Killed by a pill bought on Snapchat: the counterfeit drugs poisoning US teens

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Admin

Accidental deaths soar among young people amid a proliferation of fentanyl-filled pharmaceuticals

Fourteen-year-old Alondra Salinas had set out her new white sneakers and packed her backpack the night before the first day of in-person high school when police say she responded to an offer on Snapchat for blue pills, which turned out to be deadly fentanyl. Her mother couldn’t wake her the next morning.

Seventeen-year-old Zachary Didier was waiting to hear back on his college applications when a fake Percocet killed him. Sammy Berman Chapman, a 16-year-old straight-A student, died in his bedroom after taking what he thought was a single Xanax.

Ricky Gervais on offence, anger and infuriating Hollywood: ‘You have to provoke. It’s a good thing’

Posted on December 18, 2021 by Admin

He has made a career out of winding people up in everything from The Office to his Golden Globes speeches – but is the comedian’s bark worse than his bite?

Ricky Gervais’s assistant leads me past a huge, empty room to the top floor of an office above a shop on a swanky London high street. Gervais is sitting behind a desk at his computer in another huge, empty room, and looks as if he’s just squatted the place. There is nothing that suggests this is his office, except for the branded mugs sitting on his desk; one shows his face, the second says Tambury Gazette, the fictional newspaper where Gervais’s character, Tony, works in his hit Netflix series After Life.

As soon as he sees me, he swings his legs off the floor and on to the desk. I expect him to say, “Right, shoot”, as his fabulous fictional creation David Brent might have done, but he reins himself in. It’s 20 years since Gervais made his name with The Office, and it’s often been difficult to know where Brent ends and Gervais begins.

David Baddiel and his daughter on his social media addiction: ‘it can reward and punish you’

Posted on December 11, 2021 by Admin

Despite the abuse and anger, the comedian spent hours a day online. But then his daughter Dolly became dangerously drawn in. Was it time for a rethink?

Over the past 30 years, I have read and heard David Baddiel’s thoughts on many subjects, including sex, masturbation, religion, antisemitism, football fandom, football hooliganism, his mother’s sex life and his father’s dementia. “I am quite unfiltered,” he agrees, “mainly because I am almost psychotically comfortable in my own skin.” But today I have found the one subject that makes him squirm.

How much time does he spend on social media a day? “Oh, um, too much,” he says, his usual candour suddenly gone. What’s his daily screen time according to his phone? “It says four hours, which is a bit frightening.”

I feel despair at Sudan’s coup. But my children’s mini protest gives me hope | Khalid Albaih

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Admin

After 30 years in exile, it’s easy to doubt that it will ever be safe to live and work in Sudan. But the action being taken by young people shows democracy will rise again

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to a friend in 1941, just before the US entered the second world war. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins – it never will – but that it doesn’t die.”

Growing up, I was always interested in politics, politics was the reason I had to leave Sudan at the age of 11. At school, we weren’t allowed to study or discuss it, and it was the same at home.For years, I lay in bed and listened to my father and his friends as they argued about politics and sang traditional songs during their weekend whisky rituals. They watched a new Arabic news channel, Al Jazeera, which aired from Qatar. All the journalism my father consumed about Sudan was from the London-based weekly opposition newspaper, Al Khartoum. The only time he turned on our dial-up internet was to visit Sudanese Online.

‘I’m happy to lose £10m by quitting Facebook,’ says Lush boss

Posted on November 26, 2021 by Admin

Losing 10m followers on sites such as Instagram is a price worth paying for co-founder of ethical beauty empire

Quitting social media is hard to do, even when it doesn’t cost you anything. So when Lush’s chief executive, Mark Constantine, shut its thousands of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok accounts on Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, he knew dropping off millions of customers’ screens would damage his business.

Its Facebook and Instagram accounts alone had 10.6 million followers and the void will result in an estimated £10m hit to sales but Constantine, one of the business’s co-founders, said it had “no choice” after whistleblowers called attention to the negative impact social media sites such as Instagram are having on teenagers’ mental health.

El Salvador rights groups fear repression after raids on seven offices

Posted on November 24, 2021 by Admin

NGOs believe raids, officially part of an embezzlement inquiry, are an attempt to ‘criminalise social movements’

Rights activists in El Salvador said they will not be pressured into silence after prosecutors raided the offices of seven charities and groups in the Central American country.

“They’re trying to criminalise social movements,” said Morena Herrera, a prominent women’s rights activist. “They can’t accept that they are in support of a better El Salvador.”

Young people more optimistic about the world than older generations – Unicef

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Admin

Despite mental health and climate concerns, youth believe they can improve the world, survey for World Children’s Day finds

Young people are often seen as having a bleak worldview, plugged uncritically into social media and anxious about the climate crisis, among other pressing issues.

But a global study commissioned by the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, appears to turn that received wisdom on its head. It paints a picture of children believing that the world is improving with each generation, even while they report anxiety and impatience for change on global heating.

The majority of young people saw serious risks for children online, such as seeing violent or sexually explicit content (78%) or being bullied (79%).

While 64% of those in low- and middle-income countries believed children would be better off economically than their parents, young people in high-income countries had little faith in economic progress. There, fewer than a third of young respondents believed children today would grow up to be better off economically than their parents.

More than a third of young people reported often feeling nervous or anxious, and nearly one in five said they often felt depressed or had little interest in doing things.

On average, 59% of young people said children today faced more pressure to succeed than their parents did.

Prince Harry says online misinformation is ‘global humanitarian issue’

Posted on November 15, 2021 by Admin

Duke of Sussex says issue needs to be tackled by policies including investment in local journalism

Prince Harry has described online misinformation as a “global humanitarian issue” that needs to be tackled by policies including investment in local journalism and cracking down on super-spreaders of false content.

The Duke of Sussex contributed to a report by a US thinktank into disinformation, which made 15 recommendations after a six-month study.

Chakras, crystals and conspiracy theories: how the wellness industry turned its back on Covid science

Posted on November 11, 2021 by Admin

Its gurus increasingly promote vaccine scepticism, conspiracy theories and the myth that ill people have themselves to blame. How did self-care turn so nasty?

Ozlem Demirboga Carr is not really into all that woo‑woo stuff. “I’m definitely a full-science kind of person,” says the 41-year-old telecoms worker from Reading. She doesn’t believe in crystals, affirmations or salt lamps. But she did find herself unusually anxious during the UK’s Covid lockdown in March 2020 and, like many people, decided to practise yoga as a way to de-stress.

“I tried to be open-minded and I was open to advice on trying to improve my wellbeing and mental health,” she says. So she followed a range of social media accounts, including the “somatic therapist and biz coach” Phoebe Greenacre, known for her yoga videos, and the “women’s empowerment and spiritual mentor” Kelly Vittengl. The Instagram algorithm did its work. “I suddenly found myself following so many wellness accounts,” she says.