Alliance Healthcare took delivery on 24 December and then closed for four days, amid nationwide shortage
The sole distributor of Covid lateral flow tests (LFTs) to pharmacies closed for four days over the Christmas period just as it received a delivery of 2.5m devices, it has emerged.
Alliance Healthcare took delivery of the tests on Christmas Eve and then shut, the Times reported. It provides LFTs to pharmacies to give out to the public.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Labour party research also finds black children at least twice as likely to grow up poor as white children
More than half of black children in the UK are now growing up in poverty, a new analysis of official data has revealed.
Black children are also now more than twice as likely to be growing up poor as white children, according to the Labour party research, which was based on government figures for households that have a “relative low income” – defined as being below 60% of the median, the standard definition for poverty.
Continue reading...Half a million people have sunk into poverty since the pandemic struck, with rising costs forcing many to cut back on food
Sri Lanka is facing a deepening financial and humanitarian crisis with fears it could go bankrupt in 2022 as inflation rises to record levels, food prices rocket and its coffers run dry.
The meltdown faced by the government, led by the strongman president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, is in part caused by the immediate impact of the Covid crisis and the loss of tourism but is compounded by high government spending and tax cuts eroding state revenues, vast debt repayments to China and foreign exchange reserves at their lowest levels in a decade. Inflation has meanwhile been spurred by the government printing money to pay off domestic loans and foreign bonds.
Continue reading...Research shows that a positive attitude to ageing can lead to a longer, healthier life, while negative beliefs can have hugely detrimental effects
For more than a decade, Paddy Jones has been wowing audiences across the world with her salsa dancing. She came to fame on the Spanish talent show Tú Sí Que Vales (You’re Worth It) in 2009 and has since found success in the UK, through Britain’s Got Talent; in Germany, on Das Supertalent; in Argentina, on the dancing show Bailando; and in Italy, where she performed at the Sanremo music festival in 2018 alongside the band Lo Stato Sociale.
Jones also happens to be in her mid-80s, making her the world’s oldest acrobatic salsa dancer, according to Guinness World Records. Growing up in the UK, Jones had been a keen dancer and had performed professionally before she married her husband, David, at 22 and had four children. It was only in retirement that she began dancing again – to widespread acclaim. “I don’t plead my age because I don’t feel 80 or act it,” Jones told an interviewer in 2014.
Continue reading...Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can
When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.
Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would.
Continue reading...The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has had ‘significant’ increase in annual donations after it went to the aid of asylum seekers
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is on course for the highest annual fundraising total in its near 200-year history. Donations swelled after the charity attracted huge public support following rightwing attacks for helping save the lives of asylum seekers at risk of drowning in the Channel.
The RNLI said it has received a significant increase in support, with online donations rising by 50% this year.
Continue reading...Our writer sat through the trial in New York and reports on the humiliation of the mwah-mwah princess, her repeated failures to end Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and the chances of her cutting a deal with the Feds
Guilty, five times over, Ghislaine Maxwell, shackled, sits in the sweat box as it crawls over Brooklyn Bridge along with the rest of the rush-hour little people she used to fly over, saying a last goodbye to the Imperial City’s billion-dollar stalagmites. The one-time Princess Mwah-Mwah is now the Demon Queen, facing 30 years, the rest of her life in prison, not some Disneyland of rightwing fantasy but a bone pit of the bad, the mad and the broken locked up until the end of age.
She has a secret key that could unlock her shackles. What if she sings, tells the feds what she knows, gives up the overmighty men who, along with her one-time lover Jeffrey Epstein, abused women more child than adult back in her pomp? She could cut her jail time down to 10 years and be out in seven, thanks to good behaviour.
Continue reading...England records 162,572 cases and 154 deaths; fully vaccinated would also require booster shot
Russia has reported 847 deaths from Covid in the past 24 hours. It also reported 19,751 new coronavirus cases in the same time period, up from 20,638 on the previous day.
The NHS Confederation’s chief executive, Matthew Taylor, agreed with the health secretary the record-breaking Omicron wave of infection will “test the limits of finite NHS capacity even more than a typical winter”, with reports suggesting that a requirement to work from home in England could be in place for most of January.
Continue reading...Three former refuseniks reveal their misgivings about having the vaccination and what finally convinced them to take the plunge
The UK’s vaccine rollout has largely been a success: more than 90% of the population aged 12 and over has now had at least one dose, with just over half having had a second dose and the booster.
However, there are thousands of people who still haven’t had a jab, despite estimates suggesting that 90% of the most severely ill Covid patients in hospital at the moment are unvaccinated.
Continue reading...A lifetime of hating my body has got me nowhere. If I can’t love it, can I at least respect it?
Every January, the same old battle cry: this will be the year that I get thin. Last January, I did a week-long juice cleanse, and the year before that, I fasted for three days. It wasn’t quite nil by mouth, but almost. At the time, I told myself the science interested me (the fervour with which fasting evangelists assure you that a few days without food can reset your microbiome or stave off cellular ageing is compelling enough to make you ignore the health warnings). Really, though, what I wanted was rapid weight loss, minimum one dress size.
I made it to 81 hours. Practically levitating with hunger, I ignored the advice to reintroduce food slowly (soups and juices before solids) by bingeing on a cheese sandwich, which I promptly threw up. Happy new year to me.
Continue reading...Messages may contain unhinged expletives, threatening tropes … or one of my interviews set to music
“You scaremongering ignorant fucking cunt, you and your retarded team made predictions that could have fucked this country for billions of pounds, fucked Christmas for a second time and cost thousands thier [sic] jobs only to have your most pessimistic ballshit [sic] now found to be just that. How fucks like you can sleep at night is beyond me and I hope you are fucking held to account for what you have done and could have done if there weren’t some people in the government with a brain.”
