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Defender of all faiths? Coronation puts focus on King Charles’s beliefs

In 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the UK was predominantly Christian, with Sunday church attendance the norm, children taught to say their prayers at bedtime and vicars regarded with unquestioning deference. Opinion polls in the 1950s and 1960s asking people to name their religion found that between 86% and 91% gave a Christian denomination. Seventy years on, as King Charles III prepares for his coronation on 6 May, the picture is rather different. The 2021 census found that for the first time, a minority of people in England and Wales described themselves as Christian, with those saying they had no religion gaining ground. Attendance at Sunday services at Anglican churches in England hit an all-time low (bar the pandemic year of 2020) in 2021, at 509,000 people, or less than 1% of the population. Nevertheless, the coronation will be a deeply religious ceremony – “first and foremost an act of Christian worship”, according to Justin Welby , the archbishop of Canterbury. Behind a screen, the new sovereign will be anointed on his head, hands and heart with holy oil consecrated in Jerusalem, as a symbol of his divine right to rule. In common with his predecessors for almost 500 years, Charles will take the titles of defender of the faith and supreme governor of the Church of England. He will swear to uphold “the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel, maintain the Protestant Reformed religion established by law and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established.” Almost 30 years ago, Charles triggered a furore when he suggested he would be defender of faith in general, rather than defender of the faith, stemming from a desire to reflect Britain’s religious diversity. Ever since, there has been speculation that the coronation oath might be altered. In fact it will be unchanged, as became clear when the archbishop of Canterbury’s office published the coronation liturgy last weekend. Instead, the coronation oath, for the first time, will be prefaced with words spoken by Welby, making clear that “the church established by law, whose settlement you will swear to maintain … will seek to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely”. James Walters, who leads the London School of Economics’ faith centre, said: “People got very fixated on whether the title would change. But I don’t think that was ever [Charles’s] intention; rather, it was how the title was to be understood. And in many ways that reimagining of what it means happened under his mother, who spoke of the Church of England creating a space for freedom across religions.” Last September, shortly after the queen’s death, Charles echoed and expanded on his mother’s words. He told faith leaders at a Buckingham Palace reception that he was a “committed Anglican” but the sovereign had a “duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals.” In a significant acknowledgment of the growing number of people who say they have no religion, he added: “By my most profound convictions … I hold myself bound to respect those who follow other spiritual paths, as well as those who seek to live their lives in accordance with secular ideals.” Charles’s own faith is “deep and strong, but more questing, more intellectual, more complex” than his mother’s, said Ian Bradley, an emeritus professor of cultural and spiritual history at the University of St Andrews and the author of God Save the King: The Sacred Nature of the Monarch. “He’s clearly drawn to eastern Orthodox Christianity and aspects of Islam. He’s interested in all kinds of spirituality.” In his Thought for the Day broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 1 January 2000, Charles expressed hope that “in the new millennium we will begin to rediscover a sense of the sacred in all that surrounds us”. He also dwelt on the importance of the sacred in his 2000 Reith lecture . The coronation liturgy, produced by Lambeth Palace in close consultation with the king, will accommodate Charles’s desire to involve leaders and representatives of other religions . One innovation is a greeting to the king to be delivered in unison by Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim representatives at the end of the service. It will not be amplified, out of respect for the Jewish prohibition on using electricity on the sabbath. The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis , has been invited to stay at St James’s Palace on the night before the coronation so he can walk to Westminster Abbey, as vehicular travel is also prohibited on the Jewish sabbath. Sensing an opportunity to engage the public’s interest in an era of sharply declining congregations, the archbishops of Canterbury and York have said the coronation “presents a unique missional opportunity for the church”. Clergy and congregations have been supplied with a pack of tips and advice. And it may resonate. “For most of the 20th century, people thought that religion would recede entirely as education and technology superseded superstition,” said Walters. “And similarly, people have been talking about a republic in this country since at least the 1960s. But neither has happened. “In an age of rapid change and individualism, where politics seems to have become either very technocratic and managerial or very close and divisive, there’s a certain appeal of ancient symbols and stories.”

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Talking Horses: Saffie Osborne lifts Chester Cup in rookie season

Saffie Osborne, who is in her first season as a fully-fledged professional having ridden out her claim in November, landed the most valuable success of her career at Chester on Friday as Metier stayed on strongly from the top of the straight to beat Zoffee by a neck in the Tote Chester Cup. Harry Fry’s gelding had a disappointing time over hurdles over the winter, when he was pulled up on both his starts, but bounced back to the form that had seen horse and rider take last season’s November Handicap at Doncaster off an 8lb lower mark. The first prize of £76,000 was just over twice as much as Metier won on Town Moor six months ago. “It didn’t really go right through the race, I was too far back and he was all guts,” Osborne said. “I was saying what a tough horse he is, but he’s also extremely talented and still fairly unexposed at this trip on the Flat. You’d like to think there’s more left in the tank. “He’s just got a lot of ability and for a big horse he’s very well balanced to go round a track like this. I was having to make up ground on a part of a track that I didn’t really want to have to, but he was making it feel very easy and I didn’t want to check his momentum.” Earlier on the card the odds-on favourite, Point Lonsdale, had to work hard to gain a first Group Two success since August 2021 in the Huxley Stakes, holding the late challenge of Mujtaba by a neck having been strongly ridden for much of the way by Ryan Moore. Aidan O’Brien’s colt was a leading juvenile two seasons ago but made only one start at three, when he finished well down the field in the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket after being sent off at 11-2. “It wasn’t very pretty, was it?,” Moore conceded afterwards. “He’s a real galloper and he probably hasn’t been round a tight track like this before. He’s only really been to the Curragh, Leopardstown and Ascot and he was just a bit unsure what to do with himself. “Today’s race was well up to standard and the track didn’t suit him, but he has a great attitude to be fair to him and plenty of ability. It was a very good performance.” Silvestre de Sousa, who was Britain’s champion jockey on the Flat three times between 2015 and 2018, has been suspended for 10 months by the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s stewards after pleading guilty to a betting charge. De Sousa was suspended along with fellow rider Vagner Borges, who received a 12-month suspension for having “an interest” in his mount Young Brilliant in a race at Happy Valley on 26 April. De Sousa admitted that he had “facilitated” the bet. A statement from HKJC said that there was no evidence that Borges and De Sousa “had ridden their horses … with any intention other than to obtain the best possible placing for their mounts.” The statement also emphasised, however, that “it is fundamental to the integrity of racing that jockeys are not permitted to bet or to have an interest in a bet.” Desert Crown, unraced since winning the Derby at Epsom last June, is on course to make his four-year-old debut in the Brigadier Gerard Stakes at Sandown Park on 25 May. “He runs in the Brigadier for sure,” Bruce Raymond, racing manager to Desert Crown’s owner, Saeed Suhail, said on Friday. “He is in good shape, the horse looks good and all has gone to plan, from what I have been told.” The high numbers generally have the upper hand over seven furlongs at Ascot and John Quinn’s veteran Safe Voyage (2.40) , is an interesting contender from stall 22 in Saturday’s Victoria Cup. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s action after newsletter promotion Safe Voyage was a Group Two winner over this seven-furlong trip at York’s Ebor meeting three summers ago and showed that he is still capable of useful form when finishing a close third in a well-run Thirsk Hunt Cup last time. The 10-year-old can run off the same mark of 97 on Saturday, has plenty of form with cut in the ground and looks like the pick of the prices in the day’s big handicap at around 12-1. Ascot 1.30 Harry Fry has saddled just seven runners on the Flat since the start of 2022, four of which were winners with two more finishing second. High Fibre , a recruit from Ralph Beckett, ran a huge race to finish second at Newmarket after a 164-day break on his only start last season and remains a very interesting runner at around 5-1 despite having an even longer absence to overcome. Lingfield 1.50 The drop back to seven furlongs helped Winforglory to produce a career-best run on the ratings at Chelmsford City last time out and William Buick is an eye-catching booking for Richard Hughes’s gelding. Ascot 2.05 Timeless Melody pulled a long way clear of a next-time winner in a novice event at Leicester last time and her opening mark looks generous as a result. Lingfield 2.25 Sacred and Sandrine are both very capable performers at this specialist trip, but Andrew Balding’s filly has winning form on this surface and her Group Two win at Glorious Goodwood last summer is – marginally - the best on offer. Lingfield 3.00 Unlike Be Happy, her main market rival, Eternal Hope is not entered for the Oaks but there is little depth in this field and Charlie Appleby’s filly may need only normal progress to come out on top. Catterick 1.50 Dreamcasing 2.20 Specific Times 2.50 Zoom Star 3.20 Laura’s Breeze 3.50 Cold Henry 4.20 Lezardrieux 4.50 Prince Achille 5.20 Jamil Musselburgh 2.00 Cuban Slide 2.30 B Associates 3.00 Sheikh Maz Mahood (nap) 3.30 St Andrew’s Castle 4.00 Forgetmenotblue 4.30 Fanzone 5.05 Going Underground 5.40 Teresa Grace Wolverhampton 2.10 Razzam 2.40 Mediate Alexander 3.10 Intricacy 3.40 Magical Merlin (nb) 4.10 Bobby Joe Leg 4.40 Hopeforthebest 5.15 Hellavapace Windsor 5.35 Dream By Day 6.05 Rockit Tommy 6.35 Snuggle 7.05 Azure Angel 7.35 Graignes 8.05 Alba Longa 8.35 Sparks Fly Southwell 5.45 Dime Store Cowgirl 6.15 Dee Star 6.45 Blue The Money 7.15 Hostile Hotelier 7.45 Midnight Jewel 8.15 Kingfast 8.45 McGowan’s Pass Haydock 3.15 Several of the market leaders like to force the pace so this could be set up for a more patiently-ridden runner like Gary Moore’s Teddy Blue, who looked better than ever in victory at Plumpton last month and has the added benefit of excellent conditional Caoilin Quinn taking off 5lb. Lingfield 3.35 Charlie Appleby’s Military Order could hardly have a better pedigree or connections, as he is a full brother to the trainer’s 2021 Derby winner, Adayar. His form to date does not make him an 11-10 shot here, however, or an 8-1 chance for next month’s Classic. Inquiring Minds, an emphatic winner of his only start to date on Tapeta at Newcastle 11 days ago, could prove to be the pick of several very promising rivals.

