Queen’s Commonwealth Trust site contains glowing review of California-based BetterUp, which the prince joined last year
A leading Commonwealth charity which has the Queen as its patron is promoting the online coaching business that employs Prince Harry as its chief impact officer.
The coaching, by BetterUp, is described as “truly phenomenal” in testimony by one user on the website of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust (QCT). Prince Harry was previously president of the trust.
Continue reading...Stake factoring is a way of grading customers according to their success and is widespread in the betting industry
On any given Saturday, Rory would spend several hours glued to a screen flickering with hundreds of football and horse racing bets placed by customers of the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power.
One of multiple insiders from firms including Paddy Power Betfair, Ladbrokes and William Hill who spoke on condition of anonymity, Rory was part of an obscure corner of the gambling industry that exists to maximise profits by clamping down on successful punters.
Continue reading...With reproductive rights being increasingly restricted in Europe, people are relying on a network of volunteers to help them
When The Handmaid’s Tale first came out in 1985, the initial response was broadly that people thought such threats to women’s bodies and reproductive rights “couldn’t happen here”. By the time it aired as a TV series in 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated in the US, people were no longer so sure. With every headline about gains in reproductive rights – Ireland repealing the eighth amendment in 2018, which had effectively banned abortions – there are others that underscore how fragile these rights are, wherever you live.
Recent changes to abortion law in Texas, which have prohibited abortions after six weeks – one of the most restrictive rules in the nation – and Poland’s near total ban on the procedure last year make it clear just how slippery the slope still is. We have to ask: what kind of country do we want to live in? A democratic one in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning their health and body, or one in which half the population is free and the state corrals the bodies of the other half?
Continue reading...At 82, the Canadian author has seen it all - and her novels predicted most of it. Just don’t presume you know what she thinks, she tells Hadley Freeman
‘How are you? You’re named after Ernest Hemingway’s first wife,” Margaret Atwood announces by way of a greeting when we meet on a hotel’s heated patio near her home in Toronto. Atwood, 82, has often been described as a prophet, thanks to her uncanny ability to foresee the future in her books. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, it looked, terrifyingly, like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale, when the government is overthrown and the dystopian land of Gilead is founded. She seemingly predicted the 2008 financial crash in her nonfiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published that year. Atwood has always scoffed at any suggestion of telepathy, pointing out that every atrocity in The Handmaid’s Tale had been carried out by totalitarian regimes in real life, and she “predicted” the crash by noticing the number of adverts offering to help people with their personal debt. But as she stands in front of me, snowflakes glittering around her like stars, the flames of the hotel’s gas heaters leaping on either side of her, dressed all in black save for her little red hat, correctly guessing who I’m named after, she certainly seems to have a touch of magic about her. How did she know about the Hemingway connection?
“Because I’m deep into Martha Gellhorn,” she says, launching into a long discussion about the celebrated war correspondent and Hemingway’s third wife. Atwood isn’t writing a book about Gellhorn (yet), but she found a letter from her to the father of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, and is now a Gellhornologist. After six or so minutes, I wonder if we’ll ever talk about anything else, but Atwood has a regal quality that makes interruption unthinkable. It does not, as I later learn, render argument impossible.
I don’t like to favouritise my books. The others would be out to get you: ‘How could you? I spent all this time with you!’
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Mexico
Continue reading...Council chair says decision not guided by data or made in consultation with health profession
Ending all Covid restrictions is premature and “not based on current evidence”, the British Medical Association has said, as experts warned dropping testing and self-isolation could lead to a surge in cases.
Boris Johnson told MPs last week that he was preparing to lift the legal requirement in England to self-isolate on 24 February, a month earlier than originally planned, with a formal announcement expected on Monday.
Continue reading...Ambika Mod, who plays stressed junior doctor, reacts to criticism that BBC drama disrespects women
It is the TV drama that has divided its viewers. Hailed by some as a brutally accurate depiction of the realities of working in an NHS maternity unit, This Is Going to Hurt has been denounced by others as misogynistic and insulting to women giving birth.
Now the actor who plays an exhausted and stressed female junior doctor in the show has rejected criticism of the BBC series set on an NHS obstetrics and gynaecology ward.
Continue reading...UN warns of looming catastrophe as hundreds of thousands more arrive at settlements that do not have enough food or water
Somalia’s displacement camps are coming under intense pressure with more than 300,000 people leaving their homes in search of food and water so far this year as the country experiences its worst drought in decades.
People have been walking miles to camps, already home to those escaping the country’s protracted violence, after three consecutive failed rainy seasons since October 2020 that have decimated crops and livestock. Somalia has more than 2,400 such settlements, which already lack resources.
Continue reading...The prime minister’s performance, Brexit and mask-wearing: can two strangers agree over dinner?
Emma, 46, Hove
Occupation Sales operations specialist
Yes, we need to do something about obesity. But this new legislation seems unlikely to help
Everything I am, I owe to calories, as Sophia Loren never quite said. I have built myself, one edible unit of energy at a time. In truth I have more than built myself. I am over-engineered, in the way Mussolini’s Milan railway station is over-engineered, or Jason Momoa is over-engineered. See how deftly I compare myself to Momoa? We are exactly the same, him and me. Save that every calorie he consumes turns into a plank of rippling muscle, while mine turn into the greatest muffin top this side of the Greggs cake counter. But it’s all flesh, right?
Ah, calories. Mostly I try to ignore them; to regard them as I do the isobars on a meteorologist’s map which in no way describe the experience of standing outside in a howling gale. I know that not all calories are equal; that calories from carbs impact the body differently to those obtained from protein, for example. I also know that we all process foods differently. I have a metabolism that suggests I may at some point have been gene-spliced with a sloth, and hence spend hours in the gym brutalising myself. I also like my dinner very much. I regard the diet book industry as a massive scam. If a single diet book worked there would be no need to publish another one ever again. But still they come.
