Category Archives: Society

Phillipson calls for ‘less public debate’ from EHRC on gender recognition rules

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Minister responds to calls from watchdog’s chair to approve new guidance on transgender rights ‘as soon as possible’

Bridget Phillipson has urged the equalities watchdog to focus more on helping ministers do their jobs and less on having public debates as a row continues about how long it will take to implement new rules on gender recognition.

The comments by Phillipson, who is the equalities minister as well as the education secretary, come after the Equality and Human Rights Commission took the unusual step of urging the government to “act with speed” in approving its statutory guidance on responding to a landmark supreme court ruling on transgender rights.

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UK man who murdered pregnant girlfriend after release from prison jailed for 42 years

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Alana Odysseos, 32, was pregnant with her third child when she was killed by Shaine March in July last year

A man who murdered his pregnant girlfriend after being released from prison on licence has been jailed for 42 years.

Alana Odysseos, 32, was in the early stages of pregnancy with her third child when she was killed by Shaine March last year at her home in Walthamstow, east London. She died at the scene from stab wounds after the attack on 22 July 2024.

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Nearly 150,000 aged 90 and above wait 12 hours in England’s A&Es each year

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Older people left in their own excrement and wet beds for hours and forced to watch others die, Age UK report finds

Almost 150,000 people aged 90 and over in England are forced to wait longer than 12 hours in A&E every year, with some experiencing “truly shocking” waits of several days stuck in corridors, a report warns.

Older people are also being left in their own excrement and wet beds for hours, denied pain relief and forced to watch and hear other patients die next to them because they end up waiting so long for care, according to Age UK.

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NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England

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Those in need of free emergency contraception no longer have to see their GP or attend a sexual health clinic

The NHS has made the morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England in an effort to reduce a “postcode lottery” of access to emergency contraception.

Almost 10,000 pharmacies are now able to offer the pill without charge, saving those in need of free emergency contraception from having to visit their GP or to get an appointment at a sexual health clinic.

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Racist incidents against UK nurses surge by 55%

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Royal College of Nursing calls on government to stop using anti-migrant rhetoric, which it says emboldens racist behaviour

The number of reports by nurses of racist incidents at work has risen by 55% over three years, according to analysis by the nursing union.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) expects to receive more than 1,000 calls this year from nurses seeking advice and support after racist incidents in the workplace, compared with almost 700 cases in 2022.

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Over 1,200 health leaders call for swift passage of UK tobacco and vapes bill

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Experts publish letter as peers prepare to scrutinise draft legislation six months after its second Commons reading

More than 1,200 public health leaders have called for the tobacco and vapes bill to be passed swiftly through parliament to “protect future generations”.

They said in a cross-party letter that the “gamechanging” measures outlined were “far too important to let it slip off the agenda”.

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NHS leaders warn of longer waiting times if demand for extra £3bn not met

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Key Labour pledge under threat as health service faces costs from redundancies, strikes and rising drug prices

NHS bosses are seeking an emergency injection of £3bn to cover unexpected costs and have warned ministers that without it patients will wait longer for treatment and hospitals will start rationing care.

Their move presents a fresh problem for Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, as she tries to find ways to fill an estimated £30bn hole in the nation’s finances in her budget next month.

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UK’s biggest weapons firm BAE grounds ‘lifeline’ aircraft delivering food aid

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Exclusive: In the year they announced record profits, Britain’s arms maker has revoked licence to fly for planes taking supplies of food to starving people in South Sudan, Somalia and DRC

Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, has quietly scrapped support for a fleet of aircraft providing “life-saving” humanitarian aid to some of the world’s poorest countries.

The decision further reduces the distribution of vital aid to countries facing serious humanitarian crises, including South Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

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US man accused of faking own death after rape conviction gets at least five years in prison

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Nicholas Rossi, who fled US, receives first of two sentences after being convicted of raping two women in Utah in 2008

A judge has sentenced a Rhode Island man who appeared to fake his death and flee the United States to avoid arrest of at least five years in prison for rape.

The sentence handed down Monday for Nicholas Rossi, 38, was the first of two he faces after being convicted separately in August and September of raping two women in northern Utah in 2008. He is scheduled to be sentenced in November for the second conviction.

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Will affordable housing be the casualty as London tackles its building emergency?

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Collapse in construction activity causing alarm but mayor and Whitehall face pushback over ‘extreme solutions’

Sadiq Khan has known for a while that he has a problem with housebuilding in London. But last week a consultancy published figures about the scale of the problem, which prompted full-scale alarm in City Hall and Whitehall.

The analysis from Molior showed that new housebuilding in the capital had collapsed. Only 40,000 homes are under construction – two-thirds the normal rate – and in the first three months of the year builders started work on just 3,248 private sector units.

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Reform council leader says she has launched hunt for ‘cowards’ behind leaked video

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Linden Kemkaran told fellow Kent councillors those who disagreed with decisions would have to ‘suck it up’

The leader of Reform UK’s flagship local authority has told her fellow councillors that she launched a hunt for the “cowards” who leaked a recorded meeting in which she said those who disagreed with decisions would have to “fucking suck it up”.

