Category Archives: Society

We’ve cut aid to Yemen and children will starve – is this what global Britain means?

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Monday’s announcement confirmed my worst fears – not even those in the most desperate crises are safe from aid cuts

Three weeks ago, foreign office minister James Cleverly told me that in the face of drastic cuts to the UK’s aid budget, Yemen would remain a UK priority country and the government would use the full force of its diplomatic efforts to bring about peace.

On Monday, those words rang hollow when he announced the UK was slashing humanitarian aid to Yemen by more than 50% compared with last year. As a consequence, an already devastated country now faces the worst famine in decades and the prospect of lasting peace seems further away than ever.

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‘It’s an arms race’: the tech teams trying to outpace paedophiles online

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As platforms pivot towards greater encryption, analysts are rushing to finesse child abuse prevention technology

“Predators are often early adopters of technology,” says Sarah Smith, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK child abuse hotline. “It’s an arms race, we have to be constantly horizon-scanning.”

Smith and her team, based in an unassuming office in Cambridge, are a key link in a chain of experts around the world developing and finessing technology that tracks down paedophiles and removes child abuse images found online.

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Child abuse hotline reports rise in calls from men viewing illegal content

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Growing use of adult pornography in lockdown may lead to more people seeking out images of under-18s, experts say

Child abuse experts have reported a rise in the number of men contacting a specialist helpline for people who are watching or considering watching online child sexual abuse material.

The Stop It Now! helpline had its busiest year in 2020, handling more than 12,500 calls, emails and live chats – up from 10,700 in 2019. More than 3,500 individuals asked for help because they were worried about their own or someone else’s online sexual behaviour towards children.

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Time to say goodbye? Calls rarely end when we want them to, study finds

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Whether talking to family, friends or strangers, calls hardly ever end when both parties are ready

So you just called to say “I love you” – but how long should you stay on the phone?

New research suggests no matter who we’re talking to, or what we’re talking about, conversations rarely conclude when the two individuals want them to end.

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More than 75% of Syrian refugees may have PTSD, says charity

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‘There is a huge amount of damage you can’t see – the mental trauma’, says Syria Relief report author

More than three-quarters of Syrian refugees may be suffering serious mental health symptoms, 10 years after the start of the civil war.

A UK charity is calling for more investment in mental health services for refugees in several countries after it found symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were widespread in a survey of displaced Syrians.

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Gilbert and George on their epic Covid artworks: ‘This is an enormously sad time’

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The artists have responded to the pandemic with comic, haunting works showing themselves being buffeted around a chaotic London. They talk about lines of coffins, illegal raves and ‘shameful’ statue-toppling

As they call themselves living sculptures, I can’t resist asking Gilbert and George what they think of all the statue-toppling that took place last year. When I ask for their verdict on the removal of public works that have been accused of celebrating slavery and colonialism, they are sceptical.

“We would call that shameful behaviour,” says George. “And it’s very odd – because normally those statues are totally invisible. Nobody ever looks at them. I remember, very near my home town, there’s a statue of Redvers Buller, the hero of the Boer war, surrounded by dying Zulus and things. And if you asked people in Exeter, ‘Where’s Buller’s statue?’, none of them knew. It’s a bit silly. Rewriting history is very silly.”

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Guilt and fury: how Covid brought mothers to breaking point

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The pandemic exposed gender inequality, shattering the fragile jigsaw of support that allowed women with children to work. Radical action is necessary to prevent women’s rights backsliding a generation

“It is so hard, I cannot describe it.”

“I burned out, completely.”

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Britain must reset its compass, from housing to wages, says archbishop of York

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Stephen Cottrell says the nation has learned to live with wrongs when it should be trying to change them

Britain needs to reset its compass in a political climate in which “we’ve learned to accommodate things that we know are wrong”, the archbishop of York has said.

Stephen Cottrell, who was enthroned in October, told the Observer: “Our compass has slipped; we’ve allowed ourselves to believe that things can’t change, that this is just the way the world is. Politics has, I think, shrunk. There’s a loss of vision about what the world could be like.”

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Doctors fear new child mental health crisis in UK, made worse by Covid

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Surge in cases expected as schools reopen and charities report 70% rise in demand for services

A surge in child mental health cases is expected to emerge as schools reopen next week, amid warnings of a “crisis on top of a crisis” hitting vulnerable children during the pandemic.

Paediatricians, psychologists and charitable groups providing mental health support all told the Observer they were seeing increasing demand and warned of another surge as lockdown is lifted. Several reported longer waiting lists for young people in need of help.

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Vaccine envy, inoculation etiquette and judging the unjustly jabbed

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Queue-jumping triggers rows and resignations – and experts say it could undermine trust in the system

Vaccines against Covid-19 may represent a peak of human ingenuity and achievement – but that still leaves a sticky problem of etiquette: how should you behave during a global scramble for the jab?

When someone jumps the queue and gets vaccinated, do you condemn their selfishness, admire their chutzpah, ask for tips? When a friend or relative is way ahead of you in the queue, are you happy for them or resentful? Is yearning for vaccines a legitimate existential response or is it just a symptom of Vomo – fear of missing out on a vaccine?

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The UK couples breaking Covid lockdown to avoid breaking up

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Compliance with lockdown is proving increasingly hard for people in relationships who don’t live together

Since most of the UK went back into lockdown on 5 January, people have once again been forced to “stay at home, save lives”. But with “pandemic burnout” on the rise many say compliance is proving increasingly difficult.

