Charity says Covid policy is having ‘devastating consequences’ for sector already in crisis
Some of England’s only holiday homes for disabled people in care are facing closure due to the policy that means all staff must be fully vaccinated against coronavirus.
The charity, Revitalise, said England’s vaccines mandate for care homes was having “devastating consequences” for a sector already in crisis.
Continue reading...With poverty deepening, state services are failing to cope with rising rates of addiction
Kola* was in secondary school in Nigeria when he started smoking cigarettes. He soon graduated to cannabis, heroin and eventually to crack cocaine. Access to drugs was easy and he felt the pressure of friends to participate.
In 2002, when he was 39, he was introduced to a private drug rehabilitation centre in Ibadan, in the south-west of the country, where he spent 90 days weaning himself off his addiction.
Continue reading...This acute documentary gets under the surface of its Palestinian film-maker’s sharp-tongued grandmother to the loneliness and resentment within
Juna Suleiman’s documentary about Hiam, her octogenarian grandmother who lives in Nazareth, is no journey through a picture-perfect family album. Hiam is not the cake-baking kind of grandmother. In fact, she is grumpy, foul-mouthed and very politically incorrect. It could have been quite annoying to spend more than an hour with someone so disagreeable, and yet Suleiman’s love for her grandmother’s quirks shines through, making this familial snapshot an interesting watch.
First off, Hiam is not the sister of that Mussolini. For reasons untold, her parents named one of her brothers after Il Duce. Another child, named Hitler, died in infancy. Still, the film does not dwell much on Hiam’s younger days, and instead focuses on her day-to-day activities, which include berating her ever-changing cleaners, venting bitterness about the news, and lamenting her son’s rare visits. Mostly shot inside Hiam’s apartment, the film acquires an undeniable sense of claustrophobia, which renders her bitterness understandable rather than unforgiving. Instead of turning a senior citizen into a one-dimensional cliche, the decision to capture both Hiam’s humour and her unpleasant side gives us the fullness of her personality. Hiam may look harmless, but you would think twice before crossing her.
Continue reading...Nearly eight out of 10 of young Britons blame capitalism for the housing crisis and two-thirds want to live under a socialist economic system. How did that happen?
The young are hungry and the rich are on the menu. This delicacy first appeared in the 18th century, when the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau supposedly declared: “When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!” But today this phrase is all over Twitter and other social media. On TikTok, viral videos feature fresh-faced youngsters menacingly raising their forks at anyone with cars that have start buttons or fridges that have water and ice dispensers.
So should the world’s billionaires – and fridge-owners – start sleeping with one eye open? Hardly. It’s clear that millennials (those born between the early 80s and the mid-90s) and zoomers (the following generation) are not really advocating violence. But it is also clear that this is more than just another viral meme.
Continue reading...Social Market Foundation suggests measures including better childcare provision to increase birthrate
Britain is facing a “baby shortage” that could lead to “long-term economic stagnation”, a thinktank has said.
The Social Market Foundation (SMF) said the birthrate was almost half what it was at its postwar peak in the 1960s, and the country’s ageing population could lead to economic decline.
Continue reading...His 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, has become a huge pandemic hit, topping bestseller lists this summer and becoming a meme on social media. What does it tell us about the world we live in?
When Dr Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, it was a huge hit with yoga people. That is not a euphemism for “rich, underoccupied people”, it is just people who do yoga. Certain physical activities do something weird to your brain: ancient memories resurface, often with new feelings or perspectives attached; you start treating yourself with more compassion. It doesn’t make sense until you read Van der Kolk. After that, nothing has ever made more sense.
His thesis centres on trauma: the urgent work of the brain after a traumatic event is to suppress it, through forgetting or self-blame, to avoid being ostracised. But the body does not forget; physiological changes result, a “recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormones, an alteration in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant”, as he says in his book. The stress is stored in the muscles and does not dissipate. This has profound ramifications for talking therapies and their limits: the rational mind cannot do the repair work on its own, since that part of you is pretending it has already been repaired.
