Category Archives: Society

Risks of cannabis use for mental health treatment outweigh benefits

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New study shows evidence of positive outcomes is scarce while symptoms can be exacerbated

The use of cannabis medicines to treat people with depression, anxiety, psychosis or other mental health issues cannot be justified because there is little evidence that they work or are safe, according to a major new study.

A review of evidence from trials conducted over nearly 40 years, published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry,concludes that the risks outweigh the benefits. And yet, say the authors, they are being given to people with mental health problems in Australia, the US and Canada, and demand is likely to grow.

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Healthy diet means a healthy planet, study shows

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Healthier food choices almost always benefit environment as well, according to analysis

Eating healthy food is almost always also best for the environment, according to the most sophisticated analysis to date.

The researchers said poor diets threaten society by seriously harming people and the planet, but the latest research can inform better choices.

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Beauty and the beam: the future of LED therapy looks bright

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It’s non-invasive and has been proven to work. But can LED therapy really be a miracle cure for everything from acne to tired skin? Rachel Cooke sees the light

If I said I knew of a sure-fire way to lastingly improve your skin and that all you would have to do to experience this seeming miracle would be to sit for 13 minutes every week beneath a gently pulsing light with your eyes closed, what would be your response? Would you whip out your credit card and rush to book yourself an appointment? Or would you silently mark me down as yet another decadent, middle-aged, straw-clutching desperado who feels bad about her complexion?

To be clear, I don’t feel bad about my neck – not yet. But perhaps I am a middle-aged desperado all the same, for how else to explain my appearance at the Light Salon, a clinic that offers the very treatment I’ve just described? The child of scientists, I’m a natural sceptic when it comes to the claims of the multi-billion-pound beauty industry. I still wash my face, just as I’ve always done, with soap and water. I would no more spend a lot of money on moisturiser, Botox or anything else in that vein than I would run down the street in my underwear. Even if I didn’t have strongly feminist feelings about facelifts, I would still find them alarming both in theory and in practice. Yet here I am, hoping that I will shortly look a little rosier: a better version of myself, if not precisely a younger looking one.

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‘I have more than 100 different food rules’: how healthy eating became an obsession

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For years I binged on diet books: paleo, keto, vegan, the 16:8. But can you have too much of a good thing?

It started during the 1999 eclipse. The year before, I had run away to Devon. Lots of bad things had happened there, but the main one was that I’d got fat. On my 27th birthday, I was 5ft 6in and weighed a hefty (as I bizarrely thought then) 9st 2lb. Worse: according to every news story I read, I was going to get an incurable disease and die. The most likely cause would be food; mad cow disease hadn’t gone away, and then there were pesticides and insecticides and growth hormones. When a friend told me he’d heard organic diets were cancer-preventing, I was in. As the skies darkened on 11 August, and birds began their evening song hours too early, I pledged that if I survived the solar eclipse, I would eat only organic food. I would stay healthy, and I would not die.

When organic food didn’t make my life perfect, I tried food combining (no protein with carbs). Then veganism. For 20 years now, I have cycled between diets and diet books, in search of the perfect hack for a good life: great health, better skin, the optimum weight and all, of course, with minimal impact on the environment. (Like so many women who dedicate their eating disorders to saving the planet, I need what I eat to be in some way an ethical choice.) I have been a vegetarian, a meat eater; I have gone paleo, keto, macrobiotic, pegan (look it up).

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‘Women were being killed on the street’: the township struggling with domestic abuse

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In a 2016 study of Diepsloot, 56% of men surveyed admitted to raping or beating a women in the previous 12 months – a lack of policing is just the start of the problem

The violence usually starts on a Thursday night, worsens on a Friday and reaches a peak over Saturday into the early hours of the morning. At the start of spring in September, temperatures rise and tempers flare. By the hot, heady weeks of the festive season in December, domestic abuse reaches its worst, outdoing the incidents of violence that have become common over long weekends throughout the year. In Diepsloot, an impoverished community north west of Johannesburg, gender-based violence has become so common that it follows a recognisable pattern.

Some would survive if a car comes by while they are raping her or before she was killed

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‘An indictment of South Africa’: whites-only town Orania is booming

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Twenty-five years after apartheid, black people cannot live and work in this small South African city

Photographs by Madelene Cronjé

October in Orania can be charming. When the sun sets, long ribbons of burnt orange settle on the horizon. The flies and mosquitoes that come with the summer’s oppressive heat haven’t arrived yet. It is Magdalene Kleynhans’ favourite time of year. “You can sit outside until late into the night,” says the businesswoman, whose family spends much of their time outdoors. Her children fish from the banks of the Orange River whenever they choose. Kleynhans leaves the house unlocked. “It’s a good life. It’s a big privilege.”

But there is much more to small Northern Cape town than the bucolic ideal painted by Kleynhans. Incredibly, 25 years after the fall of apartheid, Orania is a place for white people only.

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Auteurs assemble! What caused the superhero backlash?

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They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?

Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.

Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?

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The future of Durban: is this South Africa’s most inclusive public space?

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The Indian Ocean beachfront, the restaurant strip of Florida Road and the market at Warwick offer three very different models for the future of South Africa’s third largest city

Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?

It’s an early start on Durban’s beachfront Golden Mile. By 6am the surfers have arrived, followed by the runners and their dogs, then executives-cum-cyclists, speed walkers and yoga instructors. By 7am the cafes are open for breakfast and children, on holiday from inland schools, are already in the water.

Where fellow oceanside metropolis Cape Town has marketed itself to the world, Durban has positioned itself as South Africa’s playground. Beachfront theme parks and twirling public waterslides attract families from around the country, and all walks of life. This accessibility and affordability have made this eight-kilometre strip arguably one of South Africa’s most inclusive public spaces.