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CEO of biggest carbon credit certifier to resign after claims offsets worthless

The head of the world’s leading carbon credit certifier has announced he will step down as CEO next month. It comes amid concerns that Verra, a Washington-based nonprofit, approved tens of millions of worthless offsets that are used by major companies for climate and biodiversity commitments, according to a joint Guardian investigation earlier this year. In a statement on LinkedIn on Monday, Verra’s CEO, David Antonioli, said he would leave his role after 15 years leading the organisation that dominates the $2bn voluntary carbon market, which has certified more than 1bn credits through its verified carbon standard (VCS) . Antonioli thanked current and former staff, and said he was immensely proud of what Verra had accomplished through the environmental standards it operates. He did not give a reason for his departure and said he would be taking a break once he left the role. Judith Simon, Verra’s recently appointed president, will serve as interim CEO following Antonioli’s departure on 16 June. “The trust you placed in Verra and myself in my role as CEO has meant a lot, and I leave knowing we have made tremendous strides together in addressing some of the world’s most vexing environmental and social problems. Working with you on these important issues has been a great highlight of my career,” he said. The announcement follows a difficult period for Verra, which has seen the environmental integrity of their carbon standard satirised by the comedian John Oliver and journalistic exposés about the integrity of their carbon credit certification process. In January, a nine-month investigation by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and the investigative group SourceMaterial found Verra rainforest credits used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations were largely worthless, often based on stopping the destruction of rainforests that were not threatened, according to independent studies. It also found evidence of forced evictions at a flagship scheme co-operated by Conservation International in Peru. Antonioli strongly rejected the findings of the investigation and defended Verra’s impact on the conservation of rainforests. The organisation is in the process of introducing new rules for generating rainforest carbon credits, with all projects set to be using the new system by mid-2025. Some firms are moving away from offsetting-based environmental claims, such as Gucci, which has removed a carbon neutrality claim from its website that heavily relied on Verra’s carbon credits. Scientists have called for the unregulated system to be urgently reformed to finance climate mitigation and forest conservation despite current concerns about integrity. Diego Saez Gil, the CEO of Pachama, a carbon offsetting firm that uses AI and remote sensing to verify and monitor carbon capture by forests, said he would like Verra to update its programmes with the latest science and techniques to improve integrity. “This is a pivotal moment for carbon markets. In order to scale the critical funding required for carbon sequestration at a planetary scale, we must ensure integrity, transparency, and real benefits for local communities and biodiversity. A new generation of innovative players is collaborating with standard bodies, academics, corporates, and communities, creating a new era of carbon markets that gives me hope,” he said. Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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‘Ancient’ vase repatriated from UK to Greece faces fresh forgery claim

Days after Greece announced the recovery of hundreds of antiquities from a disgraced British dealer, its ministry of culture faces the accusation that one of those artefacts, a vase of the early 5th-century BC, bears a decoration that is in fact a “modern forgery” created in the 1990s. Christos Tsirogiannis, an archaeologist based in Cambridge, expressed astonishment that the ministry had included the olpe – a vase for wine – among treasured ancient objects that will be coming home. He told the Guardian that if they had conducted adequate studies they would have known that it had been dismissed in 1998 by the foremost expert, among many examples of forged decorations on ancient vases – in this case, with an added modern design of a satyr and a goat. Using worthless authentic materials to create a valuable fake is a typical technique used by forgers. Tsirogiannis described the quality of the Greeks’ research as “absolutely shameful” because, in the announcement last Friday, Lina Mendoni, the Greek culture minister and an archaeologist, had claimed they had “worked systematically and methodically” on the collection, particularly over the past three years. She announced on the official website that sculptures and vessels were among 351 objects that were being repatriated after a 17-year negotiation with the liquidated company of the antiquities dealer Robin Symes. In 2005, Symes served a jail sentence for disregarding court orders over the sale of a £3m Egyptian statue, with the judge dismissing his explanation as “a calculated deception”. In 2016, Italian and Swiss police recovered marble statues , among other treasures stolen from Italy and allegedly stored by him at the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland. Sign up to This is Europe The most pivotal stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion On Friday, the olpe was among antiquities listed by the Greek ministry of culture: “Attic red figure olpe with a decoration of a satyr carrying a large amphora. A goat appears in the background of the decoration. The decoration was made by the Six technique [one of the decorative techniques of ancient Greek vase painters]. Early 5th century BC.” But, in 1998, the leading scholar Dietrich von Bothmer had published his findings on that same olpe , concluding that its decoration was a “modern forgery”. In a wide-ranging study of forgeries of Greek vases, he wrote that its Six technique of added opaque colours on a black background was employed “five or six years” earlier than the article’s publication. He argued that a satyr and a goat had been painted on an authentic black-glazed olpe “with a generous amount of flaking or abrasion to give it an ancient appearance”. “Fortunately, the forger did not realise that his object, had it been made in an Attic workshop in [antiquity], would have had an added red band around its middle as its sole touch of colour. This red line now appears under and beyond the freshly added figures, an overlooked detail that brands the finished product a modern forgery.” His article, published by the archaeology journal Minerva, was based on a paper presented in Basel, Switzerland, at the Fakes and Forgeries symposium in 1996. Tsirogiannis said the ministry was apparently unaware of this. He said: “It is absolutely shameful because it exposes the real level of research, although they had 17 years to conduct that properly, and especially as the culture minister is herself an archaeologist. She is triumphantly including it as an early 5th-century vase because of the decoration. It’s mind-blowing, extremely embarrassing.” Based in Cambridge, Tsirogiannis heads illicit antiquities trafficking research for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. Over 17 years, he has identified 1,664 looted objects within auction houses, commercial galleries, private collections and museums, alerting police authorities and governments and helping to repatriate items. Last Friday’s announcement only included a small sample of the antiquities repatriated, he said: “We don’t know which other objects they have repatriated. Maybe there will be more unfortunate surprises.” A spokesperson for the Greek ministry of culture and sports said: “Minister Mendoni cannot comment at the moment, as we are expecting a new minister to take over after last Sunday’s elections. However, a comment from the directorate of the ministry is that, in cases of recovery of illegally trafficked antiquities, any further research on them is carried out when the antiquities are back in Greek museums. Only then it is possible to study them thoroughly and, if required, to carry out laboratory analyses.”

