Experts say further investigation of link is urgently required and may be relevant to managing pandemic
Air pollution is likely to be increasing the number and severity of Covid-19 infections, according to the UK government’s expert advisers.
In a report published on Wednesday, the experts said further investigation of the link between dirty air and the coronavirus pandemic was “urgently required” and may be relevant to how the pandemic is managed.
Continue reading...Allegation comes as nation reels from similarly horrific crime and prompted protests in Bogotá
Colombian soldiers have been accused of raping a 15-year-old indigenous girl, in the second such case to emerge in a week.
Troops in the southern Guaviare region were accused in September of kidnapping, torturing and repeatedly raping a 15-year-old girl from the Nukak Makú tribe, but the case was not widely reported until this week.
Continue reading...Older patients turned away or left untreated, while domestic abuse is also rising, leading charity reports
When Souzi Bondeko’s grandfather started showing symptoms of Covid-19 and was struggling to breathe, she took him to a hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where he was put on a ventilator.
She dashed home to get some food and returned to be told by a member of staff that he had been taken off the machine as it it was needed elsewhere.
Continue reading...Leading black British poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols and Raymond Antrobus share their thoughts on protest, change and the trailblazers who inspired them. Introduction by Kadish Morris
Performance poetry revolutionised me. When I was 13, my mother invited me to a group called Leeds Young Authors, which she co-ran with founder and poet Khadijah Ibrahiim. Together, along with visiting poets, they ran writing workshops for teenagers. The selling point was that I would get the chance to travel to the US to compete in a poetry slam festival, but the excitement of getting on an aeroplane was soon overshadowed by what I can only describe as enlightenment. Poems performed at the festival taught me about police brutality, gentrification and climate change before I even owned a computer. Performance poetry immersed me in a world of critical thinking, but also, a community of black poets. I shared stages, shook hands and was taught by some of the greatest black British and African American poets before the age of 20. From Sonia Sanchez to Saul Williams to Lemn Sissay and Jackie Kay.
Black British history and literature are intrinsically connected. Poems such as Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Five Nights of Bleeding explored the 1981 Brixton riots, while Benjamin Zephaniah’s The Death of Joy Gardner lamented on the killing of a Jamaican student who died in 1993 after being detained during a police immigration raid at her home. Literature was a forum for idea-sharing, community-building and support too. The Caribbean Artists Movement, founded by Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, Trinidadian publisher John La Rose and Panamanian-Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey in London in 1966, set about promoting the work of marginalised Caribbean artists, writers and poets. More than 50 years later, black writers are yet to be fully absorbed into the mainstream. A 2018 study found that only 7% of work published in poetry journals were by people from BAME backgrounds. Black voices have often felt like guests in UK literature, despite being routinely summoned during political events. “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark” – a line from Home by the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire – was a prominent slogan of the migrant crisis in 2015.
Continue reading...Home Office commissioner Sara Khan reveals surge in online hate material since death of George Floyd
The Black Lives Matter movement has been aggressively exploited by the UK’s far right, which has recruited and radicalised people on the back of its success, the government’s chief adviser on extremism has warned.
Sara Khan, Britain’s first counter-extremism commissioner, said far-right activists had used the death of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter (BLM) to propagate white supremacist narratives online.
Continue reading...Concerns have been raised about the plan to merge the Foreign Office and DfID. Here’s why I am confident it will help us lead the way on aid
I have seen the enormous difference made by UK aid during my time as international development secretary. The UK is rightly respected and admired around the world for this work, which saves and changes lives in developing countries every day.
The power of our commitment to spend 0.7% of our gross national income on aid – and our expertise in this field – will not diminish when the Department for International Development (DfID) merges with the Foreign Office in September. The prime minister has made it crystal clear that UK aid’s mission to reduce poverty will be central to the new department’s mission.
Continue reading...Like many other migrant workers in the UK, Gomes knew he couldn’t live on statutory sick pay. So despite illness, he kept working
Emanuel Gomes spent the last day of his life cleaning an office in the Ministry of Justice (M0J). It was late April, at the height of the Covid-19 outbreak and most of the civil servants had been sent home. Gomes and his colleagues were told that as essential workers they should keep coming into work in the central London offices.
