Intervention means all five living former prime ministers have voiced their opposition to the move
John Major has thrown his weight behind efforts to overturn government cuts to the UK’s overseas aid.
Ahead of a possible Commons vote on the issue next week, the former prime minister said the UK needed to remain “a nation that keeps its word”.
Continue reading...Up to three households can now mingle, and review ahead of 21 June will determine whether indoor activities can restart
Up to 30 people will be able to meet outdoors and large outdoor activities can resume in Wales from Monday, the first minister, Mark Drakeford, has announced.
The size of extended households can be increased to up to three households and a further household with a single adult or single adult with caring responsibilities will also be able to join.
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Jen Psaki said she did not consider Monday to be the deadline for reaching a bipartisan deal on an infrastructure bill.
The White House press secretary said Joe Biden will “continue to have conversations with Democrats and Republicans about what the path forward may look like”.
As Jen Psaki briefs the press, Joe and Jill Biden are enjoying a bike ride in Rehoboth Beach, where they are celebrating the first lady’s 70th birthday.
The president gave a wave to reporters as he rode past them:
President Biden and @FLOTUS bike along a trail in Rehoboth Beach to celebrate her birthday pic.twitter.com/wpm33Y0JIY
Continue reading...Axe falls on projects for Yemen, Syria, Rohingya refugees and people affected by famine in Africa
The government claimed Britain would be a “force for good” in the world when it defended merging the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office last year, but it soon announced £4bn in cuts to aid.
Charities instead warned that the world’s most vulnerable people would be hit by the “deadly force” of Britain’s new policies.
Continue reading...Study shows pattern of risky sexual behaviour by young men making a living in the booming boda boda industry
Uganda’s motorcycle taxis riders threaten to derail the country’s fight against HIV because of risky sexual behaviours, including sex with clients in lieu of payment, according to a new study.
At least 12% of a sample of 281 commercial riders, a common informal job known as boda boda and dominated by young men, admitted to engaging in transactional sex with customers who failed to pay their fares; 65.7% reported having had sex with more than one partner in the past 12 months; and 23% had had multiple partners in the same period, with 57.1% reporting that they did not use a condom at all in the six months prior to the survey, conducted by Makerere University College of Education and External Studies (CEES).
Continue reading...Analysis: young people’s testimonies show they are ready to draw systemic conclusions from the handling of the pandemic by political elites
They have been tested, examined, judged and graded since childhood; told they must excel, compete and succeed. But thanks to Covid-19, across Europe a generation of school and college leavers face a bleak present and an uncertain future.
When the Guardian asked Europeans in their late teens and early 20s how the pandemic has made them feel, you might have expected an outpouring of frustration: over jobs lost, friendships forcibly attenuated, dates cancelled. What arrived was a critique of capitalism.
Continue reading...As part of the Guardian’s 200th anniversary, we asked young people how the worst global pandemic in a century has affected their lives, hopes and dreams. Fifty from Europe’s Generation Z tell us how they see their future
Researchers say industry practice should change to encourage workers to seek help when they need it
Airlines are overlooking the mental health and wellbeing of pilots and other aviation workers in their scramble to get planes flying again, according to researchers.
Many aviation workers experienced anxiety, stress and depression during Covid-19 lockdowns, but they report feeling discouraged from acknowledging problems or seeking help, creating potential safety hazards and health problems.
Continue reading...Britain records no new deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test for first time since July 2020
The UK has announced no deaths from Covid-19 for the first time since July last year.
Official figures showed all four nations of the country recorded no new deaths on Tuesday within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test and 3,165 new cases of the virus. It means the official UK total number of deaths remains at 127,782, the first time the daily total has not risen since 30 July 2020.
Continue reading...Celebrity endorsements, new techniques and lockdown have led to rising demand for follicular transplants. But with patchy regulation, are men being exploited when they are vulnerable?
Hamish says he’s not at all vain. He wouldn’t consider getting his teeth whitened. He has an average life, with a happy marriage and two children. But when he caught sight of the top of his head in a family photo about eight years ago, something consumed him.