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Alberto Dainese sprints to Giro stage win as Geraint Thomas holds on to lead

Alberto Dainese timed his sprint to perfection in a breathless finish to win Wednesday’s stage 17 at the Giro d’Italia, a 195km ride from Pergine Valsugana to Caorle. The Ineos Grenadiers rider Geraint Thomas continues to lead the overall standings, 18 seconds ahead of João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) with Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) in third. The Team DSM rider Dainese held off Jonathan Milan (Bahrain Victorious) in a mass sprint to prevail by a few centimetres, with Michael Matthews (Jayco-AlUla) taking third. “In the last metres, I was really digging so deep. I was really on the limit and I saw Johnny coming. I couldn’t throw my bike because I was really on the limit but it’s nice to get a few centimetres in front and get the win,” Dainese said. “In the last five days, I was quite sick with stomach issues. Today was the first day I was feeling OK, like 80%, and to win after such a struggle in the last five days is insane.” Mark Cavendish, who announced on Monday that he will end his 17-year career as a professional cyclist at the conclusion of the season, also appeared to be in contention for the stage win, but faded in the final kilometre. A four-man breakaway comprising of Thomas Champion (Cofidis), Charlie Quarterman (Corratec-Selle Italia), Diego Sevilla (Eolo-Kometa) and Senne Leysen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) had earlier built an advantage of over two minutes. Leysen attacked with 22km to go and put in a valiant performance as he battled a challenging headwind, but he never stood a chance as Movistar and Groupama–FDJ took control of the surging peloton, which swallowed up the Belgian rider with 5km left. Thomas safely retained his race lead as the Giro heads towards its conclusion. “It was a crazy bunch finish. Luckily it didn’t rain that much today,” said Thomas, who turns 37 on Thursday. “We are all safe and ready for the next three stages. Wearing the maglia rosa on my birthday will be definitely nice, I hope I can keep it until Rome.” Thursday’s stage 18 takes place on a mountainous 161km route from Oderzo to Val Di Zoldo, with two category one ascents.

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Back to the father: the scientist who lost his dad – and resolved to travel to 1955 to save him

Prof Ronald Mallett thinks he has cracked time travel. The secret, he says, is in twisting the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop of time that would allow you to travel backwards. It will take a lot more explaining and experiments, but after a half century of work, the 77-year-old astrophysicist has got that down pat. His claim is not as ridiculous as it might seem. Entire academic departments, such as the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, are dedicated to studying the possibility of time travel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter . Of course there are still lots of physicists who believe time travel, or at least travelling to the past, is impossible, but it is not quite the sci-fi pipe dream it once was. However, the story of how Mallett, now emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, reached this point could have been lifted straight from a comic book. A year after losing his father, Boyd, at the age of 10, Mallett picked up a copy of HG Wells’s The Time Machine and had an epiphany: he was going to build his own time machine, travel back to 1955 and save his father’s life. Mallett still idolises his dad, and thinks about him every day. He had been exceptionally close to Boyd, whom he describes as a handsome, erudite and funny “renaissance man” who would try to inspire curiosity in Mallett and his two brothers and sister. “When he passed away, it was like this light went out. I was in shock,” Mallett says down the line from his study in Connecticut. Boyd had gone to bed with his wife, Dorothy, on the night of their 11th wedding anniversary and let out a deep sigh. It was only when she nudged him and his head flopped off his pillow “like a sack of flour” that Dorothy realised something was wrong. Mallett woke later that night to his mother crying uncontrollably and the news that his father had died of a heart attack. “I couldn’t comprehend how this was possible. To this day, it’s hard for me to believe he’s gone. Even after 60 some years,” he says. Boyd had fought in the second world war and then, on his return home, used the GI bill, which helped qualifying military veterans with their tuition fees, to retrain in electronics. He would bring home gyroscopes and crystal radio sets, taking them apart and explaining how they worked to his children. After the family moved to a new apartment complex in the Bronx in the late 40s, Boyd took on work as a TV repairman. “I adored him,” says Mallett. “One of the great pleasures for me was meeting him when he got off the subway and carrying his toolbox home with him. He just literally lit up the room when he would come in.” Even though Boyd earned a modest living, he spoiled his children and their mother. “He worked very, very hard, he loved having a family, and he loved playing with us,” Mallett says. “One of the last things that I remember was – [on] one of the last Christmases – we wanted a bike, and he took on extra work. And all three boys got a bicycle; it was incredible for him to do that.” After Boyd died, the bubble of safety he had created for his family vanished. Dorothy and the children moved to Altoona, Pennsylvania, to be closer to her parents. One day, as Mallett and his brothers were walking around their new neighbourhood to meet friends, they saw four white boys playing nearby and approached them to say hello. When they got closer, one of the kids spat the N-word at them. No one had ever called Mallett that before. Something in him snapped and he punched the boy until he apologised. “I was in the dark already. And that just added to that, I think. I was becoming unravelled because I was in a very deep depression after he died,” says Mallett. Mallett never had cause to contemplate his race in the Bronx. “The neighbourhood that we lived in was predominantly a white Jewish neighbourhood. And I’d never experienced any feeling of prejudice. I was actually the only African American in the predominantly white Jewish Boy Scout troop, and I felt I was not treated any differently from any of the others,” he says. Mallett became a truant and withdrew into the comforting fantasy world of books and magazines. One of these books was The Time Machine. “It somehow just spoke to me,” he says. “The very first paragraph changed my life. I still remember the quote: ‘Scientific people know very well that time is just a kind of space and we can move forward and backwards in time, just as we can in space.’” Inspired by the picture of the time machine on his illustrated copy, Mallett cobbled together a replica from his bicycle and his dad’s spare TV and radio parts. But, of course, it didn’t work. In films, travelling through time is as easy as sharing a phone box with George Carlin, à la Bill and Ted; hitting 88mph in a DeLorean kitted out with a flux capacitor as in Back to the Future; or spilling a supercharged energy drink over a hot tub’s control panel, as in the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine. In reality, it’s slightly trickier. Well, travelling into the future is easy – we’re all doing it now in fact – but going back in time presents a far bigger problem. Undeterred, Mallett kept reading. He came across an Einstein paperback. Even at age 11 he got the gist that, according to Einstein, time is not absolute. Mallett rationalised that the key to seeing his dad again was understanding everything in that book, so back to school he went, rising quickly to the top of his classes and graduating with straight As. Without the funds to go straight on to college, he joined the air force, intending to use the GI bill as his father had. “It was a very, very solitary life,” he says. He chose the graveyard shift so that he could study and “was just in my world, in my books”. After the air force, Mallett enrolled at Pennsylvania State University and became one of the first African Americans to receive a PhD in physics. However, despite his academic success, he didn’t have the confidence to publicly discuss time travel. It was the 1980s and talking about it was still unheard of in “serious” academic circles; doing so could be career suicide. Plus, growing up in white America had taught him that no matter how high he climbed, he was still in danger of being disrespected. It wasn’t until the mid-90s, when people were starting to talk about the possibility of time travel, that Mallett felt ready to be more open about his endeavour. Heart problems meant he had to have angioplasty surgery and he spent his months of recovery poring over his research. Mallett found his eureka moment in a black hole. “It turns out that rotating black holes can create a gravitational field that could lead to loops of time being created that can allow you to go to the past,” says Mallett. Unlike a normal black hole, a spinning black hole has two event horizons (the surface enclosing the space from which electromagnetic radiation cannot escape), an inner one and an outer one. Between these two event horizons, something called frame dragging – the dragging of space-time – occurs. “Let me give you an analogy,” Mallett says, with patience. “Let’s say you have a cup of coffee in front of you right now. Start stirring the coffee with the spoon. It started swirling around, right? That’s what a rotating black hole does.” But, he continues, “in Einstein’s theory, space and time relate to each other. That’s why it’s called space-time. So as the black hole is rotating, it’s actually going to cause a twisting of time.” Although black holes are in short supply in this corner of the Milky Way, Mallett thinks he may have found an artificial alternative in a device called a ring laser, which can create an intense and continuous rotating beam of light – “light can create gravity … and if gravity can affect time, then light itself can affect time,” he explains. Some of Mallett’s critics have objected that his time machine would have to be the size of the known universe, thus completely impractical. I put this to him. “You’re absolutely right; you’re talking about galactic types of energy in order to do that,” he acknowledges. So, how big would your time machine be? “I don’t know that yet. The thing is that what is necessary first is being able to show that we can twist space – not time – twist space with light.” Only then, he says, will he know what is necessary to do the rest. Mallett likens it to asking the Wright brothers, straight after their maiden flight, for their predictions for how humans will reach the moon. All Mallett can tell us at the moment is that his time machine, however big, will look like a cylinder of rotating light beams. Such an endeavour would, of course, not come cheap, but it’s highly unlikely that any government would pour its resources into time travel, and the only billionaire wacky enough to potentially fund such a project is busy with Mars and Twitter. Plus, here’s the rub. Even if clever engineers and barmy billionaires put Mallett’s theories into practice, it would only allow travel back in time to the point when the time loop was created, which could never be 1955. For all Mallett’s work and theories, there is no possibility of him travelling back to see his dad again. How did he feel when he realised? “It was sad for me but it wasn’t tragic, because I remember that there was this little boy who dreamed of the possibility of having a time machine. I have figured out how it can be done.” Mallett also takes comfort in the enormous potential his machine could have for the wellbeing of life on our planet. “Let’s suppose that we had already had this device going on some years ago, and now we have medicines that can cure Covid. Imagine if we could predict precisely when earthquakes are going to occur, or tsunamis. So, for me, I’ve opened the door to the possibility. And I think that my father would have been really proud about that.”