People in relationships who do not live with their partner have been in a tough position throughout the pandemic. Faced with the prospect of breaking lockdown or breaking up, many couples have opted for the former.

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‘You find a way’: Judi Dench on working through sight loss

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Actor describes being helped with lines and learning by repetition at event for the Vision Foundation

Dame Judi Dench has spoken of her determination to carry on working despite sight loss, even if that means using friends to learn lines and being gently told to stop delivering speeches to the proscenium arch rather than her fellow actors.

Dench described how she copes with deteriorating eyesight – the challenges, the unexpected advantages and the funny side – at an online event on Thursday with Stephen Fry and Hayley Mills for the Vision Foundation, the London sight loss charity.

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From dealing drugs to delivering food: Pastor Mick on Burnley’s Covid crisis – video report

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Pastor Mick Fleming has devoted all of his time in this lockdown to supporting the poorest communities in Burnley. But his life hasn’t always been this way. He tells us how he swapped a life of crime ​for delivering food parcels​ seven days a week, holding funerals for free and counselling people through drug relapses. He says the suffering of the poorest people in his town should make society deeply uncomfortable

Mick's Church on the Street charity: https://www.cots-ministries.com/


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Malawi MPs debate bill to liberalise abortion laws as churches oppose

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Law would widen strict rules in country where thousands suffer complications from unsafe terminations

A bill to liberalise Malawi’s abortion laws will be debated by MPs today in the face of opposition from faith groups.

If passed, the termination of pregnancy bill would allow abortions when a woman’s mental or physical health is in danger, in cases of rape and incest, and when there are serious foetal abnormalities.

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Claudette Colvin: the woman who refused to give up her bus seat – nine months before Rosa Parks

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It was a spring afternoon in 1955 when a teenager’s spontaneous act of defiance changed US history. Why did it take 40 years for her to get any credit?

It was 2 March 1955, and an unusually humid spring day when students at Booker T Washington high school, a segregated school in the heart of the Jim Crow south, had been let off early to make their way home. A group boarded a segregated public bus, which wound through segregated neighbourhoods gradually filling up with passengers.

A 15-year-old gifted Black student, with aspirations to become a civil rights attorney, took a window seat near the exit door. She gazed outdoors until the white driver instructed her to give up her seat for a white passenger standing nearby.

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Calls for mandatory Covid jabs conflict with Britons’ right to say no

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Analysis: idea is not as simple as it seems, due to the fact vaccination is not mandatory under UK law

The UK government has always said there will be no compulsory Covid vaccination. It is only nervously dipping a toe in the waters of the vaccine passport issue, which could have implications for those who do not have one. But some employers appear prepared to dive straight in. “No jab, no job,” says Charlie Mullins, who runs Pimlico Plumbers. He wants to be able to tell his customers they have nothing to fear from a visit to fix their leaking pipes.

Care homes are understandably thinking hard about it too. They have vulnerable people to protect and the families on the outside will be more than anxious to know that an elderly mum or dad is being looked after by somebody who is fully vaccinated. Barchester Healthcare, the second-biggest care home provider in the UK, has spelled it out to its 17,000 staff that if they do not get vaccinated even though they are eligible, there will be no more shifts for them from the end of April, said the chief executive, Dr Pete Calveley.

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Covax delivers first Covid vaccines in ‘momentous occasion’

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Doses land in Accra as part of scheme seeking to offset ‘vaccine nationalism’

Covax has delivered its first Covid-19 vaccine doses in a milestone for the ambitious programme that seeks to offset “vaccine nationalism” by wealthy countries and ensure poor ones do not wait years to start inoculating people.

An aircraft carrying 600,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine landed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on Wednesday, where jabs will be administered to frontline health workers on Tuesday. Vaccine doses will arrive on Friday in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and will be given from Monday.

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Yazidis have been forgotten during Covid. They need justice, jobs and a return home | Nadia Murad

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Survivors of Islamic State brutality are pushed further into the margins as the pandemic causes the world to turn inward

Staring at the same four walls day after day, unable to find work, reunite with relatives, or send your children to school. The Covid pandemic has rendered this bleak picture a reality for many people across the globe. Yet for many who have survived or are living through conflict, these hardships are hardly novel.

For the Yazidi ethnic minority in Iraq, Islamic State’s 2014 genocide created adversity long before the pandemic ever did. For more than six years, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis have been in camps for internally displaced people (IDP) staring at the same four walls of their tents. They are unable to find work because Isis razed their farms and businesses. They cannot reunite with relatives still in Isis captivity or attend the burials of family members whose bodies remain in mass graves.

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Failure to enact public duty law ‘has worsened England inequality in pandemic’

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Exclusive: government urged to activate part of Equality Act that would impose duty on public bodies to tackle inequality

The failure of successive governments to enact part of the Equality Act, which would have imposed a duty to address socio-economic disadvantage, has exacerbated inequalities in England during the coronavirus pandemic, a thinktank has claimed.

The Runnymede Trust’s report, Facts Don’t Lie, says that the public sector duty provision would have imposed a legal obligation on education authorities in England to ensure working class children on free school meals were fed properly while schools were shut and had access to laptops for remote learning.

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