“I just saw this massive receding hairline and it triggered intense emotions,” he says from his home in Edinburgh, where he works in marketing. “I can feel my heart rate has increased just talking about it. It somehow threatens my identity so much that the ground feels shaky.”
Continue reading...Statues of historical figures are lazy, ugly and distort history. From Cecil Rhodes to Rosa Parks, let’s get rid of them all
Having been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game for the kind of moral panics that might make headlines in rightwing tabloids. It’s not like I hadn’t given them the raw material. In the course of my career I’d written pieces with headlines such as “Riots are a class act”, “Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people” and “End all immigration controls”. I might as well have drawn a target on my back. But the only time I was ever caught in the tabloids’ crosshairs was not because of my denunciations of capitalism or racism, but because of a statue – or to be more precise, the absence of one.
The story starts in the mid-19th century, when the designers of Trafalgar Square decided that there would be one huge column for Horatio Nelson and four smaller plinths for statues surrounding it. They managed to put statues on three of the plinths before running out of money, leaving the fourth one bare. A government advisory group, convened in 1999, decided that this fourth plinth should be a site for a rotating exhibition of contemporary sculpture. Responsibility for the site went to the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
Continue reading...The country star is not always remembered for his politics, but his about-face to withdraw support for Nixon and the Vietnam war may be his finest moment
“I speak my mind in a lot of these songs,” Johnny Cash wrote in the liner notes to the album Man in Black, released 50 years ago today. He might be better known now for the outlaw songs of his youth or the reckonings with death in his final recordings, but Cash used his 1971 album to set out his less-discussed political vision: long on feeling and empathy, and short on ideology and partisanship. The United States seemed hopelessly polarised, and Cash confronted that division head-on, demanding more of his fellow citizens and Christians amid the apparently endless war in Vietnam.
Continue reading...For the UK and elsewhere the pandemic’s end is in sight, but less fortunate parts of the world urgently need help
When Covid-19 began to spread rapidly in January 2020, governments across the world had limited strategies to deal with it. Without a vaccine or proven treatments for the disease, or even access to mass testing, the only choice political leaders faced was taking the least bad option available.
There were four approaches that different governments took during the beginning of the pandemic. China, New Zealand, Vietnam and Thailand chose to eliminate the virus at the cost of stopping international travel. Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea suppressed the virus through rigorous testing, tracing and isolating while avoiding harsh lockdowns. Sweden allowed the virus to spread through the population before realising health systems could not cope with an influx of Covid-19 patients. Meanwhile, European countries including England and France controlled the virus through a cycle of lockdown measures while keeping borders largely open. This resembled a holding pattern for a plane running out of fuel: people grew tired of continual restrictions, the economy suffered and Covid-19 was never fully suppressed.
Continue reading...Using individual children to ‘sell’ schemes to rich donors is similar to ‘poverty porn’ images of past, say experts, as calls grow to decolonise aid
International child sponsorship schemes have come under attack for perpetuating racist thinking, as an apology by a charity to thousands of children in Sri Lanka has sparked a debate over the money-raising schemes.
Plan International last week admitted it had made “mistakes” over its exit from Sri Lanka in 2020, following criticism from donors and former employees that it had failed 20,000 vulnerable children in the country.
Continue reading...When it hurts to walk, bend or even sit, it’s tempting to lie down until your spine sorts itself out. But moving can be the key to getting better
Turns out pandemics can be atrocious for our backs. By last October, more than a third of people in the UK had reported increased back pain, according to one study – and that was before an intense winter lockdown, followed by a month-long storm. We’ve been doing online yoga without an instructor’s watchful eye and lunging with Joe Wicks without warming up, but mostly slouching over laptops feeling tense or depressed.
While the onset of back, shoulder or neck pain can feel like the last straw, the good news is that it probably isn’t as bad as you think. “It’s not likely to be serious,” says Chris Mercer, an NHS consultant physiotherapist in Sussex who specialises in back pain. It was not uncommon to keep an old door under the bed, upon which to lie when your back “went”. But the latest evidence indicates that being active is essential for both avoidance and recovery. “Keep moving, keep active and things will settle,” he says.
