to be upheld. Zoë Hilton of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said: “The law is, rightly, there to protect children.”

Starbucks taps runneth over

What’s more important: clean cutlery or saving the planet? After The Sun newspaper revealed that Starbucks, a self-styled champion of green causes, was wasting 23.4m litres of water daily by leaving taps constantly running at its coffee shops around the globe, the multinational argued that it had to keep the water on for hygiene reasons.

However, within days, the company said it would review the practice. Catherine Brahic, an environment reporter, noted on the New Scientist website that Starbucks’s position on keeping the taps running was rather at odds with “government efforts to make us turn taps off when we brush our teeth”.

Nobel critics attack ‘French farce’

There were howls of protest last week when it was announced that the French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, 68, had won the Nobel prize for literature. The award to the Frenchman resulted in accusations that the judges were deliberately ignoring American writers. Among those voicing this suspicion was The Guardian’s Mark Lawson, who said that he found it astonishing that only Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison from the United States have been honoured in the past 32 years. “Just as Barack Obama would be guaranteed the presidency if the decision rested with the electorates of Europe, so any Nobel literature poll taken here would have given the cheque to Philip Roth at least a decade ago, and probably John Updike as well,” said Lawson.

The choice of Le Clézio will inevitably revive accusations of obscurantism and pretension. What may have swung the prize his way, according to Lawson, is the fact that he is an “experimental writer”, while the greatest contemporary Americans operate “in traditional forms”. The Nobel judges “are not indifferent to flags, but what really gets them going is formats”, he noted.

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