Category Archives: Society

Boris Johnson’s legacy will be shaped by Covid inquiry appearance

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Discredited ex-PM faces a demolition job in one of the few policy areas to which he and his allies still cling

Even at the height of his popularity, Boris Johnson routinely avoided close questioning – to the extent of once hiding in a fridge to dodge a TV inquisitor. The former UK prime minister is likely to be dreading next week’s appearance at the Covid inquiry. And he probably should.

It is no exaggeration to say that events on Wednesday and Thursday at the inquiry’s repurposed office building in Paddington, west London, could help define the post-power image and legacy of Johnson, and very possibly not for the good.

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Countries that criminalise gay sex are impeding fight against Aids, UN warns

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Anti-LGBTQ+ laws lead to stigmatism and deny access to lifesaving drugs and services

Anti-homosexuality laws stop people from accessing lifesaving health services and seriously impede progress on eliminating HIV, a senior UN official has said.

Sixty-seven countries have laws that criminalise gay sex, and nearly half are in Africa, the continent most affected by HIV. In those countries, prevalence rates are about five times higher among gay men than in countries where same-sex relations are not criminalised, according to figures from UNAids.

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Record revenues at UK gambling firms amid rise of online slot machines

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Industry takings top £15bn as government considers curbs on online slots due to association with addiction

Gambling firms are raking in more money than ever from UK punters, fuelled by a surge in the use of online slot machines, which the government is considering curbing due to their association with heavy losses and addiction.

The betting and gaming industry’s revenues reached £15.1bn in the year to March 2023, or £10.95bn excluding the National Lottery, figures from the Gambling Commission released on Thursday show.

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Earlier lockdown could have saved lives of 30,000, Hancock tells Covid inquiry

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Ex-health secretary has described Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by ‘culture of fear’

Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if the UK had locked down three weeks earlier, Matt Hancock has told the Covid inquiry, as he described the operation of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by a “culture of fear”.

The former health secretary said his staff were abused by Dominic Cummings and that Johnson’s then chief adviser attempted to exclude ministers and even Johnson himself from key decisions at the start of the pandemic, hampering the government’s response.

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LGBTQ+ couple in Nepal are first in south Asia to be legally married

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Rights activists say marriage of Maya Gurung, a transgender woman, and Surendra Pandey is ‘historic day’

An LGBTQ+ couple in Nepal have said they want to “scream to the world that we are husband and wife at last” after becoming the first in south Asia to have their marriage legally recognised.

Maya Gurung, 38, a transgender woman, and Surendra Pandey, 27, were given a legal certificate in Nepal’s Lamjung district on Wednesday.

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New push for debt relief to help developing world fund climate action

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Cop28 hears poorest nations spend at least 12 times as much to service debts than on tackling global heating

The fight against the climate emergency is being hampered by a debt crisis that involves the world’s poorest countries paying more than 12 times as much to their creditors as they are spending on measures to tackle the impact of global heating, a campaign group has warned.

As the Cop28 meeting opened in the United Arab Emirates, Development Finance International (DFI) said a new round of comprehensive and deep debt cancellation was needed to free up much-needed investment in climate emergency adaptation.

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NHS England faces lawsuit over patient privacy fears linked to new data platform

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Four groups claim no legal basis exists for setting up the Federated Data Platform which facilitates information sharing

The NHS has been accused of “breaking the law” by creating a massive data platform that will share information about patients.

Four organisations are bringing a lawsuit against NHS England claiming that there is no legal basis for its setting up of the Federated Data Platform (FDP). They plan to seek a judicial review of its decision.

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One in four adults in UK to buy now, pay later for Christmas, study shows

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Citizens Advice warns such credit schemes risk delivering ‘knockout blow’ to household finances

More than a quarter of adults in the UK will use buy now, pay later to help with festive spending, research suggests, with the proportion rising to more than half of parents with young children.

The survey for Citizens Advice also found 11% of respondents used such credit schemes to pay for groceries, a proportion that rose to 35% for regular BNPL users.

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NHS ‘unethical’ in recruiting nurses from short-staffed countries

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Hiring from ‘red-list’ nations risks destabilising healthcare overseas, warns Royal College of Nursing

The NHS has been accused of “unethical” behaviour after it emerged that it has been recruiting record numbers of nurses and midwives from countries which have serious staffing shortages.

Bringing in staff from “red-list” countries risked destabilising those nations’ healthcare systems and breaching government guidelines, said hospital employers and the Royal College of Nursing.

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How Labour’s plan for ‘fair pay deals’ looks to solve UK social care crisis

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Underfunded, overstretched sector to become testing ground for battle against low pay but critics say policy is weak and vague

“My sister is a care worker. She was a care worker during the pandemic. Fourteen-hour shifts, often overnight. Unimaginable pressure. And the reward? A struggle every week – and I mean every week – just to make ends meet.”

So spoke Keir Starmer last month, drawing on experience close to home in his party conference speech to underline his determination to overhaul the cash-strapped social care sector.

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US life expectancy increases but remains below pre-Covid level

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CDC researchers say life expectancy has rebounded to 77 years and six months as pandemic wanes but still down on 2019 statistic

US life expectancy rose last year by more than a year but still is not close to what it was before the Covid pandemic.