Continue reading...The author’s new novel centres around an elderly couple bound in a suicide pact. Watching her parents age, the subject of dying with dignity is never far from her mind
For those of us with elderly parents, countless news broadcasts of bewildered residents cruelly exiled in care homes during this pandemic have been especially raw. Even so, I can’t be the only one who’s thought reflexively: “That will never be me.”
My friend Jolanta in Brooklyn has made that vow official. Put through quite the medical ringer herself, she tended to a difficult mother through a drawn-out decline. Not long ago, she declared to me fiercely that she’d no interest in living beyond the age of 80. Dead smart and not given to whimsy, Jolanta was already about 60, the very point at which old age starts to seem like something that might actually happen. I couldn’t help but wonder, should she indeed turn 80, will she take matters into her own hands – or not?
Continue reading...Rising house prices and restrictions on overseas travel are leading to a surge in popularity for houseboats
Little more than six months ago, Paul and Anthony Smith-Storey were still living in a three-bedroom semi-detached house near St Helens in Merseyside. But now the couple – and their dog, Dexter – have traded it all in for a life afloat in a two-metre-wide narrowboat on Peak Forest Canal in Derbyshire.
“We took the equity out of the house, bought the boat and thought we’d enjoy it while we were still alive,” said Anthony, 48, an NHS sonographer. They are not the only ones.
Continue reading...After a life marked by abuse, fame, scandal and struggle, the Irish singer-songwriter says she never lost faith
Sinéad O’Connor has been pretty much invisible for the past few years. There’s a good reason, though, she tells me with her usual disregard for social niceties. “I’ve spent most of the time in the nuthouse. I’ve been practically living there for six years.” She pauses, takes an intense drag on her fag, and warns me off being similarly politically incorrect. “We alone get to call it the nuthouse – the patients.”
O’Connor is a music great – her 1990 version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U is one of the most transcendent five minutes in pop history, the solitary tear falling from her eye in the accompanying video one of its most beautiful images. The single topped the charts worldwide, as did the album it was taken from, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Astonishingly, in the 31 years that have passed, she has never had another UK Top 10 hit single and only one Top 10 album. And yet she remains a household name.
Continue reading...Growing numbers of frazzled parents are paying a fortune to people who claim they can help them get a good night’s rest. Are they being taken for a ride? Plus a doctor’s top tips for children of all ages
By the time her baby was four months old, Zara, a psychologist and executive coach from Surrey, was able to open a bottle of wine and have “a bit of an evening”. He was sleeping in four-hour stints, waking twice in the night. Then, at four and half months, his sleep pattern changed: “It was five wakes, then six, then eight,” Zara says. She was so exhausted she ended up Googling “can you die from sleep deprivation?”.
“I was broken, emotional, confused, sleep-deprived and catastrophising,” she says. “He wouldn’t be down for longer than 20 minutes, and I was losing my mind. Using a sleep consultant was the best money I’ve ever spent; £250 to give me the confidence to trust my child to get himself to sleep without me.”
Continue reading...The young star of Peter Murimi’s intimate documentary is as poor, religious and conservative as his peers – and fearful of a violent backlash, he says
Samuel Asilikwa grew up in rural Kenya. There was a strict template for masculinity, informed by centuries of tradition – and intolerance. In a new documentary about his life, we see his father, a pastor, question Asilikwa about why he is yet to find a wife. We then watch as he relocates to Nairobi in search of work and adventure. He finds community, friendship and intense romance with a man called Alex.
Peter Murimi’s film I Am Samuel, shot verité-style over the course of five years, is at its most powerful contrasting city and countryside. Kenya’s farmland, clay roads, shrubbery and corn fields are evidence of a still, yet cyclical, pattern of life compared with the infinite noise and claustrophobia of Nairobi. But it is also a film about a shifting political landscape, where “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” is punishable by 14 years’ imprisonment.
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