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Giro d’Italia: Davide Bais triumphs on Gran Sasso after ‘boring’ stalemate

The expected general classification scrap on the first summit finish of this year’s Giro d’Italia never came as the Italian rider Davide Bais took a surprise victory on stage seven from a breakaway. More than three minutes after Bais (Eolo–Kometa) took his first professional win, the main contenders came to the top of the Gran Sasso d’Italia together, merely ensuring there were no time gaps between them. The world champion, Remco Evenepoel of Soudal-Quick-Step, led the group home. It was a long way from the expected drama as the main contenders passed up an opportunity to race, an unexpected truce among rivals who remain bunched up in the standings behind the overall leader, DSM’s Andreas Leknessund. A stage that finished above the snow line was one where the weather might have added to the drama, but instead Geraint Thomas of Team Ineos said the wind dissuaded any of the big names from making a move. “There was a super strong headwind,” the Welshman said. “Everyone was just waiting really, no one wanted to push the pace, in the wheels it was a lot easier. It was a bit of a stalemate. We kind of wanted to race a bit but it wasn’t the conditions to. I feel all right, I’m feeling better, we’ll be able to see once the race really kicks off in the last week.” Leknessund, enjoying his third day in the maglia rosa , called the stage “a bit boring” after he prepared for attacks that never came. “We were quite lucky how the day unfolded,” the Norwegian said. “In the end it was only full gas in the last few kilometres, but we are grateful for that as we get more days in pink.” Few gave a small breakaway much hope when they rolled off the front early on, but victory for the escapees reflected the cagey tactics of those with bigger ambitions behind, unlike when Simon Yates won in pink on this mountain in 2018 . The ingredients had all been there. The day began in damp conditions, with the threat of standing water on the road and reports of snow at the finish. The fact that few riders fancied the breakaway was understandable, but many that sat back would have been kicking themselves six hours later. Bais attacked with Simone Petilli (Intermarché–Circus–Wanty), Karel Vacek (Team Corratec) and Henok Mulubrhan (Green Project–Bardiani–CSF–Faizanè) and they were afforded 10 minutes, enough to make Petilli the virtual race leader . Mulubrhan would fall back, but it became apparent that the front three would fight for the stage. As they began the first of the two back-to-back climbs which in effect made this a 45km drag to the summit, their advantage was still more than 10 minutes. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s action after newsletter promotion Petilli tried to attack with six kilometres remaining but the three were still together coming into the final few hundred metres. Petilli again went first, but Bais swept past him as Vacek came through to take second.

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Planet Normal: 'The nation's social contract with the government has been broken'

England may be moving to Plan B Covid restrictions following Wednesday's announcement, but according to Telegraph columnists and hosts of the weekly Planet Normal podcast, Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan, it may be in name only. Referring to the Chief Medical Officer's recent comments at a Local Government Association discussion panel last week, Halligan says "Chris Whitty questioned in public if having an extended taste of freedom since July, the public is prepared to give up on our liberties once more." "And I do think the leaked film, and the government's response, will have compounded that. It literally is one rule for them and one rule for the rest of us,” Halligan tells this week’s podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above. “The social contract has been broken pretty badly with these signs of shenanigans and rule breaking.” Pearson questions if the Wednesday night press conference, in which the Prime Minister announced people will have to work from home from Monday , is more about "resetting the Johnson government after bad polling over sleaze and corruption" than the Omicron variant. Joining Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan on this week’s podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, is breast cancer specialist Professor Gordon Wishart. Professor Wishart, Chief Medical Officer at Check4Cancer and Visiting Professor of Cancer Surgery at Anglia Ruskin University, tells listeners that there's no point returning to pre-pandemic "normal" when it comes to cancer services, as they were failing before the pandemic - we must aim for "super normal". Plus he reveals that for many years cancer waiting time targets were met due to the goodwill of staff doing extra clinics - and that the goodwill has now run out. Listen to Planet Normal, a weekly Telegraph podcast featuring news and views from beyond the bubble, using the audio player above or on Apple Podcasts , Spotify or your preferred podcast app.

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My passion for the seven small objects at the heart of everything we build

When I was about five years old, I was living with my parents and sister in snowy upstate New York. It was the 1980s and one day I sat in front of my favourite large rectangular lunchbox, adorned with a picture of the Muppets on the front. This one held my huge collection of crayons – long, short, thick, thin, in every shade available. Like most children, I was continuously curious and I wanted to “discover” what was inside my crayons. So I peeled off the paper that enveloped them, then held them one at a time against the sharp edge of the open box and snapped them in two. My great anticipation was rather dampened to find, well, just more crayon inside. Nevertheless I persisted. When I was a little older and started writing words on paper with pencils, I would twist them inside a sharpener to see if the grey rod that marked my sheets went all the way through its body. It did. From there, I graduated to pens – far from the disappointing crayons of my early childhood, the insides of fountain pens and ballpoints contained slender cartridges and helical springs, held together with a top that threaded, screw-like, on to the rest of the pen. Growing up in India, I saw my television taken apart to reveal boggling innards that only made sense when I did a degree in physics. In fact, the reason I chose to study physics was because I wanted to understand the building blocks of our universe. Towards the end of my school years, I had become fascinated by atomic and particle physics, enthralled by the idea that the atom itself, once thought indivisible, was then revealed to be made up of electrons, protons and neutrons – and that these, after having their turn on the podium of “fundamental building blocks of matter”, were supplanted by quarks. Whether or not I understood it at the time, I was on a mission to understand how things worked. This quest began, in practical terms, with a career in engineering. I spent six years as part of the team that designed the Shard . Between the lack of women and people of colour in my profession, and my passion for my work, I did hundreds of presentations about engineering around the world, which led to publishing two books about iconic structures and how they’re built. After exploring the big in my writing, I decided to turn to the small. Whether it’s the matter that makes our universe, living biological creatures, or the human-made objects we invented, complex compositions are made up of smaller and simpler, well, things. Inside all the human-made things around us are fundamental building blocks without which our complex machinery wouldn’t exist. At first glance, they might seem uninteresting. Often small, and sometimes hidden, the truth is that each of these elements is an extraordinary feat of engineering with fascinating stories that go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It is this idea that inspired my book where I select what I believe are seven elements that form the basis of the modern world – the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the pump and string. Together they encompass a vast range of innovations in terms of their underlying scientific principles, the fields of engineering they touch, and the scale of objects they have enabled. They are also wonders of design that went through many different iterations and forms, and continue to do so. As they evolved, combined in different ways, the complexity of the machines we could make escalated in a cascading butterfly effect of invention and innovation. Every one of these objects has touched us – they have created and changed our technology, of course, but have also had a sweeping impact on our history, society, political and power structures, biology, communication, transportation, arts and culture. I selected these seven objects during the first 2020 lockdown. Trapped at home, I let my mind roam free, looking around at my possessions and mentally (or sometimes physically) deconstructing them to see what lay inside. I revisited the ballpoint pen and saw a spring, a screw, and a revolving sphere. The blender I used to make my baby’s food relied on gears, which in turn couldn’t exist without the wheel. Before that, when I was breastfeeding, a breast pump allowed my husband to feed our daughter, too. The process of IVF I went through relied on a lens to see things on a cellular scale. The protective masks we wore during our short walks, and that kept medics safe, were formed of countless fibres twisted together to make fabric. The speaker on my phone through which I could hear the voices of family and friends relied on a magnet. Even as I thought about larger and more complex objects – diggers, skyscrapers, factories, tunnels, electrical grids, cars, satellites, and so on – again and again, I came back to the same seven foundational innovations. We join things together: the nail. We need something that rotates or revolves: the wheel. We need power and technology that can store it: batteries, sure, but more fundamentally, the spring. Magnetism (and electricity) allow us to manipulate things from a distance; the lens lets us play with the path of light. String gives us a strong material that is also flexible. To move water and keep us alive, we fashion pumps. The invention or discovery of each of these seven pieces of engineering involved a process of failure and iteration: of having a need, then trying out different materials, shapes and forms, until something worked. To take one example, buildings, bridges, factories, tractors, cars, phones, locks, watches and washing machines – in fact, most things that need pieces of metal to be attached to each other – have nails, screws, rivets and bolts keeping them together. The nail was originally used to join pieces of wood together – to create more robust ships and furniture. Later, the screw vastly improved on the nail’s holding power, although it was much harder to make. Then, when thin metal sheets could be cheaply manufactured, neither the nail nor the screw was fit for purpose, and the rivet came into being. Small rivets in cooking vessels gave way to larger and stronger rivets to join metal planes, ships and bridges, before engineers invented the bolt, a combination of the rivet and screw, which was stronger and easier to install. The tallest skyscrapers, longest bridges and deepest tunnels are held stable and robust by such bolts. All this evolution doesn’t mean that the original nail is obsolete, however. In fact, nails, and their multiple reincarnations, are all being used in parallel with screws, rivets, and bolts, each one for the purpose it best suits. And that’s how design changes: sometimes we use the same technology for centuries before we invent a new material or process, or realise that we need to adapt existing technology to suit. Other times, it’s the other way around: we invent a new technology, like the incredibly strong fibre Kevlar, and then find purposes for it – in this case, bulletproof vests. Some of these inventions developed independently in different parts of the globe with very similar designs, like the wheel, but others, like the pump, looked very different. And so, these inventions were born, then changed and evolved in their own ways, often going on to have unexpected applications and implications far beyond their original purpose. While we think of engineering as a field littered with inanimate objects and complex pieces of technology that often feel alien or beyond our understanding, at the heart of engineering is people – those who create it, those who need and use it, those who sometimes inadvertently make a contribution to it. When I think about string, I think about the seamstresses in Delaware who watched the Moon landings worrying about Neil Armstrong’s gusset holding. Magnetism formed the basis of a colonial telegraph system, designed by a doctor who passed electrical current through his hands. An Islamic scholar finally figured out how we see and revolutionised our understanding of optical physics, centuries before Newton made his mark. And so, engineering is the meeting of science, design, and history. It’s about human need and creativity, about finding problems and creating solutions to them in ways that haven’t been attempted before. It’s about trying to make our lives better, but knowing that, conversely, our inventions can have a devastating impact on society when not used responsibly. At its most fundamental, it is inextricably linked to everyday life and to humanity. Look around you, and ask questions about what you see: reignite that childhood curiosity. Hopefully, that will inspire you to investigate the increasingly complicated world of engineering and lead to a better understanding of the building blocks of our world. Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World (in a Big Way) by Roma Agrawal (Hodder, £ 22), is available from guardianbookshop.com for £19.36

