Category Archives: Society

In too deep: the epic, doomed journey of Europe’s first narco-submarine

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Former boxer Agustín Álvarez jailed for piloting a sub carrying 3,000kg of cocaine across the Atlantic

Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.

Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.

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Novavax Covid vaccine approved for use in over-18s in UK

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Nuvaxovid is similar to flu jab and may have reduced side-effects, which could persuade vaccine holdouts

The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Novavax has been approved by the UK regulator for use in people over the age of 18.

The vaccine will not be immediately widely available as its use as part of the UK’s vaccination programme will be considered by the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

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Covid: Europe set for ‘long period of tranquillity’ in pandemic, says WHO

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Vaccinations, milder Omicron and arrival of spring should keep death rate low as cases rise to all time high

Europe could soon enter a “long period of tranquillity” that amounts to a “ceasefire” in the pandemic thanks to the less severe Omicron variant, high levels of immunity and the arrival of warmer spring weather, the World Health Organization has said.

In an upbeat assessment, Hans Kluge, the WHO’s Europe director, said the region was in a position of “higher protection” that could “bring us enduring peace”, even if a new, more virulent variant than Omicron should emerge.

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‘My life completely turned around’: is manifesting the key to happiness – or wishful thinking?

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The controversial concept of willing your goals into existence has leapt in popularity since Covid began. But how do you do it – and can it help you realise your dreams?

In the first months of the UK’s spring 2020 lockdown, Jennifer Doyle, a teacher and single mother, was at a low point. “I was in a bit of a hole, struggling to cope on my own and focusing only on the negatives of my life,” says the 39-year-old. “Then – during a Zoom quiz, of course – my friend said I should look into manifestation to help. I did – and my energy totally shifted. I started thinking about what I wanted from life, rather than what was wrong with it.”

Doyle was not alone. In early July 2020, Google Trends reported a peak in searches for “manifestation”, which is often described as a way of willing your goals into existence. In the past 22 months, the website Life Coach Directory has seen a 450% rise in potential clients searching for manifestation techniques. On TikTok, the hashtag #manifestation has 13.9bn views. It is part of the huge wellness market, which is worth about £1.1bn.

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Levelling up? It’s a lot of talk, say sceptical Wolverhampton public

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Of those who have heard of it, many doubt the policy will do much to improve their quality of life

It may have been dominating conversation in Westminster on Wednesday, but questions about levelling up were met with blank stares among shoppers on Wednesfield high street in Wolverhampton.

Most had never heard of the concept, while of those who had, many doubted it would do much to improve their quality of life.

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First patients of pioneering CAR T-cell therapy ‘cured of cancer’

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Cancer-killing cells still present 10 years on, with results suggesting therapy is a cure for certain blood cancers

Two of the first human patients to be treated with a revolutionary therapy that engineers immune cells to target specific types of cancer still possess cancer-killing cells a decade later with no sign of their illness returning.

The finding suggests CAR T-cell therapy constitutes a “cure” for certain blood cancers, although adapting it to treat solid tumours is proving more challenging.

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‘It stopped me having sex for a year’: why Generation Z is turning its back on sex-positive feminism

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The movement championed the right to enjoy sex and was supposed to free women from guilt or being shamed. But now many are questioning whether it has left them more vulnerable

Lala likes to think of herself as pretty unshockable. On her popular Instagram account @lalalaletmeexplain, she dishes out anonymous sex and dating advice on everything from orgasms to the etiquette of sending nude pictures. Nor is the 40-year-old sex educator and former social worker (Lala is a pseudonym) shy of sharing her own dating experiences as a single woman.

But even she was perturbed by a recent question, from a woman with a seven-year-old daughter who had caught her new partner watching “stepdaughter” porn involving teenage girls. Was that a red flag?

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Met police misogyny: the rot runs even deeper than thought

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Charing Cross station case shows old problems were allowed to fester on social media thanks to culture of fear

Case by case, the idea that the police’s problems with women is the result of a few bad apples rather than a misogynistic culture gets harder to maintain.