On 24 April, Gomes became so sick at work that a colleague, Amadou (not his real name), had to help him to get home. Amadou says: “In the last few days he was really ill. He lost his appetite, he had phlegm and he seemed to have a fever. I helped him home … by the time we got to Victoria station he was so sick he didn’t know where he was.”
Continue reading...With tobacco sales banned in effort to curb coronavirus, illegal trade has surged on border with Zimbabwe
South Africa and Zimbabwe have stepped up border patrols in a bid to stop cigarette smuggling, which has boomed since Pretoria banned the sale of tobacco in March.
The country claimed smokers were more prone to Covid-19 – something that has been challenged by tobacco companies – but the illegal trade has increased, despite South Africa erecting a R37m (£1.7m) 25-mile fence across the border in April as part of its measures to curb the spread of coronavirus. Smugglers have been crawling through broken sections of the fence and taking advance of the particularly porous Beitbridge/Musina crossing point.
Continue reading...Despite funding challenges, community aims to increase biodiversity at Langholm Moor making it resistant to climate change
A small community in the rolling uplands of southern Scotland hopes to create a major new nature reserve, straddling more than 10,000 acres of heather moorland home to hen harriers, black grouse and curlew.
The 2,300 villagers of Langholm, a small settlement a few miles north of the English border, hope to buy one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors, owned by one of the UK’s most powerful hereditary landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch.
Continue reading...The TV director and actor talk candidly about how racism is draining, limiting and ingrained. But is leaving to work in the US the answer?
The director Christiana Ebohon-Green (EastEnders, Call the Midwife, Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle) and the actor Wunmi Mosaku, 33, (Luther, End of the F**king World and Misha Green’s upcoming HBO/Sky Atlantic drama series, Lovecraft Country) have met before. In fact, they have worked together, on Ebohon-Green’s Bafta-longlisted short, Some Sweet Oblivious Antidote. They both have fond memories of the sun-dappled shoot by the Thames, with a (mostly black) cast of actors. But not every experience on set has been so joyful. Amid some laughter, a few tears and many weary sighs, they swap horror stories of industry racism, discuss solidarity among black creatives, and the opportunities and risks involved in a move to the US.
CEG: I’ve worked on a lot of mainstream television drama, so I’ve often been the only [black person] on set. For me [having this wider conversation about racism] is a relief. Sometimes, you air issues and people are like: “Oh yeah, we know! We’ve solved that! Can you stop going on?” So I’ve been very careful about what I said and assumed people understood.
Continue reading...Asylum seekers discharged from island holding centres are given little support to find accommodation and work
It never occurred to Sarah Husseini that one day she might think of Moria camp with something approaching affection. The 22-year-old Afghan spent two years in the infamous holding facility on Lesbos and, throughout, her young daughters were “sick, sick, sick”.
But then she, her husband Ali and their two toddlers were instructed to board a ferry to Piraeus and their world changed. “The UN told us ‘the government wants you to leave, you have papers now, you can’t stay here any more’,” she says, explaining why she has ended up semi-destitute in central Athens.
Continue reading...Emma Nicholson’s views on same-sex marriage raised as concern by writers and one former Booker winner
Damian Barr is leading a charge of writers, including one former Booker prize winner, who are calling on the Booker Foundation to remove the allegedly “homophobic” peer Emma Nicholson from her position as vice-president.
Lady Nicholson of Winterbourne, who voted against the same-sex marriage bill in 2013, is the widow of the late former chairman of Booker, Sir Michael Caine, who helped establish the prize. She is currently a vice-president of the Booker Foundation, and a former trustee of the prize.
Continue reading...Patients are looking for cure as healthcare system is on brink of collapse, say doctors
As coronavirus chaos has enveloped Pakistan, with hospitals overflowing, doctors dying and infections escalating at an unmanageable rate, a dangerous black market in blood plasma has emerged.
The blood plasma of recovered coronavirus patients is now being sold for upwards of £3,000 to those who are desperately looking for a cure, at a time when doctors say Pakistan’s healthcare system is on the brink of collapse.
Continue reading...Despite one of the world’s highest smoking rates, many politicians believe a ban will effect the economy
When patients quit cigarettes at the King Hussein Cancer Center’s smoking clinic they are asked to be patient with their children. Often their offspring have been exposed to so much secondhand smoke that they have become addicted, too.