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Refugee age rows having ‘devastating’ impact on children

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UNHCR says children arriving in UK whose age is disputed likely to be denied services

Age disputes are having a “devastating impact” on unaccompanied and separated refugee or asylum seeker children arriving in the UK, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has warned.

Evidence from an assessment conducted by the UNHCR found disputes over a refugee or asylum seeker’s age impeded and delayed access to services and environments that can assist integration.

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Radical light and sound wave therapy could slow Alzheimer’s

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Tests at MIT have shown a boost to the activity of the brain’s immune cells

Doctors in the US have launched a clinical trial to see whether exposure to flickering lights and low frequency sounds can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

A dozen patients enrolled in the trial will have daily one-hour sessions of the radical therapy which researchers hope will induce brain activity that protects against the disorder.

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Northern Ireland set to legalise abortion and same-sex marriage

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Equality campaigners celebrate ahead of a midnight deadline for new laws to come into force

Northern Ireland is poised to legalise abortion and same-sex marriage after an 11th-hour attempt by the region’s assembly to block change collapsed into farce.

Equality campaigners celebrated on Monday as the clock ticked towards midnight when laws extending abortion and marriage rights were due to come into force, ushering in momentous social change as Northern Ireland aligned with the rest of the UK.

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‘Cluck off’: UK’s only Chick-fil-A outlet to shut in LGBT rights row

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Reading branch of US chain to close after protests over stance on same-sex relationships

A US fast food chain is to close its first branch in the UK after protests and boycott calls by LGBT campaigners.

Chick-fil-A faced demands to “cluck off” when the fried chicken outlet opened in a shopping mall in Reading this month.

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Waving not drowning: the street children finding refuge in Durban’s surf scene

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Surfers Not Street Children is transforming the lives of homeless children and vulnerable youths. Ilvy Njiokiktjien’s 12-year project Born Free: Mandela’s Generation of Hope documents the lives of the first generation born after apartheid

Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?

“I wanted to get that fresh air,” says 21-year-old Nonjabulo Ndzanibe, explaining why she ran away from her unhappy childhood home to the coastal city of Durban. “I just needed space for myself.”

Having grown up with a distant father – who spent part of her youth in prison – and a mother whom she didn’t feel loved by, it seemed like a welcome escape when a friend invited her to come and stay in Durban. In reality it would be a long time before she would eventually find refuge through surfing.

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Have you heard of the catastrophic men theory of history? Step forward Boris Johnson… | Nick Cohen

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Self-interested and reckless leadership defines too much of our past – and present

Boris Johnson concludes his Churchill biography with splutters against historians who insist the “story of humanity is not the story of great men and shining deeds”. The story of Winston Churchill, he cries, “is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He and he alone made the difference.”

The story of Boris Johnson withers too. He is shrivelling Britain: making it cramped, poor and irrelevant. Modern historians may sniff at the 19th-century notion that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men” to use Thomas Carlyle’s words. The rest of us should not be so complacent and register the capacity of catastrophic men and women to change the world for the worse.

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Aid agencies accused of failure to make good on Oxfam abuse scandal pledges

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MPs point to lack of progress on promised safeguarding improvements for whistleblowers and survivors

MPs have accused aid organisations of “dragging their feet” over combating sexual exploitation and abuse in the sector, despite safeguarding pledges made in 2018 after the Oxfam abuse scandal.

Work to improve protection and support for whistleblowers has “stalled”, and more needs to be done to protect survivors, a report by the UK international development committee (IDC) has said.

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Soap opera could be unlikely form of birth control in Uganda

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An NGO has recut and overdubbed a Venezuelan telenovela to raise awareness of sexual health

Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It also has some of the most dedicated soap opera watchers anywhere in Africa.

Now a group of enterprising Ugandans is aiming to tackle the former through the medium of the latter. Soap operas are expensive to make, however, so they plan instead to “hack” a Venezuelan import, recutting the existing series and overdubbing it with Ugandan actors.

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Police arrest hundreds over international child sexual abuse website

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South Korean-based site accepted digital currency for access to videos, with victims rescued in US, UK and Spain

Hundreds of people have been arrested in a worldwide operation over a South Korea-based dark web child sexual abuse site that sold videos for digital cash.

Officials from the United States, Britain and South Korea described the network as one of the largest operations they had encountered to date.

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How do we feed the world without destroying it? | Bob Geldof

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An international summit next year will tackle the world’s most enduring crisis – hunger. Radical action is needed

Hunger is the most awful and profound expression of poverty. It exists in every country. It is something that most people can identify with on some perhaps primordial level. It is innate. The fear of hunger is etched into our DNA, passed down the generations from hungry, scared ancestors. It is in our bones. It is in my Irish bones.

First, the good news. For several decades global hunger has been decreasing. This is mostly thanks to the sweat and ingenuity of the 500 million smallholders who produce 80% of the food consumed in the developing world. It is also thanks to the work of exceptional NGOs, to economic growth and to the innovation of businesses all along the supply chain. It’s thanks, too, to the support of governments and international organisations. And it’s to increased political stability in some places.

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‘Failing’ food system leaves millions of children malnourished or overweight

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Unicef report finds poorest children at greatest risk, while price of healthy food in rich nations drives food poverty

At least one in three children under five are either undernourished or overweight, and one in two lack essential vitamins and nutrients, the UN children’s agency has warned.

The Unicef report laid bare the alarming rate at which poor diets and a “failing” food system are damaging children, saying that “millions are eating too little of what they need and millions are eating too much of what they don’t need: poor diets are now the main risk factor for the global burden of disease”.

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