The revelations about the hate-filled messages among officers sent via WhatsApp and Facebook at Charing Cross station in central London are exceptionally sickening in their nature.

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Scam the bereaved, defraud the dead: the shocking crimes of America’s greatest psychic conman

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He was the fake medium from Florida whose scandalous cons almost got him shot. So why did M Lamar Keene then blow the whistle on psychic swindlers? A new podcast finds out

What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.

Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?

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Flee: inside the film about a Kabul boy who finds happiness, cats and a husband in Denmark

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He escaped death, fled across the Baltic, and eventually found love and a new life. Jonas Poher Rasmussen describes how he turned Amin’s often harrowing story into an uplifting, award-winning animation

When the Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen was 15, an Afghan refugee moved to his small village. Rumours circulated about how the boy, Amin, had got there. Some said he had walked all the way from Kabul, others that he had seen his whole family slaughtered. Rasmussen became the newcomer’s friend and confidant – Amin even came out to him as gay when they were teenagers – and their closeness endured into adulthood. When they both suffered bad break-ups in their 20s, for instance, Rasmussen went to stay with Amin; they refer to that period now as “the heartbreak summer”. He still didn’t know the truth about how his friend came to Denmark, though, so he did what any documentarist might do: he proposed making a film about him. Amin refused to reveal his identity on screen – but what if the film were animated?

The result is Flee, which alternates between scenes of Rasmussen interviewing his friend, dramatisations of Amin’s perilous journey to Copenhagen via Moscow, and present-day interludes showing him househunting with his boyfriend in which the concept of settling down presents unique challenges for someone who has spent his life running. Aside from the occasional excerpt of archive footage – the war-scarred streets of Kabul, the unruly waves seen from a boat smuggling people across the Baltic – every frame of the movie is animated, most of it in a simple, straightforwardly realistic fashion that matches Amin’s narration.

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No 10 set for U-turn over mandatory Covid jabs for NHS staff in England

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Minister says lower severity of Omicron variant ‘opens the window for us to look at it’

Downing Street appears likely to drop its policy of dismissing frontline NHS and care staff in England who refuse Covid vaccinations, a minister has strongly indicated, after nursing and care organisations called for this to happen.

A decision would be made “in the course of the next few days”, according to Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury. He said the lower severity of the Omicron variant of Covid did “open a space” for the policy to be reversed.

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Young people who lost jobs in pandemic in UK ‘returning to insecure work’

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Resolution Foundation thinktank report says third of ‘returners’ on temporary or zero-hours contracts

Young people who lost their jobs during the pandemic in the UK have returned to less secure work, often in gig economy roles, according to research from a leading thinktank, which also found almost 50,000 more men under the age of 24 are now economically inactive.

A report by the Resolution Foundation published on Monday found young people had returned to work rapidly in late 2021, with unemployment now slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels, but a third of the 18- to 34-year-olds back in the workplace were now in atypical, insecure work.

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‘Like sewage and rotting flesh’: Covid’s lasting impact on taste and smell

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Many sufferers have been left unable to eat due to long-term distortions to their senses

Four months after getting sick with Covid, Anne-Héloise Dautel couldn’t eat anything at all. “I just wanted to vomit, I was gagging at everything around me,” she said. “I couldn’t even stand my own smell. I was showering five times a day.” Coffee, toothpaste, shampoo and roast meat were the worst. By the time she went to hospital, she weighed just 46kg.

Severe weight loss and kidney failure are some of the impacts of smell and taste distortions which leave people unable to eat or drink things they loved, like coffee or bacon, because they smell like rotting flesh or sewage.

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‘We pray for rain’: Ethiopia faces catastrophic hunger as cattle perish in severe drought

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Animal carcasses litter the land in areas where the rains have failed, as millions go without enough food and water in a country already grappling with civil war

The circumference of Nimo Abdi Duh’s upper arm measures just 12cm and, while the number means nothing to her, it does to the health workers treating her. Nimo, two, like so many children in the arid lowlands of Ethiopia, is suffering from malnutrition.

