I’ve been shocked and disgusted by what some men have done. I’ve also seen how complicated atonement and forgiveness are
Warning: This story contains discussion and description of sexual abuse, assault, and trauma.
When Jay first came into the program, he was asked – as all members were – to share his offense with the group. He said he’d had sex with his teenage stepdaughter.
“She was very attractive,” he said. “Mature for her age. We kind of fell into it.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: Whistleblower tells of links between Paola Cuneo, PM and US businesswoman
A Whitehall official who ran the scheme that granted Jennifer Arcuri a coveted entrepreneur visa had worked for Boris Johnson when he was mayor, the Guardian has learned.
The US businesswoman, who is at the centre of a conflict of interest row over her friendship with the prime minister, beat nearly 2,000 applicants to gain one of 200 sought-after tier 1 entrepreneur visas on the government’s Sirius programme after Johnson helped promote her firm, Innotech, by giving keynote speeches at her events.
Continue reading...Victims of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, which killed at least 10,000 people and infected hundreds of thousands more, are petitioning the US supreme court on Tuesday to hold the UN accountable for having brought the disease to the stricken country.
The nine supreme court justices will meet in conference to discuss whether to hear Laventure v UN as one of their cases of the new term. The petition goes to the heart of the question: should the world body be answerable in domestic courts for the harm it causes people it is there to serve?
Continue reading...Prime minister’s announcement of an end to open defecation in India marred by claims of coercion and violence
Narendra Modi is to declare that his flagship sanitation programme has ended open defecation in India, amid accusations that the scheme has sparked violence and abuse.
India’s prime minister will make the announcement on Wednesday at an event in his home state of Gujarat, attended by 20,000 village chiefs and international dignitaries, according to the government.
Continue reading...Bill is Emmanuel Macron’s biggest social reform since he was elected in 2017
France has taken a step towards allowing lesbian and single women to conceive children with medical help, setting the stage for a clash with the country’s religious conservatives.
To loud applause, France’s lower house of parliament approved a draft bioethics law in a move that has already sparked outrage from opponents, including some in President Emmanuel Macron’s own centrist party.
Continue reading...The author and artist’s keynote address on our fractured attention spans went viral. Now she has a plan for how to heal them: lose ourselves in nature
Nearly two years ago, the artist and academic Jenny Odell gave a keynote address on “how to do nothing”. In it she talked about the impact of modern life’s ceaseless demands on our time and attention, “a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living”. And she discussed how she herself had found respite in nature.
Her talk was written for the Eyeo festival in Minneapolis – described as for the “creative technology community” and attended by the kind of blue-sky thinkers unlikely to balk at references to concepts like “observational eros”. Yet, when the 10,000-word transcript was published online, it went viral. Not only that: many people read it to the end.
Continue reading...Infant mortality rate higher in babies exposed to pollutants such as sulphur dioxide
Babies living in areas with high levels of air pollution have a greater risk of death than those surrounded by cleaner air, a study has found.
It is not the first study to investigate the link between air pollution and infant mortality , but thestudydrew particular focus on different pollutants and its analysis at different points in babies’ lives.
Continue reading...The sustainable development goals, which promise to end extreme poverty and inequality by 2030, are alarmingly off track. It’s not too late to act
We might seem a strange group to be writing this together – a British film-maker, a Libyan doctor and women’s rights activist, and an indigenous leader from Chad – but what we have in common is that we are all appointed by the UN secretary general as advocates for the sustainable development goals.
Some won’t have heard of these global goals – 17 objectives to which every nation signed up in 2015 – but they form the basis of a masterplan to make us the first generation to end extreme poverty, the last to be threatened by climate change, and the most determined to end injustice and inequality.
Continue reading...Trial of a euthanasia activist who helped a tetraplegic, blind DJ to die may lead to new law
Italy’s constitutional court has ruled it was not always a crime to help someone in “intolerable suffering” commit suicide, opening the way for a change of law in the Catholic country.
Parliament is now expected to debate the matter, which was highlighted by the Milan trial of an activist who helped a tetraplegic man die in Switzerland.
Continue reading...After she was assaulted while unconscious, Miller’s life split in two. She became known as ‘Emily Doe’ – and her assailant served just three months in prison. Now she’s ready to tell the world who she really is
It has been just over three weeks since Chanel Miller allowed her name to become public and the 27-year-old is still trying to adjust. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. “Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!” she’d read. Or: “Hey, I always knew you’d write a book!” She smiles at the bleak comedy of a situation which no one, least of all Miller herself, knows quite how to handle. At some point in the emails, every sender would jettison the pleasantries and make the awkward turn towards saying: “I’m sorry.”