Bitter divisions among Reform members of Kent county council, one of 10 controlled outright by Nigel Farage’s party, were laid bare at the weekend by the Guardian in a leaked video of a chaotic internal meeting.

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Smart jab can shrink head and neck cancer tumours within six weeks, trial finds

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Triple-action therapy drug amivantamab could be given as an injection to help treat recurrent or metastatic cancers

Doctors have hailed “incredibly encouraging” trial results that show a triple-action smart jab can shrink tumours in head and neck cancer patients within six weeks.

Head and neck cancer is the world’s sixth most common form of the disease. If it spreads or comes back after standard treatment, patients may be offered immunotherapy and platinum chemotherapy. But if this fails, there is often little else doctors can do.

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US anti-vax stance to blame for continent-wide surge in measles, say experts

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The disease was eliminated across the Americas in 2024, but urgent vaccination drives are now under way as cases rise from Mexico to Bolivia after outbreaks farther north

Governments across Latin America are stepping up efforts to vaccinate their populations against measles, as outbreaks in North America drive a 34-fold increase in the number of cases reported in the region this year.

Measles cases have surged worldwide to a 25-year high, due to low vaccine coverage and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety. However, there is added concern in parts of Latin America over unequal access to healthcare and the worrying situation in the US, which is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades following a reversal of vaccine policy led by Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

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Trump moves to push employers on IVF coverage and lower fertility drug costs

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President says plans will lead to ‘many more beautiful American children’ but unclear if companies will sign up

The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it is urging US employers to create new fertility benefit options to cover in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other infertility treatments.

In an announcement from the Oval Office, Donald Trump also said his administration had cut a deal with the drug manufacturer EMD Serono to lower the cost of one of its fertility drugs and list the drug on the government website TrumpRx.

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Xi directs quashing of Chinese feminists even as he praises advances at women’s conference

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Chinese president is behind patriarchal turn in politics with activists silenced for ‘promoting gender antagonism’

Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping praised the “historic achievements” of women’s rights in China. In the past 30 years, the Chinese president said, maternal mortality rates had dropped by nearly 80%, and women were now participating in the project of national governance with “unprecedented confidence and vigour”.

Xi was speaking at the global women’s summit, an event on Monday and Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic UN’s world conference on women, which took place in Beijing. It was there in 1995 that Hillary Clinton, the then US first lady, delivered her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, lines now often quoted by people in China advocating for women’s rights.

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Woman, 53, becomes UK’s longest survivor of heart and lung transplant

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Katie Mitchell had procedure at 15 after being diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome, a rare congenital disease

At the age of 15, medics feared Katie Mitchell was coming to the end of her life after suffering irreversible lung damage and heart failure from a rare congenital disease.

But she defied the odds thanks to a heart and lung transplant, and at the age of 53 she has become the UK’s longest-surviving recipient of such a procedure.

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‘Brummies united against racism’: poster campaign takes on the far right

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A message of neighbourly solidarity is thriving in Birmingham against a backdrop of racist intimidation

When Mus unfurled the leaflet lying on her driveway, she was left shocked, angry and upset. “White Britons are already a minority in London … it is clear that if these trends continue white people will become a minority in Britain,” it read.

The leaflet, written by a far-right group, was distributed along her street three years ago in Moseley, a leafy suburb of Birmingham. It went on to blame NHS waiting lists, a shortage of social housing and even traffic on “the rising population”.

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NHS trust’s facilities staff vote to strike over pay discrimination claim

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Union accuses hospital group of ‘institutional racism’ as cleaners and porters get lower pay than colleagues

Hundreds of NHS hospital workers have voted for strike action after claims that they have lost more than £36m in pay and pension contributions over the last four years.

More than 330 low-paid workers, mainly cleaners, caterers and porters, known as facilities staff, at St George’s, Epsom and St Helier hospital group (GESH) are preparing to go on strike.

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Guardian prison columnist Erwin James drowned in Devon marina, inquest finds

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Journalist who wrote column A Life Inside while jailed for murder fell into the sea in January 2024

A journalist and author who wrote much-admired columns from prison drowned in a Devon marina after spending an evening in a harbourside pub, an inquest has concluded.

Erwin James Monahan, who used the pen name Erwin James and wrote a regular column for the Guardian – the first of its kind in British journalism – fell into the sea at Brixham in Devon, close to where the boat he was staying in was moored, the inquest in Exeter heard.

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One in three UK workers have called in sick after work drinks, survey finds

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IPPR report warns of ‘productivity crisis’ and says many firms out of step with gen Z shift away from alcohol

One in three UK workers have called in sick after drinking at a work event or after hours with colleagues, research has found.

Many staff feel under pressure to drink in work-related settings against their wishes, despite a big shift among younger adults away from consuming as much alcohol as their predecessors.

32% of workers had called in sick the next day after drinking at a work event or with workmates in the last year.

41% of 18- to 24-year-olds had been too hungover to work, and 47% of 25- to 34-year-olds.

22% of staff in education and 24% in health and social care had cried off work the next day after drinking at or after work in the past six months, and a fifth in both sectors had turned up late the next day.

28% think drinking at work events excludes non-drinkers or creates cliques.

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