“We have been affected by the drought,” says her mother, Shems Dire, looking anxiously on. “We don’t have milk to give to the children. My child is sick due to lack of food, and this happened because of the drought … Our cattle have been harmed by the drought. We have lost so many.

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‘We are so tired’: US parents and doctors say kids under five left behind in Covid vaccine race

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Child Covid cases have increased dramatically due to Omicron, yet no vaccine seems on the horizon for this age group

Four-year-old Joanna Gillikin likes to watch Ada Twist, Scientist, a Netflix children’s show about a young girl with a giant interest in science.

So when Matthew Gillikin and his wife, Shannon, enrolled Joanna in a trial in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19, they described it to her as a science experiment, like the ones Ada does.

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Sue Gray report: redacted version is imminent, say government sources

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Move follows anger after Met police asked civil servant to hold back details in her ‘partygate’ report

A heavily redacted report into Downing Street parties by the senior civil servant Sue Gray will be published imminently, the Guardian understands, after Scotland Yard provoked fury and confusion by revealing it had demanded key details of the worst offending be removed.

MPs labelled the Metropolitan police a broken organisation after the force admitted it had asked Gray to make “minimal reference” in her inquiry report to matters its officers were now investigating. The Met, battered by criticism, insisted it needed to protect the integrity of its investigation.

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Cold baths, cherry juice and sleep: the secret to staying fit in your 40s

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Despite aching backs and stiff joints, a growing number of elite athletes – from Zlatan Ibrahimović to Serena Williams – are pushing the clock back. So why can’t you? We ask the experts how to do it


Six years ago it looked as if Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s footballing career was approaching the final whistle. After Sweden’s early exit from Euro 2016, the striker announced his retirement from international competition. At 34, he was getting on a bit for an elite athlete. Cut to November 2021 and, days after firing in a spectacular free-kick for his club, AC Milan, Sweden’s record goalscorer was helping keep alive his country’s hopes of making the next World Cup. The retirement chat was over. “I am trying to prove that 40 is just a number,” he said.

Ibrahimovic had joined what feels like a growing club: the quadragenarian athlete holding back the clock. In an era of ever more punishing professional sport, these twilight stars seem to challenge notions that youth trumps all else. Members include American football superstar Tom Brady (44), the tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams (41, 40), Roger Federer (40), and Oksana Chusovitina (46), the eight-time Olympic gymnast from Uzbekistan.

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Care home Covid rules to be relaxed in England allowing more visitors

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Easing of restrictions comes as legal requirements for masks and NHS passes are dropped

Care home residents in England will be able to receive unlimited visitors from Monday as the restrictions to tackle the Omicron variant are eased, the Department of Health has said.

Self-isolation periods will be reduced from 14 days to 10 days for those residents who test positive, with further reductions if they test negative on days five and six.

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How Covid killed the one-night stand – and made us all kinkier

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There has been a sharp drop in one-off encounters, researchers say, but more people are enjoying friends with benefits and getting experimental in bed

A one-night stand, people used to say, is like a short story: if it is any good, you want it to go on for longer; if it isn’t, you could have done with 15 minutes’ more sleep. To which the retort is: sure – but a lot of people really like short stories.

A lot of people, in the pre-pandemic days, used to really like one-night stands, too. The sex therapist Jenny Keane hosts a wide-ranging sex chat through her Instagram account. On it, one woman wrote appreciatively: “The sex is purely focused on pleasure. You’re not thinking about your relationship dynamics, them not doing the dishes. It’s about being served and cared for physically. It can be a very empowering and beautiful thing.”

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Polish state has ‘blood on its hands’ after death of woman refused an abortion

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Family says young mother’s health deteriorated rapidly after the twins she was carrying died a week apart in the womb

The family of a Polish woman who died on Tuesday after doctors refused to perform an abortion when the foetus’s heart stopped beating have accused the government of having “blood on their hands”.

The woman, identified only as Agnieszka T, was said to have been in the first trimester of a twin pregnancy when she was admitted to the Blessed Virgin Mary hospital in Częstochowa on 21 December. Her death comes a year after Poland introduced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.

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