Category Archives: Society

‘Voters are angry’: Labour activists say Partygate could turn tide in Dudley

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The Tories made huge gains in last year’s local elections but could be punished for scandals and the cost of living crisis

Over the past two months, the Labour candidate, Adrian Hughes, has knocked on more than 1,000 doors in Upper Gornal and Woodsetton in north Dudley before May’s local elections.

The most marginal ward in a historically marginal council, it was won by the Conservatives last year by 82 votes when there were five candidates on the ballot paper. This year there are only two options: red or blue.

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Lessons from Covid can start a health revolution, says lab chief

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Director of network that processed millions of tests says smart diagnostics could tackle other major diseases

Two years of mass Covid testing have paved the way for a revolution in how we diagnose other diseases, the founding director of the Lighthouse labs network has said.

In his first interview since the pandemic began, Prof Chris Molloy said that people’s familiarity with using swabs for Covid tests meant that they could also discover and monitor their risk of other conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease.

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Metropolitan police officer found guilty of child sex offences

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Francois Olwage convicted of grooming after arranging to meet undercover officer he believed to be 13-year-old girl

A Metropolitan police counter-terrorism officer has been found guilty of three child sex offences after he arranged to a meet a 13-year-old girl for sex when he was “on duty working from home”.

Francois Olwage, a detective constable who was serving with the Met’s specialist operations unit, was convicted of grooming someone he believed to be a 13-year-old girl he had met on the Lycos online chat forum.

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Valneva approved to be UK’s sixth Covid vaccine

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Medicines regulator says it is first in world to approve Valneva product

A Covid-19 vaccine developed by the French pharmaceutical company Valneva has been given regulatory approval by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, bringing the total number of jabs approved for use in the UK to six.

As the Covid pandemic swept the world, scientists began developing vaccines against it, with the Pfizer/BioNTech jab being the first in the UK to be authorised for emergency use by the MHRA in 2020. Since then the MHRA has approved the Moderna, Oxford/AstraZeneca, Janssen and Novavax vaccines, although, according to NHS England, Janssen and Novavax are not currently available.

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MPs call for British child and ill mother to be returned to UK from Syrian camp

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Mother is unlikely to survive without medical intervention, leaving her young son orphaned, say doctors

MPs and a human rights group have called on the UK government to repatriate a young British boy and his gravely ill mother from a detention camp in Syria, after doctors said she was at risk of dying and leaving the child orphaned.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was reviewing the case of Zaid* and his mother, Maryam* – who was injured in an explosion in Syria in 2019 and left with shrapnel in her head – “as a matter of priority”.

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Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $302m over pelvic mesh implant ads

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California court rules that company made misleading and potentially harmful statements in hundreds of thousands of ads

A California appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that Johnson & Johnson must pay penalties to the state for deceptively marketing pelvic mesh implants for women.

Johnson & Johnson had appealed in 2020 after superior court judge Eddie Sturgeon assessed the $344m in penalties against the US pharmaceutical company’s subsidiary, Ethicon.

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US teen overdose deaths double in three years amid fentanyl crisis

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Deaths rise even as teen drug use drops overall, with researchers pointing to flood of deadly counterfeit pills

Drug overdose deaths among high school-aged US teens have more than doubled since 2019, driven by a rise in the deadly opioid fentanyl, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who analyzed mortality rates among 14- to 18-year-olds over the past decade, found that while drug use among this age group is actually falling, fatalities are on the rise, jumping from 492 in 2019 to 954 in 2020, then climbing to 1,146 in 2021.

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One in eight privately rented homes in England pose threat to health, MPs say

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Serious health and safety risks costing NHS £340m a year, public accounts committee report finds

More than one in eight privately rented homes in England pose a serious threat to people’s health and safety, costing the NHS about £340m a year, according to a report from a committee of MPs.

It also uncovered evidence of unlawful discrimination, with an estimated one in four landlords unwilling to let to non-British passport holders.

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Third of GPs in England want to quit within five years, survey finds

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Practitioners’ struggles include increased workloads, greater demand from patients, and paperwork

A third of GPs in England say they want to quit within five years, according to a regular survey which warns that clinical doctors are especially unhappy with the number of hours they work.

The survey of 2,195 GPs undertaken in 2021 found 33% planned to leave “direct patient care” by 2026. The figure represents a return to levels last seen in 2015, after plans to quit peaked in 2018 when two in five GPs wanted to stop seeing patients within five years.

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At least 40% of child-to-parent violence in UK unreported, study finds

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Rate of abuse against parents is highest among 19- to 25-year-olds and most perpetrators are male

At least 40% of child-to-parent violence and abuse incidents are unreported to police, according to research.

