Police’s top child protection officer says fines would be ‘drop in the ocean’ to tech firms
A public boycott of social media may be the only way to force companies to protect children from abuse, the country’s leading child protection police officer has said.
Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on child protection, said tech companies had abdicated their duty to safeguard children and were only paying attention due to fear of reputational damage.
Continue reading...Doctors hope to trial gene therapy on people with rare disorder in next three years
Doctors in the US have announced plans for a radical gene therapy that aims to drastically reduce the risk of heart attack, the world’s leading cause of death, with a one-off injection.
The researchers hope to trial the therapy within the next three years in people with a rare genetic disorder that makes them prone to heart attacks in their 30s and 40s. If the treatment proves safe and effective in the patients, doctors will seek approval to offer the jab to a wider population.
Continue reading...The Stow horse fair has been held in the Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold biannually, in May and October, for hundreds of years. Gypsy and Traveller people from all over the country have been gathering in the small town for the event since 1476
Continue reading...In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.
By Matthew Bremner
Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that part of the coast, where the sea was shallow, the tides strong and the rocks razor-sharp. They supposed it was an amateur sailor who had got lost.
In fact, the man sailing the boat was a skilled seaman. Two Italian passports, a Spanish passport and a Spanish national ID card were later found in his possession, all of which showed the same 44-year-old with weathered skin and dark curly hair. But each of the four documents listed a different name. In the previous three months, he had crossed the Atlantic twice, sailing more than 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands, just west of Morocco, to north-east Venezuela, and then back again, to São Miguel, 1,000 miles west of Portugal.
Continue reading...My friend Audrey Simpson, who has died aged 83, was a powerful voice in Brighton and Hove, which she had made her adopted city after leaving London in 1978.
Without any previous experience, she bought a small, run-down, 12-room guest house, the Granville, overlooking the West Pier on the seafront, and transformed it into one of Brighton’s first boutique hotels. Later, in an adjacent space, she created a restaurant, Trogs, which met with equal success and became a gourmet mecca.
Continue reading...Repeated attempts by police to clear dealers from Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg prompts move by park manager
Drug dealers in Berlin are to be given designated spaces in a city centre park to carry out transactions, leading to criticism that authorities have capitulated to criminal gangs.
For years there has been a heated debate about Görlitzer Park, a popular meeting point in the trendy southern Berlin district of Kreuzberg, which has been attracting an ever increasing number of drug dealers. Local people said they were reluctant to let children and pets roam free there.
Continue reading...All Catholic priests and nuns will be required to report abuse and cover-ups by superiors
Pope Francis has issued a groundbreaking law requiring all Catholic priests and nuns around the world to report clergy sexual abuse and cover-ups by their superiors to church authorities, in a fresh effort to hold the Catholic hierarchy accountable for failing to protect their flocks.
The new edict provides whistleblower protections for anyone making a report and requires all dioceses to have a system in place to receive the claims confidentially. It outlines procedures for conducting preliminary investigations when the accused is a bishop, cardinal or religious superior.
Continue reading...Bacteria-killing viruses known as phages offer hope of solution to antibiotic resistance
A British teenager has made a remarkable recovery after being the first patient in the world to be given a genetically engineered virus to treat a drug-resistant infection.
Isabelle Holdaway, 17, nearly died after a lung transplant left her with an intractable infection that could not be cleared with antibiotics. After a nine-month stay at Great Ormond Street hospital, she returned to her home in Kent for palliative care, but recovered after her consultant teamed up with a US laboratory to develop the experimental therapy.
Continue reading...International development committee evidence session on fighting sexual misconduct finds little has changed
Private aid companies and charities will be asked to reappear before MPs, after evidence given on tackling sexual abuse was condemned as “completely unsatisfactory”.
Stephen Twigg, chair of the international development committee (IDC), said he intended to invite representatives of both groups back.
Continue reading...‘Extreme, huge, and existential’ threat posed by climate change must be a central consideration when distributing aid
The British government’s aid spending is failing to recognise the “scale and urgency” of the climate change challenge facing the world, MPs warn.
Climate change must be placed at the centre of aid strategy and funding, if it is to address the seriousness of threats facing developing countries, the committee said. It urged a minimum spend of £1.76bn annually and a halt to funding fossil fuel projects in developing countries, unless they can demonstrate they support transition to zero emissions by 2050.
Continue reading...Once compared to Oxford, the university city of Pavia is now better known for gambling. These activists are fighting to change that
At the start of this year, Massimo was standing on a bridge “determined to jump off”. The 45-year-old had been struggling with gambling addiction since 2001.
“I started to play slot machines and video poker after the death of my father and ended up spending €5,000 a day,” says the artisan fence-maker, from the city of Pavia in northern Italy. He was soon in debt to loan sharks and ended up stealing to fund his habit, including from his own mother, before considering suicide.