How would you like to get this in your inbox? As a senior scientist advising the government on Covid, I get this sort of email on a fairly regular basis. Indeed, (someone calling himself) Mr Roberts (who sent this) is a regular offender. What particularly upset me about this email was that it wasn’t sent to me, but to a junior member of my team. Awful, isn’t it?
Continue reading...Exclusive: Guardian survey shows level of intimidation, including death threats, against scientific and medical advisers
The “appalling” scale of abuse, intimidation and threatening behaviour directed at the UK government’s scientific and medical advisers has been laid bare in a Guardian survey of experts working on the pandemic.
Dozens of UK advisers described incidents ranging from coordinated online attacks to death threats and acts of intimidation, such as photos being taken of their homes and shared online and suspicious packages arriving in the post, some containing items with messages scrawled on them.
Continue reading...Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies, on whether the huge rise in vacancies in the UK offers an incentive to look for another job
With the pandemic, workers have been saying “I quit!” in their droves. In the US, employees packed in their jobs at such pace that a new term was coined – the Great Resignation – and alongside it, countless newspaper articles appeared about career-switching. But in the UK, are as many people quitting as we think? And would the greatest new year’s resolution be to join in? I asked Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies.
Is the Great British Resignation under way?
We’ve seen more people resign from their jobs than at any point before: it was roughly 400,000 in the three months from July to September 2021, up from 270,000 in the same period in 2019 – the last non-pandemic year. The UK has a dynamic labour market, with a high turnover, particularly in low-paying work. And when large parts of the economy reopened, more jobs were created.
Remember being inundated with invitations and parties? If the last two years have taught me anything, it’s that you don’t have to go to any of them
It was never my intention to hide in the toilet. There was lots going on outside: highbrow small talk and top-tier networking; free drinks, air kisses, and cold canapés that – I’d quickly discovered, following glances – were very much, like my fellow attenders, there only for show. The gallery was filled, I’d been assured, with fashion figures and media leaders. I was lucky to have been invited to this salon, one of the hosts had informed me, generously. Exactly what a “salon” is, I’m still unsure.
Deep down, I just didn’t want to be there. Only 90 minutes previously I’d been watching Gogglebox and scoffing Pringles in bed. But I went along out of some sense of duty. Perhaps a desire to broaden my horizons, or a compulsion to step outside my comfort zone, where I had become too safe and snug. Now here I was, sitting in a locked cubicle counting down the minutes before I could leave without seeming rude.
Continue reading...Maseray Sei, 21, was found dead after undergoing the procedure in a centuries-old ritual carried out by a secret society for women
The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived calls to end the practice.
The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.
Continue reading...Handful of local administrations are among the first in west to offer arrangement to their employees
A handful of local administrations in Spain have become among the first in western Europe to offer menstrual leave to their employees, in an attempt to strike a better balance between workplace demands and period pains.
This year the Catalan city of Girona became the first in the country to consider flexible working arrangements for any employee experiencing discomfort due to periods. In June it announced a deal with its more than 1,300 municipal employees to allow women, trans men and non-binary individuals to take up to eight hours menstrual leave a month, with the caveat that any time used must be recovered within a span of three months.
Continue reading...Mahé Elipe captures the visceral anger as International Women’s Day protests turned into a violent clash with police
On 8 March 2021, women across the world took part in protests to mark International Women’s Day. In Mexico, there is an added poignancy to the annual event, as at least 10 women are murdered in the country each day; in 2021 the date was was marred by additional violence.
In the runup to the day fences were erected around the national palace in Mexico City’s main square, where thousands of women were due to gather.
Continue reading...There were winners and losers as work patterns continued changing, with repercussions for city centres and society as a whole
Of all the predictions on your 2021 bingo card, who had employees being fined for going into the office? Workers in Wales now face that threat since the tightening of Covid regulations amid the spread of the Omicron variant, with a possible £60 penalty for failing to work from home.
That is just one of many examples of how the pandemic has transformed the world of work this year – and perhaps for ever – for city centre employers, their staff and the service industry that depends on them for trade.
Continue reading...For 16 years, on and off, I was held at Her Majesty’s pleasure. It was the struggles and loss of a friend on the outside that made me realise how powerless I was
I am sure those who know my backstory of criminality imagine – reasonably – that the toughest times of my life were while I was a guest of Her Majesty, who kindly gave me full board and lodgings for 16 years, on and off, during the first six decades of my existence. And they are half right.
My first taste of her hospitality came in 1957 when, at 14, I was ordered to spend three months in a detention centre. Then a relatively new concept, these were designed to give miscreants a “short, sharp shock” that would teach us to stay on the straight and narrow.
Continue reading...I had refused to accept my PTSD had returned. But on a flight to Budapest it became impossible to ignore
It is hard to pinpoint the worst moment of your life. But when I think about my lowest ebb, a certain image begins to solidify: me, lying in the gangway of a plane, the cabin crew administering oxygen via a canister and a mask as we descend to Budapest airport and other passengers look on (bemused or horrified, I couldn’t say). A couple of minutes previously, a fog had descended on me as I sat in the seat next to my boyfriend; peculiar black clouds coalesced at the margins of my vision. I was passing out. “I need to lie down,” I said, with some urgency. “I need to lie down, now.”
Why does this image stand out? I suppose it is because, ultimately, it is about denial – and the point at which that stops being possible. The thing I didn’t want to know was that I was ill. Again. I had no business being on a plane. I had only been able to get on the plane at all as a result of the large white wine and two co-codamol tablets I had necked at the airport. It was no doubt the chemical effects of these that led to me almost blacking out. That and the fact I had been hyperventilating for the duration of the flight.
Continue reading...