The study into the “hidden harm” commissioned by the London mayor’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) found that the rate of violence and abuse against parents and carers was highest among those aged 19-25, and 81% of perpetrators were male.

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Quarter of a billion people now face extreme poverty, warns Oxfam

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Charity calls for debt cancellations for poorest countries to counter ‘worst collapse into poverty and suffering in memory’

The rising price of food caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increased energy costs could push a quarter of a billion more people into extreme poverty, Oxfam has warned.

The charity said these new challenges had piled on to the economic crises created by Covid, and called for urgent international action, including cancelling debt repayments for poorer countries.

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All-female newsroom launched in Somalia to widen media’s scope

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The pioneering Bilan project, funded by UN, will report on gender-based violence, women in politics and female entrepreneurs

The first all-women media house in Somalia has been launched, creating a rare opportunity for female journalists in the country to research and publish stories they want to tell.

Led by one of the few female senior news producers in the country, the team of six will produce content for TV, radio and online media on issues such as gender-based violence, women in politics and female entrepreneurs.

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Johnson’s LGBT adviser ‘dismayed’ at failure to ban trans conversion practices

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Nick Herbert calls for royal commission to detoxify trans debate but criticises ‘shouty protests’

The prime minister’s LGBT adviser has said he is “dismayed” by the decision not to include transgender people in a ban on conversion practices, while describing the cancellation of the government’s equality conference as an “act of self-harm by the LGBT lobby”.

Nick Herbert also called for a royal commission to detoxify and take the politics out of the trans debate.

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‘We’re finished’: Sri Lankans pushed to the brink by financial crisis

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Thousands take to the streets to call for the resignation of president Gotabaya Rajapaksa

While thousands of angry cries and anti-government slogans filled the streets of the Sri Lankan city Colombo on Saturday, Chanda Upul stood quietly nearby, desperately pushing his wares of soft drinks and bottled water on protesters. But in his heart he was chanting along with them.

Sri Lanka has descended into its worst financial crisis since independence, with food, fuel, medicine and electricity becoming increasingly scarce, and calls for the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa – frequently referred to as Gota – to step down. And 50-year-old Upul, who lives in a poor northern suburb of the city, is among those who have been pushed to the brink of survival.

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Ensure waist size is less than half your height, health watchdog says

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Guidance for England and Wales comes amid increasing concern over rate of obesity and cost to NHS

A health watchdog is urging millions of people for the first time to ensure their waist size is less than half their height in order to help stave off serious health problems.

The UK has one of the worst obesity rates in Europe, with two in three adults officially overweight or obese in an escalating crisis that now costs the NHS £6bn a year and wider society £27bn.

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UK politics live: Boris Johnson defends national insurance increase amid cost of living crisis

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Latest updates: PM admits households are facing ‘unquestionably tough times’, but says NI increase is right thing for the NHS

Keir Starmer says the national insurance rise is “the wrong tax at the wrong time”.

The Labour leader said:

People are really, really struggling to pay their bills. And this is just going to impact on them very, very hard.

There are lots of landlords who’ve got many, many properties and they are not going to be paying a penny more in tax. Their tenants, who are going out to work, are going to be paying more in tax.

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Johnson says trans athletes should not compete in events that do not match biological sex

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PM also says women should have ‘dedicated’ spaces, amid fallout over decision to exclude trans conversion practices from ban

Boris Johnson has suggested athletes who are transgender should not be allowed to compete in sports competitions that do not match their biological sex, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.

The prime minister said the issue “wasn’t something I thought that I would have to consider in great detail”. Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.

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From grief to paw prints, people share Ireland census ‘time capsule’ messages

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People could write a message in a blank space on the census, to be read by future generations in 100 years

Some were funny, some were angry, some were utterly heartbreaking and all were written in the same blank space of Ireland’s census form, a “time capsule” section.

In what Ireland’s Central Statistics Office says is a world first, the official census left a blank space for people to leave messages for future generations. The voluntary section of the 27-page form is to be made public in 100 years but many people have shared their messages on social media.

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LGBTQ+ conference cancelled over conversion practices furore

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Organisations pulled out of Safe to Be Me after government failure to ban conversion practices for transgender people

The government’s flagship LGBTQ+ conference is to be cancelled after it fell into disarray with more organisations pulling out and a key government adviser accusing ministers of waging a “woke war”.

With Downing Street under fire for watering down its commitment to ban conversion practices, the Safe to Be Me event due to be hosted in June has now been scrapped.

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NSW principal’s Harvard scholarship paused due to school investigation

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Education department probes complaints about Katoomba high school’s response to claims of harassment among students

The principal of a Blue Mountains high school has had a prestigious Harvard scholarship put on hold while her school is investigated by the New South Wales Department of Education.

The internal departmental investigation comes on top of two court cases involving staff or students at the school.

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