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Pacific islands warned of possible small tsunamis after earthquake near New Caledonia

People across the South Pacific have been told to avoid coastal areas due to the risk of small tsunami waves after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake south-east of the Loyalty Islands in New Caledonia . Tsunami waves ranging from 0.3 to 1 metre above the tide level were possible for some coasts of Vanuatu, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said. Waves below that level were set for 25 island groups including Tonga and Tuvalu, it said. A 22cm tsunami had been observed near New Caledonia, the threat alert added. The United States Geological Survey said the quake hit at a depth of about 38km (24 miles) on Friday. Vanuatu warned citizens to seek higher ground, according to an official at the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department, who said the office had received calls from people on the southern islands who had felt shaking. Australia’s meteorology bureau issued a tsunami threat for Lord Howe Island, off its east coast, and warned the roughly 450 inhabitants to leave the water’s edge due to waves and strong currents. “We haven’t moved to higher ground and we’re probably not going to,” said Damien Ball of the Thompsons General Store on Lord Howe Island. “We’ve been through this numerous times before and nothing ever comes of it.” Similar warnings are in place for much of New Zealand’s west coast. The country’s civil defence agency issued an advisory saying it expected New Zealand coastal areas to experience strong and unusual currents and unpredictable surges at the shore.

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Leader Remco Evenepoel pulls out of Giro d’Italia with Covid-19

Remco Evenepoel abandoned the Giro d’Italia with Covid-19 shortly after the world champion regained the race lead with victory in a rain-affected 35km individual time trial on Sunday. “It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce that I will be leaving the Giro d’Italia due to Covid-19 after taking a routine test, which unfortunately was positive,” Evenepoel, who had regained the Maglia Rosa by winning Sunday’s individual time trial, said in a statement. The new race leader is Britain’s Geraint Thomas , who had finished stage nine one second behind the Belgian, who won two stages and wore the Maglia Rosa four times. The three-time Vuelta champion Primoz Roglic is second overall, two seconds behind, with Thomas’s Ineos Grenadiers teammate Tao Geoghegan Hart in third place, five seconds off the pace. Ineos Grenadiers were without the two-time time trial world champion Filippo Ganna after the Italian tested positive for Covid-19 before stage eight. Monday is a rest day on the Giro. Tuesday’s stage 10 is a 196km ride from Scandiano to Viareggio, which features a long climb before a fast-running and technical descent. Evenepoel had reclaimed the Giro d’Italia pink jersey after dramatically edging out Thomas by a single second in the stage nine time trial. Evenepoel flew out of the traps and, despite appreciably slowing after the first time check, the Belgian had enough in the tank to pip Thomas by crossing the line in 41min 24sec. Thomas remains without a stage win at the Giro. It was his fourth runner-up finish in the event’s time trial, having come second twice in 2012 and once in 2017.

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Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed review

We live in an environment that encourages rock and pop artists to make an immediate splash, to cut through the digital noise and the plethora of musicians jostling for attention on streaming services by appearing fully formed, as exciting on arrival as they’re ever going to be: in a world where tens of thousands of new tracks are uploaded every day, you’d better stand out straight away. Carving out the space to evolve or develop isn’t easy, so it’s impressive when you encounter a band that has managed it. Which brings us to Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes. The duo, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, started out as nothing special. Their 2017 debut, Long Days No Dreams, covered so many modish US indie bases – bedroom synth-pop, offbeat post-punk and distorted digital noise, shoegazey textures, introverted acoustic balladry and what Americans persist in calling tweepop – it might as well have been called 6.9 From Pitchfork: fine if you like that sort of thing, but there really was more than enough of that sort of thing already available. In ensuing years, they kept plugging away, audibly searching for an identity of their own. There were concept albums and a collection of covers from which a dead-eyed version of Eminem’s Lose Yourself attracted attention. An experimental, idiosyncratic sound coalesced on 2021’s Structure, but it’s on Everyone’s Crushed that it pulls into focus, if that’s the right metaphor for a cut-up, sample-heavy sound that feels wilfully chaotic and scattered. The most obvious comparison might be the swarming overload of Low’s most recent albums – notably when Open devolves into squealing, distorted guitar interrupted by digital noise – although occasionally you can trace the ghost of past generations of alt-rock: the detuned guitars and drones of 14 vaguely evoke Sonic Youth, as droning detuned guitars are wont to do. But Everyone’s Crushed feels more straightforwardly poppy than either band. Notwithstanding all the cut-up, oddly bluesy guitar licks, its key sonic factor may be a warped approach to noises familiar from mid-80s pop – breathy, pan-pipe-esque electronic tones; synths that sound a little like steel drums; the kind of vocal samples that were the dernier cri in cutting-edge pop around 1985, thanks to the arrival of the Emulator synthesiser and the Art of Noise . It twists them until they sound off-key and disquieting rather than comfortingly familiar, marooning them over slippery rhythms and jutting them against rumbling live drums and bass, letting them spiral out of time. On Out There and Barley the effect is thrilling, as if everything is both teeming and on the verge of spinning completely out of control. Some of the improvements are almost boringly prosaic, but crucial nevertheless. Brown’s voice, which in the past often seemed content to inhabit an area in roughly the same postal district as the tune, feels stronger. Strong enough, in fact, to foreground, which lends a curious heft to their untrained voice: there’s a weird tension in hearing someone who sounds like they’re distractedly singing to themselves put front and centre in the mix. A tendency to inverted-commas irony – characteristic of artists who grew up online – has conversely been dialled down. True Life ends with a verse about the song itself, detailing the band’s failed attempt to get Neil Young to let them use the lyrics from his 1969 track Cinnamon Girl, interpolated with lawsuit-dodging paraphrases of said lyrics, but it doesn’t overwhelm the song. The track’s power lies in its blasting atonal guitar riff and thundering drums, not the self-conscious meta stuff. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Their lyrical approach could do with more honing. Usually abstract to the point of incomprehension, their songwriting here is at times more direct. But the message appears to be about how terrible the past few years have been, presumably for the benefit of anyone in their audience who has found the past few years an unceasing hoot. It’s inarguable to the point that it seems hardly worth saying (“tell me something I haven’t been told,” as True Life puts it). This is particularly true of tracks like the anti-consumerism-themed closer Buy My Product: “Buy my product / There are no happy endings / I’m spending,” it offers, over one of the album’s most appealing backdrops, a taut bass and drum pattern disrupted by bursts of skittish guitar and ominous cello. It’s better when the lyrics take their cue from the fragmented backing – the chaotic word salad of Out There – or when odd, intriguing phrases loom out of the confusion: “I traced what I erased”, “knowing you is a thunderstorm”. Still, it’s not the only recent album occasionally given to stating the obvious: more important is the fact that Everyone’s Crushed is the only recent album that sounds the way it does. It has taken Water From Your Eyes six years to reach a point where their music feels genuinely original, a journey that feels worth it. There’s a lesson in there. King Krule – If It Only Was Warmth A song that feels like you’re eavesdropping on something private: subdued, heartsore, compelling.