The 2022 rise was mainly due to the waning pandemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said on Wednesday. But even with the large increase, US life expectancy is only back to 77 years and six months – about what it was two decades ago.

Life expectancy increased for both men and women, and for every racial and ethnic group.

The decline in Covid deaths drove 84% of the increase in life expectancy. The next largest contributor was a decline in heart disease deaths, credited with about 4% of the increase. But experts note that heart disease deaths increased during Covid-19, and both factored into many pandemic-era deaths.

Changes in life expectancy varied by race and ethnicity. Hispanic Americans and American Indians and Alaska Natives saw life expectancy rise more than two years in 2022. Black life expectancy rose more than one and a half years. Asian American life expectancy rose one year and white life expectancy rose about 10 months.

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One in seven HR heads believe men are better suited to top jobs

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‘Shocking’ poll in England and Wales shows nearly one in five reluctant to hire women they think may go on to have children

A significant minority of human resources executives believe men are better suited to senior management than women, according to the results of a “shocking” poll.

Nearly one in seven HR decision-makers rate men as better for top jobs and nearly one in five admitted they were reluctant to hire women they thought might go on to start families, the survey of personnel managers in England and Wales for the charity Young Women’s Trust (YWT) found.

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Elf Bar vape adverts banned in UK over ‘greener’ recycling claims

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Ads gave misleading impression that recycling vapes is easy and can be done at home, says watchdog

Adverts for the vaping company Elf Bar have been banned after using the slogan “recycling for a greener future” over concern they were misleading because of the environmental damage of discarded vapes.

A study by Material Focus shows that 260m disposable vapes were thrown away in the UK in 2022, making them a leading cause of the rise in plastic pollution in recent years.

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Thousands of refugees in England and Wales ‘face homeless Christmas’

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Government push to clear asylum backlog is not giving people granted refugee status enough time to find new home, say councils

Tens of thousands of refugees are at risk of sleeping rough this Christmas after a Home Office drive to hit Rishi Sunak’s asylum case target, the umbrella body for local councils has said.

The Local Government Association said councils across England and Wales were facing a “perfect storm” as the government worked to clear 92,327 asylum cases by the end of the year.

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Senior doctors in England reach pay deal with government

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NHS leaders welcome breakthrough as ‘vital step’ towards halting walkouts by various staff groups

Doctors’ leaders have struck a deal with ministers that could end the strikes by hospital consultants that have badly disrupted NHS care for months.

Grassroots members of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) in England still have to approve the government’s offer. But if medics accept it in referendums then both unions will call off the industrial action that has led to hundreds of thousands of operations and outpatient appointments being cancelled.

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Stalking victims face ‘postcode lottery’, says coroner after Gracie Spinks killing

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Concerns raised over ‘consistency and availability’ of stalking advocates in UK police forces to support victims

Stalking victims face a “postcode lottery” of support due to a lack of advocates in police forces across the UK, a coroner has said following the death of Gracie Spinks.

The 23-year-old was killed in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, by a work colleague, Michael Sellers, who had become “obsessed” with her after previously harassing a number of other women. On 18 June 2021 he followed Spinks to the field where she kept her horse before fatally stabbing her and taking his own life soon after.

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UK school pupils ‘using AI to create indecent imagery of other children’

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Protection groups call for urgent action to help pupils understand risks of making images that legally constitute child sexual abuse

Children in British schools are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make indecent images of other children, a group of experts on child abuse and technology has warned.

They said that a number of schools were reporting for the first time that pupils were using AI-generating technology to create images of children that legally constituted child sexual abuse material.

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UK spends more financing inequality in favour of rich than rest of Europe, report finds

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Inequalities of income, wealth and power cost UK £106.2bn a year compared with average developed OECD country

The UK spends more than anywhere else in Europe subsidising the cost of structural inequality in favour of the rich, according to an analysis of 23 OECD countries.

Inequalities of income, wealth and power cost the UK £106.2bn a year compared with the average developed country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), according to the Equality Trust’s cost of inequality report.

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Campaigner for council housing in London fights on after leaving her home

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Aysen Dennis, who accused Southwark council of ‘social cleansing’, continues court challenge over Aylesbury estate plans

The bulldozers will soon be out for the south London council flat that was Aysen Dennis’s home for 30 years. After leading a fierce battle against the council and developers, claiming their plans to fill much of her estate with private homes amounted to “social cleansing”, she has finally moved.

Dennis, 65, has been relocated to a swanky new flat in a development bought back by Southwark council. She claims it paid £690,000 for her ninth-floor flat with panoramic views of the park – and is convinced it was an attempt to shut her up before a legal challenge.

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‘They thought I had cancer’: painkiller banned in UK linked to Britons’ deaths in Spain

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Patients’ group says reactions to metamizole can cause sepsis and organ failure – and British and Irish people are at higher risk

A patients group representing several British victims has launched legal action against the Spanish government over claims it failed to safeguard people against the potentially fatal side effects of one of the country’s most popular painkillers, involved in a series of serious illnesses and deaths.

The drug metamizole, commonly sold in Spain under the brand name Nolotil, is banned in several countries, including Britain, the US, India and Australia. It can cause a condition known as agranulocytosis, which reduces white blood cells, increasing the risk of potentially fatal infection.

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