Around midnight on 17 January 2015, Miller was spotted by two students at Stanford University being sexually assaulted by a third student as she lay unconscious on the ground behind some bins. She was 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in her first job at a tech firm and living with her parents in Palo Alto. Earlier that evening she had, on a whim, agreed to accompany her younger sister to a fraternity party at Stanford University, a 10-minute drive from the house. By the early hours of the morning, Miller was in a hospital having her vagina and anus swabbed by police doctors – and 19-year-old Brock Turner was in custody.
Continue reading...Ruling in Freddy McConnell case is first legal definition of a mother in English common law
A transgender man from Kent who gave birth with the help of fertility treatment cannot be registered as his child’s father, the most senior family judge in England and Wales has ruled.
In the first legal definition of a mother in English common law, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the high court’s family division, ruled on Wednesday that motherhood was about being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.
Continue reading...Questions over rise in funds to ministries outside Department for International Development, with little clarity on value for money
MPs have criticised a “dramatic increase” in aid spending in ministries outside the Department for International Development, because they have not put in place adequate measures to assess value for money.
A report, by the House of Commons public accounts committee, questioned the doubling of the Newton Fund, managed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to £735m, despite the department’s “weak understanding” of how funds were spent, where and with what results.
Continue reading...Majority of funding will go to UN population fund, which works across countries with highest maternal death rates
The UK government has pledged to spend an extra £600m to support family planning programmes in some of the world’s poorest countries.
Most of the money, which will be rolled out between 2020 and 2025, will be given to the UN population fund (UNFPA), which works in 150 countries, including the 46 with the highest rates of maternal deaths and lowest rates of modern contraceptive use.
Continue reading...Frankfurt court made ruling in relation to illegal claims by a company selling anti-hangover ‘shots’
A German court has ruled that hangovers are an “illness”, in a timely judgement days after the annual Oktoberfest beer festival began in Munich.
The case landed before judges in Frankfurt when plaintiffs claimed a firm offering anti-hangover “shots” and drink powders to mix with water was making illegal health claims.
Continue reading...Campaigners say incidents are still underreported and more must be done to stop attackers
Sexual assaults reported on the tube have soared by 42% in the last four years, new figures show.
Attacks recorded on the London Underground leapt from 844 in 2015-16 to 1,206 in 2018-19, according to analysis by the PA news agency.
Continue reading...Employees urge charity to consider using donations to fund jobs as management say job losses are unavoidable
Staff at Amnesty International are to vote on whether to strike over a dispute about redundancies.
The trade union Unite will ballot its 300 members at the human rights organisation next week.
Continue reading...‘Feminist emergency’ demonstrations follow series of high-profile rape cases
Protesters will take to the streets of more than 250 towns and cities across Spain on Friday to declare a “feminist emergency” after a series of high-profile rape cases and a summer in which 19 women were murdered by current or former partners.
Organisers are aiming to “turn the night purple” – the colour of the feminist movement – to raise the alarm and protest against apathy, indifference and a lack of attention from politicians and the media.
Continue reading...Louise Casey says Birmingham demonstrations have been put in ‘all-too-difficult box’
The former integration tsar, Dame Louise Casey, has accused ministers of “radio silence” over protests against the teaching of LGBT equality at a Birmingham school.
Casey said the government had failed to act on what she described as homophobic demonstrations because it was in the “all-too-difficult box”.
Continue reading...Police say they seized the cocaine-loaded penises at the home of a couple who managed a Peruvian restaurant
Police in Argentina have arrested members of a gang of drug dealers accused of smuggling cocaine hidden inside plastic penises.
The cocaine-loaded members, of the kind found as costume adornments at party shops, were sold by dealers operating in the red light district of the city of La Plata, about 36 miles south of Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires.
Continue reading...Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene fears medical impact of failure to prepare for global heating over next 25 years
The climate crisis represents the biggest threat to the future of global health over the next quarter of a century, according to a survey of top medical professionals.
The vast majority of members of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, some of whom are responsible for significant discoveries in tropical diseases that plague poorer countries, believe governments and health bodies are failing to prepare adequately for the medical impacts of global heating.
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