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Hibernation artificially triggered in potential space travel breakthrough

In science fiction, space crews are often spared the boredom and inconvenience of long-distance space travel by being placed into a state of suspended animation. Now this goal may have come a step closer after scientists showed that hibernation can be artificially triggered in rodents using ultrasonic pulses. The advance is seen as significant because the technique was effective in rats – animals that do not naturally hibernate. This raises the prospect that humans may also retain a vestigial hibernation circuit in the brain that could be artificially reactivated. “If this proves feasible in humans, we could envision astronauts wearing a helmet-like device designed to target the hypothalamus region for inducing a hypothermia and hypometabolism state,” said Hong Chen , an associate professor at Washington University in St Louis, who led the work. The team first identified a specific group of neurons in a deep brain region called the hypothalamus preoptic area, which were found to be involved in regulating body temperature and metabolism during hibernation. They showed that, in mice, these neurons could be artificially activated using ultrasound, delivered non-invasively through a helmet. When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3C for about one hour. The mice’s metabolism also shifted from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature. The scientists also developed an automatic closed-loop feedback system that delivered an ultrasound pulse to keep the mice in the induced torpor if they showed signs of warming up. This allowed the mice to be kept at 33C in the hibernation-like state for 24 hours. When the ultrasound system was switched off, they woke up again. The experiments, described in the journal Nature Metabolism , showed that the same device worked in rats, which had a 1C drop in core body temperature when the same brain region was targeted. Chen said the result was “surprising and fascinating” and the team planned to test the technique in larger animals. In humans, inducing a torpor-like state has potential medical applications, with some suggesting that slowing down metabolism could buy critical time for treating life-threatening conditions such as heart attack and stroke. “By extending the window for medical intervention, this technique offers promising prospects for improving patients’ chances of survival,” said Chen. “Additionally, the non-invasive nature of the technique opens the possibility of developing wearable ultrasound devices, such as helmets, for easy access in emergency situations.” Prof Martin Jastroch, of Stockholm University, who was not involved in the research, described the work as a breakthrough. “Everything they see recapitulates what you see in nature,” he said. “They can also do this in rats, which is quite exciting,” he added, saying that “the chance is quite high” the same technique would, theoretically, work in humans. “We might have some residual abilities there. Before this paper no one was even thinking of how you could experiment with that in safe manner.”

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Miami F1 GP drama: Leclerc crash hands Pérez pole as Verstappen suffers

Max Verstappen faces the toughest test of his season after being punished for a mistake in qualifying for the Miami Grand Prix. The race desperately wants some fireworks to go with the grand spectacle it is so determined to present and Red Bull’s world champion must now very much light the blue touch paper in Florida. With his teammate Sergio Pérez taking pole and Verstappen managing only ninth, the Dutchman’s slender championship lead of six points over the Mexican is under genuine threat on Sunday on a track where an inexorable march back to the front from the Dutchman is far from guaranteed and where any errors will be punished even more harshly. On form and on the back of a dominant world championship victory last year, Verstappen will not have expected to come under the cosh from Pérez so early in the season, yet at the Miami International Autodrome it was the world champion found wanting, while Pérez took advantage. Though Verstappen was unlucky, too, he had to abort his first hot run in Q3, having gone wide after being untidy through turns four and five, putting him under pressure for the final quick laps, with Pérez having nailed his lap and holding provisional pole. Verstappen needed a perfect run on his final shot but was denied it when Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc crashed out, overcooking it through six and seven and going into the barriers. With only 1min 36sec remaining, the session was ended by the red flags, and with not enough time to resume the grid was set from the first runs. Verstappen signalled his displeasure with a series of expletives over team radio, while F1 in contrast had the entertainingly mixed-up grid the sport craves. Fernando Alonso was second for Aston Martin, Carlos Sainz third for Ferrari , Kevin Magnussen fourth for Haas and Pierre Gasly in fifth for Alpine. Verstappen, who must pass them all in the race, held his hands up but remained bullish about his chances. “It was my mistake, I tried to put it on the limit and had to abort,” he said. “Then you rely a bit on luck but it can happen. The race is going to be tough, yes, I made it difficult for myself but I am targeting a minimum of P2.” He will have a swathe of places to gain even to catch his teammate and, while the Red Bull is a rocket ship, passing on this circuit will be a formidable test. After a monotonous procession at the last round in Baku, drivers are fearful this track will offer similar fare, with a perfect storm of issues militating against overtaking. Last year the track surface began to break up over the weekend, so it has been relaid and drivers have complained of a lack of grip from the fresh asphalt, especially off-line. It is a problem that has been exacerbated by the Pirelli tyres shedding excessive marbles. There has also been disquiet because the FIA, the sport’s governing body, has shortened two of the drag reduction system zones at the circuit, a subject raised at the drivers’ briefing on Friday. It was an issue they had highlighted as impeding overtaking in Baku and they emphasised it was likely to result in a similar hampering of passing moves in Miami. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s action after newsletter promotion A long and genuinely testing afternoon awaits the world champion, then, while Pérez, with momentum from his win in Baku, is absolutely in a position to ignite his title challenge. With the championship a two-horse race between the Red Bull drivers, qualifying in Miami ensured Verstappen cannot take anything for granted. Behind them there was only further woe for Lewis Hamilton , who had warned he expected to struggle and could not escape from Q2, finishing in 13th. He was critical of his Mercedes team for sending him out for his final hot run too late, catching traffic on his out lap. “When you are fast you can be more relaxed, go at the last minute and you know you will make it to Q3 but now we need to do better with our time,” he said. George Russell was in sixth for Mercedes, Leclerc finished in seventh, Esteban Ocon in eighth for Alpine and Valtteri Bottas in 10th for Alfa Romeo. Alex Albon was in 11th for Williams with Nico Hülkenberg in 12th for Haas. Guanyu Zhou was in 14th for Alfa Romeo with Nyck de Vries in 15th for AlphaTauri. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were in 10th and 19th for McLaren. Yuki Tsunoda was 11th for AlphaTauri, Lance Stroll in 18th for Aston Martin and Miami local Logan Sargeant in 20th for Williams.

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Perhaps it’s time to admit it: drinking at work is an ugly hangover from the past