Continue reading...Visually impaired women in Colombia are using their enhanced sense of feel to improve early breast cancer detection
As a child, Francia Papamija started progressively losing her eyesight due to a retinal detachment. Today, everything is darkness for the 36-year-old – except for the job she holds in a clinic in Cali, Colombia, where she contributes to the early detection of breast cancer.
Papamija is a medical tactile examiner (MTE), a role created especially for women who are blind and have higher sensitivity in their fingertips.
Continue reading...The philanthropist and wife of Bill Gates on what she tells her kids, getting women into tech and the perils of wealth
Melinda Gates is co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which she set up with her husband, Bill Gates. It is the largest private charitable organisation in the world and uses Microsoft’s billions in diverse philanthropic drives: supplying vaccines and birth control to developing countries and working to get the world’s 130 million girls not in formal education into school. Gates was herself educated in an all-girls Catholic high school in Dallas and studied computer science and economics at university before taking a job with “a smallish software company called Microsoft”. Her new book The Moment of Lift is an illuminating and often moving scrutiny of the ways in which the lot of women can be improved; her argument is that it is only by involving women that the world will be changed for the better. She lives in Seattle with her husband and their three children.
What, aside from donating, are the top three things a western woman could do to improve her situation and help the world beyond herself?
The first thing I’d urge is: look into your own home. Figure out whether you have true equality. Sit down with your partner and say: “OK, who is doing the dishes? Who is putting the rubbish out? Who is doing the gardening? Do we need to make some changes?” [Her book describes her own negotiations with Bill over divisions of labour – he volunteers to do the school run.] And if there isn’t equality, you need to bring up some tough conversations about unpaid labour in your home. The second thing that still needs saying to women is that it is essential to vote – and to vote for candidates whose policies best support women. And the third thing is: look at your workplace. Is there full transparency about pay?
Images of sandy beaches, sun-kissed swimming pools and azure blue skies gleam from the window and walls of what appears to be a new travel agent opening in a London shopping centre. But browsers may be surprised by the destination, for it is a journey every one of us will one day take: death.
Look more closely at the posters and it becomes clear that the words are all about “passing away” (half of British adults prefer to avoid the word “death”, apparently). The Departure Lounge, in Lewisham, south London, is the brainchild of the Academy of Medical Sciences, whose mission is to promote biomedical and health research. Death, it turns out, is one of the most under-researched areas in healthcare, accounting for less than half of 1% of money spent.
Continue reading...Next up: Brexit hijacks the European elections
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Continue reading...Students at UC Berkeley have an unusual way to take the edge off before final exams. The Guardian was granted exclusive access to a petting session
Final exams are approaching at one of America’s elite universities, and the atmosphere might be tense – if it weren’t for eight hairy campus visitors.
On Friday, students flocked to UC Berkeley’s Memorial Glade for Llamapalooza, a human-llama social occasion on a sunny campus lawn. The eight animals were scattered throughout the crowd, munching grass while the adoring masses petted, fed and photographed them under the supervision of trained student volunteers.
Continue reading...Karanbir Singh Cheema, 13, was unconscious within 10 minutes of incident at London school
The death of a schoolboy with a dairy allergy after cheese was thrown at him could be the first known case of its kind, an expert has said.
Karanbir Singh Cheema, 13, known as Karan, went from “absolutely fine” to unconscious in under 10 minutes after the incident at William Perkin Church of England high school in Greenford, west London, on 28 June 2017.
Continue reading...Paper says risk between male partners is zero if virus fully suppressed by antiretrovirals
An end to the Aids epidemic could be in sight after a landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner.
The success of the medicine means that if everyone with HIV were fully treated, there would be no further infections.
Continue reading...Deaths follow wave of rumours and a hoax video intended to derail final push to eradicate the disease
A federal government campaign to vaccinate more than 40 million children under five against polio in Pakistan has been suspended following a series of attacks on workers and police over the past week.
On 23 April a police officer responsible for protecting polio workers was gunned down in Bannu. The same day, a polio worker was injured with a knife in Lahore by a man refusing to allow his child to be vaccinated, citing a recent hoax video that claimed children were becoming ill after the immunisations.
Continue reading...Mother alarmed after anti-vaccination propaganda found inside book bought for son, who is about to receive the HPV jab
Concerns have been raised that the anti-vaccination movement is targeting children via Amazon warehouses, after a Hampshire mother found a leaflet condemning the HPV vaccine tucked inside a children’s book she had purchased from the online retailer.
Lucy Boyle bought Ali Sparkes’ Night Speakers along with several other novels as a birthday present for her 12-year-old son at the start of April. He began reading the novel last week, “got a few pages in, turned over the page and there was the leaflet,” she told the Guardian.
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