“For every four cigarettes their parent has smoked, the child has smoked one,” says Firas al-Hawari, a physician who directs the clinic. “We can control the parents with medication, but the kids are going through withdrawals because we don’t have them on medication.”
Continue reading...When it comes to water infrastructure, America’s challenges resemble those of a developing country. It’s time for that to change
How can it be that in the midst of a pandemic, children living in the richest country in world history are being poisoned by tap water? For decades, our government has put corporate profits ahead of guaranteeing its people the right to clean water. We have neglected the most basic public investments to keep Americans healthy and safe. Now, as America battles an unprecedented public health crisis, we can no longer continue along a course in which companies have been allowed to buy up, privatize, and profit off a basic human right. The solution is not more privatization – it is for Congress to end decades of neglect and immediately invest billions into our public water systems so that we can finally guarantee clean drinking water to everybody.
That’s why we joined with Representative Ro Khanna to introduce the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (Water) Act. This comprehensive legislation would provide up to $35bn per year to overhaul our water infrastructure across the nation.
Continue reading...Drug addiction is common among men in many villages, leaving their wives to develop survival strategies for the family
Anita Zadid would divorce her husband if she could. Eight years into the marriage, her husband turned to opium and crystal meth because he couldn’t find work. He’s now addicted.
As well as taking care of her three children, Zadid, who was married at 14, says she also has to support her spouse. “Divorcing him is not an option in rural Afghanistan, but I mentally left my marriage many years ago,” the 30-year-old tells the Guardian. Sadly, she’s not the only woman to do so.
Continue reading...Writers had asked company ‘to reaffirm their commitment to transgender rights and equality’
Four authors represented by JK Rowling’s literary agency have resigned after accusing the company of declining to issue a public statement of support for transgender rights.
Fox Fisher, Drew Davies and Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir said they could no longer work with the Blair Partnership, the London-based agency that represents all aspects of the Harry Potter author’s work, because they were not convinced the company “supports our rights at all avenues”. One other author is understood to have also quit the agency but wishes to remain anonymous.
Continue reading...The lawyer representing 200 victims of the Windrush scandal says systemic racism is at the root of the problem
For the past three months, Jacqueline McKenzie says her front room has been covered with Windrush compensation files. Since lockdown, she has stopped going to the offices of the law firm she co-founded in 2010 and has been working from home. But her study is too small to accommodate the huge amount of paperwork that goes with the 200 separate claims she is filing on behalf of people affected by the Home Office citizenship scandal, during which thousands of people were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants because they could not prove they were British citizens.
“I think they are treating people with contempt,” she says. She is frustrated at the slow progress towards paying compensation to people who lost their jobs or their homes, were denied healthcare or the right to travel, or who were, in extreme cases, detained and deported. Part of the problem, she says, lies with the structure of the scheme, which requires claimants to gather large amounts of documentary proof of the losses they have incurred as a result of being miscategorised as unlawful residents (a problem that often arose because those affected were unable to gather the large amounts of documentary proof required to show that they had been living legally in the UK since the 1960s).
Continue reading...Drug research, well-practised NHS staff and greater awareness of dangers give reasons for hope
When a deluge of coronavirus cases threatened to overwhelm the NHS in March, Covid-19 was a brand new and little-understood disease, causing panic as well as deaths. Hospitals under huge pressure did all they could.
Next time round, if, as everyone supposes, there is a next time, it will be different. In a second wave, or even localised spikes across the nation, the health service will know more about what it is dealing with – and will be better able to help people recover and send them home, say doctors.
Continue reading...Many families are enduring terrible hardship, and campaigners fear long-term consequences for the most vulnerable in society
“Before Covid, my three children and I had structure. We would wake up in the morning, they would go to school and do their thing, and I would do mine. We had joy,” says Vicky (not her real name), a single parent living in one of the most disadvantaged boroughs in the country, in south London.
The capital has the highest rate of child poverty in any English region – more than 700,000 children, and 43% of children in inner London. Over the past five years, child poverty has risen in every London borough, in part because of the capital’s uniquely high housing, childcare and living costs, as well as low pay (72% of children in poverty are in working households) and the impact of £39bn cut nationally from the benefit system since 2010. Then, in March, came Covid-19 and lockdown, deepening and accelerating deprivation across the UK, increasing rates of child abuse, mental ill-health and domestic violence.
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