When she was about to leave her midwest home to head to drama school in New York in the 1940s, the actor Elaine Stritch’s father offered her some parental guidance. “Lainie,” he told her, “you are not the same after two martinis.” Good advice, then and now. But while awareness of the harm that excessive alcohol consumption can do has grown in the intervening years, our relationship with booze has not necessarily improved all that much. And the use (or abuse) of alcohol at work remains a live issue. The CBI is just the latest organisation to have its work-related, alcohol-fuelled behaviour scrutinised in the sober light of day. And while the No 10 Partygate saga appalled people on a number of levels, it was not just the flagrant breach of Covid restrictions that caused upset, but the excesses of drinking in an actual workplace – and quite an important workplace at that. A new survey from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) suggests that, in the UK at least, our difficulties with alcohol at work continue. About a third of managers overall (33% of female managers, 26% of male ones) said they had witnessed harassment or other inappropriate forms of behaviour at work parties. The CMI’s chief executive, Ann Francke, says that it may be necessary to limit the amount of drink offered at work parties, or supervise events and behaviour much more carefully. Alcohol “doesn’t need to be the main event”, she told the BBC. This approach makes sense: overemphasising the “piss-up” factor is asking for trouble. But perhaps we also have to think a bit harder about the role of alcohol and what it represents. What is really going on when we drink in a work environment? The organisational anthropologist John Curran says that there are two main types of workplace drinking. There is the traditional male drinking culture that is associated with power and misogyny – think Mad Men and, well, martinis. And then there is drinking as a ritualised, team-building exercise that is supposed to enhance a sense of community at work. Both of these forms of behaviour can be seen as control mechanisms, Curran says: “If you don’t turn up you are not a team player.” And so on. The other, subset event is the Christmas party or leaving do, when excess may almost seem to be encouraged, and some modest, temporary challenge to the existing hierarchy may take place, with junior staff mocking more senior figures. During lockdown there were some (only partially successful) attempts to recreate community by having online drinks. And since the lockdowns ended, the need to rebuild cohesion at work has been recognised by a lot of bosses, even if many are still struggling to persuade people to spend more time in the office. Drinking culture at work runs deep in Britain. The home of the industrial revolution was also the home of thirsty, hard-working men who had earned a drink. Booze has been part of work here for centuries. It would be hypocritical for a journalist to say otherwise. At the end of the working day during my first job in journalism, in London more than 30 years ago, many of us strolled almost automatically to the pub that stood less than 100 yards away from our desks. There was often drink at lunch, whether it was a work meeting or a social one. But I made good friends then who are still (drinking) buddies today. It’s not just journalists, of course. Some City traders will still be ready for a drink after a busy day’s work (one that starts very early). Good days can be celebrated, while on less fortunate ones sorrows can be drowned. Any self-respecting sales team will want to enjoy a big win. And that enjoyment will usually be marked (and enhanced) by alcohol. But perhaps the time has come to draw a line under all this. Many people do not really want to be confronted with alcohol at work, for health, personal or religious reasons. There are a lot more interesting (and alcohol-free) drinks available today than there used to be. The term “soft drinks” seems to contain a slight hint of disapproval. But if we can’t be grown up and responsible about booze at work, perhaps it is one of those nice things that we cannot have. “Maybe alcohol should just be banned in any workplace situation,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the Alliance Manchester business school. “Why not just enjoy yourself without booze?” Prof Cooper recognises that alcohol might be used as a stress reliever or a coping strategy, perhaps for more introverted people who are not looking forward to a social gathering. “But it’s better to identify the cause of the stress and deal with it, rather than turning to drink,” he says. There are some grounds for hope, and it comes from younger people. They seem to be drinking less than their older colleagues. It could be that it’s just too expensive. But there is also evidence that different ways of socialising and less obsessive worship of booze may lie behind this. A healthy, productive workplace should not need too many stimulants to function, beyond perhaps caffeine. Sometimes we are told to “bring your whole self to work”. But we should probably leave our hangovers at home. Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre

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Lake or mistake? The row over water firms, drought and Abingdon’s new super-reservoir

It will be like a giant flan case full of water dumped on a marsh, says Julie Mabberley. She is discussing the plan to put a 150bn-litre reservoir, spanning almost two miles across, to the south-west of Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Mabberley, a management consultant and local campaigner with 1,000 people on her list of anti-reservoir sympathisers, believes the 25-metre-high walls needed to keep in the huge volume of water would be too close to hundreds of homes built near the site to be safe. Her doubts, and those of other campaigners, about the feasibility and safety of the £1.4bn reservoir feed into an unresolved debate over the need for extra water storage in the south and east of England. Britain’s water companies are grabbing the headlines after spilling vast amounts of raw sewage near beaches and into rivers. But the other problem bubbling away is the need for them to provide more water, especially in the east and south-east, where natural stores in underground aquifers are being sucked dry. After more than three decades of privatisation, debate is raging about the ownership of water companies , the extraction of huge sums in dividends, and how vast and vital upgrades to infrastructure are funded as the climate changes. Emergencies and extremes are expected to become more frequent now that the country is increasingly becoming used to flash floods and droughts, where once showers, drizzle and the occasional burst of sun were more common. The Abingdon reservoir is the cornerstone of plans to build a resilient network of water sources – ones that can be easily deployed when shortages hit. Yet local residents and politicians say they remain confused by it. What was going to provide Oxfordshire with a degree of drought resistance when it was put forward in 2010 became a solution for London in 2019. Then Thames, Affinity and Southern, the three water companies that plan to build the reservoir, said its water would be piped south to Portsmouth. Oxfordshire county council’s climate change spokesperson, Pete Sudbury, sums up the local mood. “The water industry has utterly failed to convince people in Oxfordshire, who have no wish to see this vast reservoir imposed on them,” he says. Water companies, local residents, council officers and the water regulator remain at loggerheads despite a public consultation that ended in March. By this autumn, a report prepared for the water regulator, Ofwat, is expected to recommend Abingdon reservoir be included in an overarching plan to keep water flowing to the taps of 19 million people in the south-east. At this stage more studies are being carried out to test the reservoir’s impact and no conclusion has been reached. However, campaigners fear the project will gather momentum before a new 50-year water resources management plan, which all water companies are expected to publish in 2024, and that analysis of the scheme’s flaws will be pushed aside. Historically, the south-east has far fewer reservoirs than the north, mainly because the lack of clay in the region – broadly, the area below a line between the River Exe in the south-west and the Norfolk coast – limits the places new reservoirs can be constructed. Investment-shy water companies are cited as another barrier to building a new generation of infrastructure. Thérèse Coffey is the latest environment secretary trying to get the companies to secure new sources of water. She oversees an arm’s-length agency known as Rapid – the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development. Made up of Ofwat, the Environment Agency (EA) and the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), Rapid has dictated terms to regional groups of previously autonomous private water companies since it was created in 2019. The group of companies that covers the south-east region – including Thames, Affinity and Southern – is called Water Resources South East (WRSE). Since it was privatised in 1989 the industry has hitherto failed to construct a single reservoir, but now three could be built in the south-east over the next 15 years. They will be part of £14bn worth of investment to revamp treatment works, mend leaky pipes and transfer water around the country to resolve increasingly frequent shortages. At the heart of the plan are water transfers – diverting river flows from those with a lot to those with little. They make up a significant slice of the investment along with fixing leaks. Reservoirs account for only 7%, but are considered a crucial backup by WRSE, and the Abingdon reservoir is the largest. Critics of water transfers, including the environmentalist George Monbiot, argue that they are an exercise in robbing parts of the west and north of England to benefit a profligate south-east. That is not view of the Abingdon protesters, who say the installation of pipe networks between one catchment and another to cope with shortages – in this case from the Severn to the Thames – is better than having a mass of untreated water locked up in a reservoir based on a flawed design. Derek Stork, the chair of the Group Against Reservoir Development (Gard), says: “Usually, it pays to learn lessons from history. Water transfer schemes are not in any way a radical or new idea. “Anyone familiar with Roman aqueducts, or the cities of the ancient Persian empire, will be familiar with the concept. They have, moreover, been what has been happening in England since Victorian times, when the north Wales reservoirs were built to supply Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester. “Nobody thinks twice about having an electricity grid and a national gas grid. We should be planning a sensible water grid too.” Stork battled against a plan for a 100bn-litre reservoir in 2010, arguing that the Thames was already struggling to fill adjacent reservoirs before a drought period and the same would be the case in Abingdon, making it an almost useless addition to the “grid”. The planning inspector agreed that Thames Water, which was acting alone at the time, had not made the case and told the company to come back with a more modest and less disruptive proposal that was more adaptable to changing needs. Now, Stork is coming to grips with a welter of detailed supporting documents put forward by WRSE in favour of a larger 150bn-litre lake. Most of the water, in the latest version of the scheme, will sit above ground after engineers found that the rare patch of clay soil which drew them to this corner of Oxfordshire is too shallow to dig down as far as 25 metres. That will leave most of the water weighing heavily on a patch of farmland that is already criss-crossed with small rivers, all of which are prone to flooding. Stork, a former head of technology at the Atomic Energy Authority and a nuclear fusion expert, disputes the safety of the scheme when the area is already a flood risk, while others in the campaign group argue that the proposal skates over the environmental impact. Roger Turnbull, a parish councillor and retired planning officer, claims the population growth forecasts used by the water companies to justify the reservoir are out of date. “They are using old forecasts. For instance, the plan for London was for another 800,000 people over the next 10 years. Now it is 300,000. And yet Thames Water has not adjusted its forecasts.” Andy Cooke, a Liberal Democrat district councillor and military IT specialist, wants WRSE to champion more immediate solutions to the drought problem. He rejects an “inflexible mega project” that is likely to be late and over-budget in favour of speeding up the transfer of water from the Severn to the Thames basin.“If you want to cover population growth, if you want abstraction reduction, if you want drought resilience, why go first and foremost for something that most of the population won’t see in their lifetime?” he says. Simon Thomas, who manages a farm that would lose 800-1,000 hectares of land if the plan goes through, considers the wetland habitats that he has helped create to be among the main losses, along with the birds that live there and the lines of riverbank trees that skirt the site. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion “We created a wetland mosaic with differing depths of water, which encourages different species,” he says. “Whether it survives is an open question because it falls into the area designated for flood alleviation and we don’t know how they are going to manage that.” Labour and Conservative politicians regularly cite excessively strict planning rules for holding up major infrastructure projects. Housing schemes, renewable energy installations and new road and rail projects are regularly abandoned after objections at the planning stage. Water schemes are no exception. To help ministers push ahead, the National Infrastructure Commission, which has grown in stature under its boss, Sir John Armitt, is becoming an unofficial arbiter of good development. Its report on the water industry – which estimated the UK needed new supplies equivalent to the water consumed by more than 9 million people by the mid-2030s – was behind the creation of Rapid and WRSE. Unsurprisingly, the commission is in favour of the Abingdon reservoir as an essential building block of future water resilience. Planning rules have nothing to do with the reservoir’s travails so far, say campaigners, unless WRSE is referring to rules that force it to make a coherent and transparent argument. Catriona Riddell, a planning expert and former head of planning at the now defunct South East England Regional Assembly, says the reservoir needs to be part of regional plan to make headway. She says politicians who blame planning laws should reflect on the scrapping of regional planning bodies more than a decade ago. Only a regional infrastructure plan can convince local people affected by huge diggers on their doorstep that the project fits with other climate-friendly infrastructure in their area and that the national interest is at stake, she says. Janice Morphet, a visiting lecturer at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, says only a national plan setting out the UK’s needs over the next 50 years will bring local politicians on board when they are under pressure from campaign groups to block developments in their backyard. Katherine Foxhall, a local Green party activist, agrees that a national and regional plan will help put the reservoir in context. She says Oxfordshire county council is under pressure to support several infrastructure projects in addition to the HS2 rail line that carves its way through the county. One of the country’s largest solar farms is planned to go ahead from 2025. “There is a lot of big infrastructure coming into Oxfordshire and there are strategic reasons why that is,” she says. “But what Thames Water have yet to do – and they have had 20-odd years – is make a convincing case based on evidence.” Vale of White Horse district council has objected to the plan partly because it will prevent councillors meeting their targets on carbon emissions. Two years of archaeological, wildlife, and geological surveys, followed by a 10-year building programme, as well as the two years needed to fill the reservoir with water, would mean the council could not claim to be carbon neutral within the next 15 years. Neighbouring South Oxfordshire district council raised similar concerns, recommending that Thames Water urgently review the proposal to give priority to solutions with low impact on the environment. Sudbury at Oxfordshire county council would personally back a smaller reservoir, but because there is not one on offer, has sided with Gard. “The regulators are the people really getting this wrong. They have been asleep at the wheel for over 30 years and are now determined to make up for it by overdoing everything,” he says. WRSE says the lower population forecasts have been taken on board in the proposals, but that the range from high to low – from 5 million extra people to just 420,000 – still means the larger version of the Abingdon reservoir is needed. It is more cost-effective to build big, limiting the impact on customers’ bills, WRSE says. The disruption of digging up such a large area will be difficult to mitigate, but Thames Water says all the technical and safety concerns raised by Gard and local councils can be overcome. Protesters may believe such a large body of water will equate to the power of a nuclear bomb if the worst happens, but the company says it will use the latest techniques and best engineers to make sure the site is safe. There is also a likelihood that residents in nearby towns and villages will come to appreciate the reservoir as an activity hub for water sports in decades to come, it argues. Thames Water says: “We’re still in the very early stages of consultation and design. We will always work closely with customers and local communities to consult with them on our proposed plans, listening and responding to their feedback.” Foxhall echoes many local campaigners when she says: “I find it impossible to trust Thames Water. They tell us they have the environment at heart and people at heart, but that is not a credible argument telling us why the reservoir needs to be here.” Richard Harding, the chair of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) in Oxfordshire, is only concerned that the water companies are too committed to a flawed project. “Don’t think we are a bunch of nimbys? We are not,” he says. “If we need a reservoir after all the tests are done, then we’ll go for it.” This article was amended on 23 & 27 April 2023: to remove a reference to the reservoir’s proposed location being near “Twyford Down”; to note that it was Vale of Abingdon district council that objected to the plan; to note South Oxfordshire district councils concerns about the plan and to add more detail about district councillor Andy Cooke’s position.