Continue reading...Playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm on how the groundbreaking female punk band helped her tell the story of women suffocating in the prison system
It was a bit of a “pinch me” moment, to be honest. Earlier this month I sat in the rehearsal room for Typical Girls and watched our incredible cast play the music of the Slits to Tessa Pollitt, an original member of the band.
When I first started writing this show, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would get to this point. This absolute legend, punk royalty, was beaming at the liveness of it all and so were we. This is what we’ve all been aching to do.
Continue reading...More than 100m doses could be discarded by December if global leaders do not share jabs with poorest countries, warns former PM
More than 100m Covid vaccine doses are due to expire and be “thrown away” unless global leaders urgently share surplus supplies with the world’s poorest countries, Gordon Brown has warned.
The “staggering” number of stockpiled “use now” jabs will be of no use to anyone by December, according to a new report from the research group Airfinity.
Continue reading...When the ‘subscription social network’ OnlyFans announced it would be banning the sexually explicit content that made it a billion-dollar business, sex workers were up in arms – and many observers wondered how the move could make financial sense. Then it had second thoughts. So what does this tech saga tell us about where pornography fits into the future of the internet – and is it just another example of the sex industry treating women as disposable?
This episode includes discussion of sex and pornography. It first aired on Today in Focus.
OnlyFans bills itself as a wide-ranging ‘subscription social network’ where content creators of any kind can charge their followers to view their output – but in reality its hugely successful business is largely based around sex. That emphasis only grew during the pandemic, with more and more users spending their free time online – and more people wondering about a new source of income. With the company valued at about $1bn (£720m), and celebrities like Cardi B and Bella Thorne signing up, it was hard to see it doing anything other than more of the same.
Continue reading...New drug combination shrunk tumours significantly in 46% of patients with treatment-resistant form of disease
Thousands of women with ovarian cancer could benefit from a revolutionary drug combination after it was shown to shrink tumours in half of patients with an advanced form of the disease.
The pair of drugs – which work together to block the signals cancer cells need to grow – could offer a new treatment option for women with a type of ovarian cancer that rarely responds to chemotherapy or hormone therapy.
Continue reading...I felt overwhelmed: 40,000 hits to my website – 50 times more than the average month – plus 2,000 emails, people tagging me in social media posts to let their followers know they had signed up to my online anti-racism course – but not always actually signing up. The murder of George Floyd had thrown up a very apparent collective sense of white guilt around the world.
I had been doing anti-racism work long before the summer of 2020, so I didn’t understand why – increased volume aside – some of these interactions felt so different to the usual business inquiries I receive. I felt there was such a sense of ownership over me, my time, my words, what I should talk about and when. The more boundaries I put up, the more they would trample over them.
Continue reading...England’s deputy medical chief asked for data to be withheld unless British vaccine guinea pigs allowed to travel abroad
• Coronavirus – latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage
England’s deputy chief medical officer asked ministers to withhold all UK clinical trial data from the EU if European countries continued to deny entry to British vaccine trial volunteers, the Observer can reveal.
Jonathan Van-Tam made the extraordinary proposal after months of uncertainty for the 19,000 volunteers who are effectively unable to travel to Europe to see family, work or go on holiday because they took part in trials of Novavax and Valneva.
Continue reading...Thomas Cook chief executive predicts this weekend will be biggest of the year so far; about 1,000 protesters gather in Melbourne as state records 535 cases
Prof Adam Finn, a member of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, has said while it is not “essential” for 12-15 years to get the Covid-19 vaccination, it is also “perfectly sensible” for them to have it.
He told Times Radio:
It’s a finely balanced decision. It’s not a black and white decision. It’s not essential that these children receive the vaccine, but equally it’s a perfectly sensible thing to do. It’s being offered because the benefits do outweigh the risks, and it’s available for people who want it. And I’m afraid that’s the truth of the situation.
Because the risks on either side are not that high. It’s not like these children are at great risk from Covid, or indeed that they’re at great risk from the vaccination.
