Category Archives: Society

More boats on canals and rivers than in 18th century as thousands opt for life afloat

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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.

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Sinéad O’Connor: ‘I’ll always be a bit crazy, but that’s OK’

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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.

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‘I was losing my mind’: can baby sleep gurus really help exhausted parents?

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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.”

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I Am Samuel: the film aiming to ‘change the narrative’ on being gay in Kenya

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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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‘They fired at everyone’: peril of Pakistani villagers protesting giant luxury estate

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Activists were shot and beaten at demonstration to stop property giant Bahria Town building on indigenous land they say was taken with force

Muhammad Anwar was not aware of any danger when he took the day off work to join his friends at a demonstration on a construction site of a powerful real estate company.

When Anwar, 35, reached the west bank of Langeji river, near Karachi, earlier this month, he saw the bulldozers levelling land next to Bahria Town, a luxury gated development.

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‘Protect and invest’: WHO calls for 6m more nurses worldwide

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Warnings of brain drain from developing world as Covid adds to numbers of nurses leaving profession

Health ministers around the world are being urged to sign off on plans to create 6m more nursing jobs by 2030, amid warnings that Covid-19 has exacerbated a global shortage and could spark a “brain drain” from the developing world.

Delegates meeting virtually this week at the World Health Assembly, the key decision-making body of the World Health Organization, are expected to adopt a resolution calling on countries to transform the nursing profession through more investment, support and training.

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After the inferno: Sierra Leone’s poorest struggle to recover from slum fire – in pictures

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A blaze ripped through the overcrowded settlement of Susan’s Bay in Freetown in March, injuring hundreds. British photographer Henry Kamara, of Sierra Leone descent, documents the aftermath in this coastal community as people try to rebuild their lives

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Councils in Covid hotspots criticise advice to ‘minimise’ travel

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Local leaders say latest guidance – updated following criticism – was not what was agreed at meeting on Tuesday

Ministers are facing fresh opposition from local authorities over updated travel advice urging people to minimise travel to areas with higher coronavirus cases.

The government revised its official guidance on Tuesday following criticism that it had introduced a lockdown “by stealth” by urging people to avoid all but essential travel to eight Covid hotspots in England.

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Spain PM decries domestic violence surge after five women killed in a week

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Pedro Sánchez condemns ‘misogynist scourge’ after deaths of women at hands of partners or ex-partners

The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has denounced as “unacceptable” a surge in domestic violence in which five women were killed in the past week by their partners or ex-partners.

Among the victims was a 42-year-old Barcelona woman who was stabbed to death by her husband who then killed himself, and a pregnant Moroccan woman who was killed by her partner, who called police to confess.

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WHO and global faith leaders call for fair access to Covid vaccines

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Declaration warns that the world is at a turning point in saving poorer countries from devastation

Global faith leaders and senior health and humanitarian figures are calling on countries to ensure the equitable distribution of Covid vaccines, warning that the world is “at a turning point”.

The signatories of an international declaration include Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization; Henrietta Fore, executive director of Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency; Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross; Filippo Grandi, United Nations high commissioner for refugees; Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the global Anglican church; Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar; and Christian and Jewish leaders.

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GPs stricken by long Covid ‘shocked and betrayed’ at being forced from jobs

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Unions demand fair compensation for dozens of doctors now unable to work because of debilitating symptoms

Family doctors are being forced out of their jobs after developing long Covid, prompting demands for the government to compensate NHS staff with the debilitating condition who cannot work.

GPs struggling with the condition have told the Observer they felt “shocked and betrayed” when their colleagues removed them from their posts because of prolonged sick leave.

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Pfizer and AstraZeneca ‘highly effective’ against India Covid variant

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A Public Health England study has revealed the vaccines can be up to 88% effective after a second dose

Both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs are highly effective at protecting people from the strain of the Covid-19 virus first found in India, a study by Public Health England (PHE) has found.

The analysis, carried out between 5 April and 16 May, found the Pfizer vaccine was 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the India variant two weeks after a second dose, compared with 93% effectiveness against the Kent strain. For its part, the AstraZeneca jab was 60% effective, compared with 66% against the Kent variant over the same period.

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Plan International accused of abandoning children in Sri Lanka exit

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Children’s charity faces claims it failed vulnerable children and misled donors after shutting down activities in the country

One of the world’s largest children’s rights charities has admitted it “made a number of mistakes” when it left Sri Lanka abruptly last year, amid accusations it had misled the public and donors and failed 20,000 vulnerable children in the country.

Former employees and provincial governors who spoke to the Guardian described Plan International’s exit as “irresponsible”, “cynical and indefensible”.

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Infected blood scandal: Hancock pledges payouts if advised by inquiry

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Health secretary agrees government has ‘moral responsibility’ to address what happened in 1970s and 80s

Matt Hancock has said compensation will be paid to people people infected by contaminated blood products and their relatives if is recommended by the public inquiry into the scandal.

Appearing at the inquiry on Friday, the health secretary agreed the government had a “moral responsibility” to address what had happened.

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Thousands of breast implant victims will get payouts after court ruling

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Case in Paris was brought by 2,700 women over implants made by French company and certified as safe by German firm

Thousands of victims of the PIP breast implant scandal, including 540 British women, will receive compensation after a Paris appeals court ruling.

The case in Paris was brought by 2,700 women who said they had suffered long-term health effects after receiving implants manufactured by a French firm which were filled with cheap, industrial-grade silicone not cleared for human use.

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Putting economics over ethics is a dismal vaccination strategy – Bulgaria shows why | Luba Kassova

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Bulgaria focused on protecting the economy over saving older people from Covid. Ultimately, it will achieve neither

April will forever be in my memory as a month of painful unfairness: it is when I had my first Covid-19 vaccine in the UK and my unvaccinated father died of the virus in Bulgaria. I’m a middle-aged, healthy woman. My father was a vulnerable 85-year-old with underlying health conditions.

I have a pile of letters from the NHS that arrived for my father since January, inviting him to get a vaccination in London, the city he left for his native Bulgaria six months before. With sadness and disquiet, I wonder why Bulgaria did not protect my father in his old age while the UK’s NHS has made every endeavour to do so. Why have I been protected in my middle age while about 90% of Bulgarians over 80 have not?

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Acid test: scientists show how LSD opens doors of perception

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Study analysing brain scans of people finds psychedelic drug lowers barriers that constrain thoughts

When Aldous Huxley emerged from a mescaline trip that veered from an obsession with the folds in his trousers to wonder at the “miraculous” tubularity of the bamboo legs on his garden chairs, he offered an opinion on how the drug worked.

Writing in The Doors of Perception, his 1954 book that took its name from a William Blake poem, Huxley declared that the psychedelic “lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life”.

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Air pollution linked to ‘huge’ rise in child asthma GP visits

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Exclusive: consultations for asthma and other respiratory infections go up with increased dirty air, finds study

A “huge” increase in the number of visits to doctors by children with asthma problems occurs after a week of raised air pollution, according to a study. The number of inhaler prescriptions also increases significantly.

Dirty air is already known to increase hospital treatment for severe asthma attacks and other respiratory problems. But the new research is the first using clinical data to show increased illness among the much bigger number of people who seek treatment from their GP.

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Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine has approved storage period extended

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Increased flexibility of vaccine expected to have ‘significant impact’ on rollout in EU member states

The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine can be stored at fridge temperature for much longer than previously recommended, according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The previous advice was the vaccine needed to be kept at an ultra-low temperature, between -70C and -80C, until a few days before use when it could be transferred to a standard medical fridge.

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