Category Archives: Society

HIV and me: ‘I decided to fight: I always wanted the body of a wrestler’

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What’s it like to live with HIV in different parts of the world? Here, as part of a 10-year project covering eight countries, seven people share a self-portrait and tell their stories

The collaborative photo-storytelling project Through Positive Eyes chronicles a very particular moment in the global Aids epidemic, when effective treatment is available to some but not all, and when the enduring stigma associated with HIV and Aids has become entrenched – a major roadblock to both prevention and treatment. Over 10 years, more than 130 HIV-positive people across five continents have taken part, many of whom picked up cameras for the first time in their lives. Here they tell their stories, in words and in photographs.

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No woman should be slapped for screaming as she gives birth | Ann Yates

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Respect in childbirth is a human right. As a midwife of many years’ experience, I am calling for a global effort towards more compassion in maternity care

Respectful maternity care is a universal human right due to every childbearing woman in every health system around the world. So why do women continue to endure violence, abuse and substandard care during childbirth?

As a midwife with more than 44 years of international experience, I have seen disrespect and abuse in many countries.

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Staff at ‘Brexit HQ’ Mayfair members’ club strike for living wage

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Migrant workers at club owned by Boris Johnson-backer Robin Birley, asking for £10.55 an hour

Staff at an exclusive private members’ club owned by a high-profile, Brexit-supporting backer of Boris Johnson are to go on strike.

Celebrities coming to 5 Hertford Street, which has hosted figures including George and Amal Clooney, Margot Robbie, Alexa Chung, Bella Hadid and royals such as Prince William, will have to consider whether they want to cross a picket line at the Mayfair property.

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Prisoners may be denied life-saving HIV treatment in UAE, campaigners say

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Human Rights Watch warns non-national detainees were denied drugs and kept isolated by staff who ‘knew nothing about HIV’

Prisoners in the United Arab Emirates who are HIV-positive but not from the country may have been denied regular access to life-saving treatment, Human Rights Watch has warned.

On Monday the organisation claimed that non-national prisoners in at least one major UAE jail have seen delays, interruptions or a complete freeze on their access to antiretrovirals – drugs that suppress the activity of the HIV infection.

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‘We lay like corpses’: Bangladesh’s 1970s rape camp survivors speak out | Lucy Lamble

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Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence

In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, four sisters – Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa and Budhi Begum – were abducted by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators. They were among the more than 200,000 women held in rape camps and were detained for two and a half months.

“Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” says Maleka as she explains how her elder sister Buhdi, “unable to bear the pain”, died before they were released.

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George Soros: ‘Brexit hurts both sides – my money was used to educate the British public’

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The philanthropist who has spent billions promoting democracy talks populism, Trump and powerful enemies

Around three decades ago, George Soros was introduced to a brash property magnate over dinner at a country house in the Catskills, upstate New York. Donald Trump was about to launch a New York office block, and he asked Soros to be his lead tenant. Soros was already a spectacularly successful financier, but told Trump he simply couldn’t afford it. “And that was just because I didn’t like him,” he tells me, smiling.

It’s not hard to see why Soros took such an instant dislike. Worldly, bookish, curious and somewhat shy, he tends to find other businessmen boring. He is unimpressed by celebrity, preferring the company of intellectuals, journalists and anyone he feels knows more about a given subject than he does. As a hedge fund manager, he was more likely to spend his free time reading and writing philosophy texts than hanging out on the golf course. If you had to conjure up a personality that is the polar opposite of the current president of the United States, it would look a lot like Soros.

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The children labouring in Malawi’s fields for British American Tobacco

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Lawyers argue that while farming families toil over backbreaking work in desperate poverty, BAT is reaping the rewards

Even Dickens did not describe harder toil. Life for the child of a tenant farmer who works the tobacco fields of Malawi is unimaginably arduous: up at 4am for several hours of labour with no breakfast, cutting into the earth with a heavy hoe.

School – if they go to school – is a brief respite. The first and often only meal of the day, maize porridge, is eaten when they get home, before more digging. Sleep is on the bare earth under a straw roof.

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The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism

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From a festival that helps artists trade work for healthcare to a regional micro-currency, Kingston is trying to build an inclusive and self-sufficient local ecosystem

Kingston, New York is a diverse city of 23,000, flanked to the east by Rondout Creek and the Hudson River and to the west by the Catskill mountains. It boasts a rustic industrial waterfront, a colorful historic district and Revolutionary War-era stone buildings. A stranger might call it bucolic. The streets of uptown are bustling with eateries and, of late, places to buy velvet halter dresses, vintage boleros, CBD tinctures, and LCD tea kettles with precision-pour spouts. But strolling by 10-year-old Half Moon Books, passersby might glimpse a different side of this city. The bookshop’s windows exclusively feature nonfiction on the end of the world as we know it. “I started out putting together a window of utopias,” says bookseller Jessica DuPont, “but somehow I ended up with the death throes of capitalism.”

I moved to Kingston from New York City just over a decade ago, on the heels of the 2008 recession. I was three years out of university, but my fledgling career in media stalled with the economic downturn. Friends of mine – two painters, one in her 30s, the other in his 40s – owned a building with an available apartment on the second floor where I could afford to live and work.

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Antibiotic price drop could stop millions from developing tuberculosis

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New agreement secures 66% reduction in cost of rifapentine, which prevents ‘latent’ TB from becoming active

The price of a drug crucial to prevent tuberculosis is to be slashed by two-thirds in a deal that could stop millions from developing the disease.

TB is the leading cause of death from infectious disease worldwide, killing 1.5 million people a year, according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) global TB report.

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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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