Continue reading...Watching the misfortunes of Boris Johnson or Novak Djokovic is deliciously satisfying – and unmistakably human. But is it wrong to submit to our basest instincts?
No one is especially shy about the anger they feel about the partygate shambles in Downing Street, nor should they be. We are all a bit more discreet, though, about how enjoyable it is to watch the prime minister’s downfall. It hits every base of funny, from the slapstick to the surreal; a comedy home run. But there is something delicious here that is richer than humour. To see a chancer unmasked is a very particular pleasure.
Likewise, I would happily give you my thoughts on the international tennis elite and their stance on vaccination. But why it was so droll to see Novak Djokovic detained in and then deported from Australia I would struggle to say; I never had anything against the man.
Continue reading...Female genital mutilation cannot be considered solely a ‘women’s issue’ if it is to be stamped out by 2030, say male campaigners in Guinea, Somalia, Kenya and Nigeria
There is a case from Dr Morissanda Kouyaté’s career that stays with him.
In 1983, Kouyaté, then 32, was working at a village hospital in Guinea when 12-year-old twins, Hassantou and Housseynatou, were brought in. Through wails, their relatives told Kouyaté that earlier that day, the girls had been taken into the bush to be submitted to genital mutilation. Now, they were barely conscious and bleeding heavily.
Continue reading...Across the continent, young Africans are using their unique local knowledge and bargaining power to challenge beliefs about female genital mutilation
It took courage for Ayodeji Bella to raise the subject of female genital mutilation in her rural community in southern Nigeria. She knew local chiefs were key to challenging beliefs around the practice but when Bella, who was cut at five, broached the issue with an elder from her village, she was rebuked.
“I was young and unmarried and they wouldn’t take me seriously.”
Continue reading...I have blood cancer and continue to isolate, living without touch, hugs, intimacy or love. It is heartbreaking
Before the pandemic, I was an artist, activist, teacher, director and producer – living fully, despite having had blood cancer for 10 years. Today, I am classified as “A3” (a person with comorbidities) in the Philippines. In the UK, I am classified as extremely clinically vulnerable.
I don’t believe in labels, yet all of a sudden, I am one. Although I am fully vaccinated and boosted, there are no guarantees that the vaccines work in a body that has a suppressed immune system, like mine.
Continue reading...As girls are paraded through Kuria’s streets in the school holiday cutting season, hundreds more are hidden by a network of neighbours working to change attitudes on FGM from the ground up
Half rising from the plastic white chair, he jabs a finger toward a girl and her school friends sitting across the circle from him. “She will have a future,” says Patrick Ikware, almost shouting. “This cult is diminishing, but to eliminate it, we need to substitute education, send our daughters to school and block our ears to the elders.”
The handful of others sitting on mismatched chairs on the grass outside the school in Masaba nod. A parents’ meeting held for those opposed to female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice almost universal among women in the Kuria districts of Migori county, western Kenya, is sparsely attended.
Continue reading...CDC considers rolling back limits on which doses can be prescribed and for how many days in cases of acute pain
The US could see loosened guidance around prescribing opioids, as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers relaxing some of its guidelines in a move that could signal a new direction for managing chronic pain.
The CDC last Thursday released proposed changes to its guidance on prescribing opioids, rolling back limits on which doses can be prescribed and for how many days in cases of acute pain.
Continue reading...Our beliefs about difficult feelings may do more damage than the feelings themselves
In the late 19th-century America, a somewhat bizarre form of abstinence emerged. The vice was not alcohol but anxiety. Citizens of New York began to attend regular “Don’t Worry Clubs” in which they encouraged each other to look on the bright side of life. Their founder, Theodore Seward, argued that Americans were “slaves to the worrying habit”, which was the “enemy which destroys happiness”. It needed to be “attacked” with “resolute and persevering effort”.
By the early 20th century, the psychologist William James described how people had developed a kind of “religion of healthy-mindedness” with the aim of turning the mind away from all negative thoughts and feelings.
Continue reading...More babies are born by C-section than ever, causing alarm at the WHO. But some believe the option should always be offered. So what are the risks and benefits?
When Elizabeth Chloe Romanis first considered the ethics of chosen caesarean sections, she was listening to a radio programme her husband had sent her. The programme was about how some NHS trusts refused to give medically unnecessary C-sections to people who wanted them. “He sent it to me like: ‘Have you heard this?’ and obviously I got very annoyed,” says the biolaw researcher at Durham University.
Someone phoned in and asked, why should the NHS offer the choice when childbirth is natural and surgery costs money? Irritated, Romanis thought someone from her field ought to argue for the right to choose. “So that’s what I did,” she says.
Continue reading...Conspiracy theory songs claiming Covid-19 is fake and calling vaccine ‘poison’ are being actively promoted in Spotify playlists
Songs that claim Covid-19 is fake and describe the vaccines as “poison” are being actively promoted to Spotify users in playlists generated by its content recommendation engine.
Tracks found on the world’s largest music streaming service explicitly encourage people not to get vaccinated and say those who do are “slaves”, “sheep”, and victims of Satan. Others call for an uprising, urging listeners to “fight for your life”.
Continue reading...New research into sudden weight loss finds a possible cause of cachexia in cancer patients and Cockayne syndrome in children
One of the most serious impacts of cancer is the sudden loss of weight, appetite, and muscle that can hit some patients in the later stages of the disease. This wasting syndrome is known as cachexia and it can be triggered in other serious conditions, including heart disease and HIV.
In addition, an inherited version of extreme wasting syndromes can affect children. Known as Cockayne syndrome, it causes them to suffer severe malnutrition and wasting that parallels the effect of cachexia.
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