Ronapreve, the Covid antibody drug, is to be given to vulnerable NHS patients.
Covid antibody drug Ronapreve to be given to vulnerable NHS patients https://t.co/lU6CTVlE3g
Continue reading...Campaigners fear ban emboldens anti-choice governments as more aggressive opposition, better organised and funded, spreads from US
The new anti-abortion law in Texas is a “terrifying” reminder of the fragility of hard-won rights, pro-choice activists have said, as they warn of a “more aggressive, much better organised [and] better funded” global opposition movement.
Pro-choice campaigners have seen several victories in recent years, including in Ireland, Argentina and, most recently, Mexico, where the supreme court ruled last week that criminalising abortion was unconstitutional. Another is hoped for later this month when the tiny enclave of San Marino, landlocked within Italy, holds a highly charged referendum.
Continue reading...Traffic-light system replaced, with foreign countries now listed as either ‘red’ or OK for travel
Half-term holiday bookings are expected to surge after ministers unveiled a simplification of Covid foreign travel rules, replacing the traffic-light system with a single red list and bringing in a laxer regime for tests.
But while MPs and some travel groups welcomed the new system, airlines voiced anger that fully vaccinated travellers returning to England will still have to take a test after they return, even if this will be changed to a cheaper lateral flow version.
Continue reading...Exclusive: privacy concerns ‘must not delay use of neuralMatch algorithm to protect victims of abuse’
Child protection experts from across the world have called on Apple to implement new scanning technologies urgently to detect images of child abuse.
In August, Apple announced plans to use a tool called neuralMatch to scan photos being uploaded to iCloud online storage and compare them to a database of known images of child abuse.
Continue reading...Evacuation of employees, not contractors, ‘splitting hairs’, says HRW, warning of days left to save lives
Afghan employees who worked as contractors on UK aid projects fear for their lives after not being granted resettlement in Britain.
The Guardian has been in contact with four families who said they had been targeted by the Taliban because they worked for the UK government, and have now been forced into hiding.
Continue reading...Heather Maddern and her daughter, Sammie-Jo Forde, were care workers and Maddern had shared conspiracy theories online
An anti-vaxxer mother and her daughter died just days apart in a Belfast hospital after they contracted Covid-19, leaving their family “devastated”.
The BBC reported that Sammie-Jo Forde, 32, died in the Ulster hospital on Saturday, where she had been treated on the same ward as her mother, Heather Maddern, 55, who died on 31 August.
Continue reading...Joe Biden has introduced a vaccine mandate affecting millions, but some countries have gone further
Following the decision by the US president, Joe Biden, to introduce a vaccine mandate for millions of workers, and the UK government’s decision to row back on its push to require vaccine passports for nightclubs and other crowded events, where does the issue of insisting on vaccination stand globally?
Continue reading...Blinded by medical intervention as a baby, Billups became one of the leaders of a groundbreaking, world-shaking 1977 protest. He talks about what drives him and why Barack Obama loves his energy
“My mother used to tell us we had to be really good,” says Dennis Billups. “There were always two strikes against us – so you had to hit the third strike out of the park.” The “strikes” were being Black and being blind. And growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, both were potential sources of open discrimination. “There were times when, even walking in our own neighbourhood, we would get: ‘You’re supposed to stay inside.’ ‘Don’t you have a dog?’ ‘Don’t you have a cane?’” At times this could turn physical. “Some neighbours would turn water on us and stuff like that.” Finding employment was also a challenge. “Being blind, they didn’t have to do too much except say: ‘We’re not going to hire you,’ or: ‘We don’t think you can do this.’ So it was a glass ceiling, more or less. I’m sure with my twin sister there was a lot more, being a woman, African American and blind as well, but she was a hell of a fighter.”
Billups is a fighter, too, albeit one whose principal weapons are determination, congeniality, optimism – and a mellifluous voice. Now in his late 60s, speaking on Zoom from the San Francisco public library, he still radiates an infectious positivity that helped him as a young man when he played a key role in a lesser-known battle for civil rights.
Continue reading...