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Labour hopes local knowledge can make jobcentres a class act

Along the snowy quays in Canada Water, south-east London , the waterfront and sidestreets are teeming with new developments. The buildings include shops and cafes – many advertising for full or part-time staff. Despite extensive gentrification Southwark remains one of the most deprived boroughs in England. The local council has faced a challenge in how to directly link the benefits of shiny new development to the lives of young people growing up in Rotherhithe or Peckham. Alison McGovern, the shadow employment minister, says Labour wants to bridge that gap between jobcentres and the local knowledge of councils and employers. It will involve a radical overhaul of what jobcentres offer – with powers fully devolved locally for local authorities to decide how they operate rather than running from central targets and scripts. Speaking as she toured Southwark’s Skills Centre, a hub for training and apprenticeships in construction with close ties and funding to developers, McGovern said the changes would be one of the pillars of Labour’s offer on jobs. “Everywhere I go I ask people, what do they think of the jobcentre? I never hear much enthusiasm, we have great people working there but they are constrained by what they are told to do in Whitehall and that’s wrong,” she says. “People locally know their area best, they know how to help people get jobs. “Jobcentres are there to tick boxes at the moment and that’s not good enough. Kickstart, Restart, all these national schemes – we need to rethink it from the ground up and locally.” A report by Gordon Brown into devolution and democracy said the devolution of Jobcentre Plus should mean they become a hub for local employers – open to those looking to upskill, re-enter the workplace later in life or after childcare responsibilities, or start businesses, and resources for civil society, trade union and private sector support. Health services should have closer connections to job support and be data hubs for local market information. Kieron Williams, the leader of Southwark council, said his local authority had to in effect build schemes such as Southwark Works , a free employment support service, in order to bridge the gap. “The challenge we face with the nationally provided programmes is they’re not connected with the local employment market,” he says. “They don’t see where the opportunities are to create more employment, or the skills gaps exist, and how you fill them. “We have a separate works programme, ensuring that you’ve got a real focus on those groups of people who are most likely to be excluded from work, getting the additional support they need to get into employment. What’s really important there is that that’s connected back to the community.” A skills report by the former Labour minister David Blunkett also recommends funding people to study with agreed providers. “The nature of the way in which the [Department for Work and Pensions] currently operates, people are pressed into taking an immediate job available,” the report found. “Those who are being requested to job search for 35 hours a week are self-evidently not able to access training.” He said the DWP should “allow people to study full or part-time, whilst on benefits for an agreed course”. McGovern says it is “blindingly obvious” people should not be penalised for wanting to train for a long-term skilled career. “People are being pushed into insecure, unskilled jobs, when they could be sat in these classrooms.” Southwark Works functions in much the same way as Labour hopes jobcentres could eventually exist, offering support to anyone who drops in and with specialist support for care leavers, long-term unemployed or sick, those with disabilities, the homeless, families and lone parents. Some are already referred by the local jobcentre but many and in particular young people refuse to engage with the jobcentre at all. Almost 85% of the people who were supported into work were from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds. Joseph, 20, who is waiting to take a test in one of the centre’s classrooms, says he came to the centre via his probation manager. “I want to be a bricklayer because it’s more hands-on, I’m not into working in an office, but here I can meet people who have the jobs.” John White, the partnerships director at the Skills Centre, says it prides itself on having no curriculum at all, but constantly evolving provision based on what local employers need, training 10,000 people to date. “We want to make sure we get local people into local jobs,” he said. “We’re speaking to local places who just can’t get bricklayers. And we speak to places that need big tiling jobs done, and we know we can get local people in trained to do the work.” In the yard outside, formwork apprentices are working in bright pink jackets and thick gloves. Some are women, part of a concerted effort to get more of them into construction jobs. Clarissa Destouche, 36, says: “I would not have joined this course if there was not an initiative for women to join. Representation matters a lot.” Many of the apprentices were in their 30s, seeking a new career direction. Lawrence Atkinson, 31, says he had mixed feelings about what the jobcentre had offered him. “There should be a lot more transparency there, about what’s available, more diverse opportunities, different pathways. I want to challenge myself to see how far I can go. Here is where I can find out what the pathways are for my career.” Ultimately, the vision is for similar provision to exist for training where there are big local gaps – whether in hospitality, agriculture, nuclear or green energy. “We’re working around hospitality skills because we’ve had big growth in that industry,” Williams says. “And we want to make sure that not just the entry-level jobs in those professions but the good jobs, the hotel manager and beyond, are within reach to people.”

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Revealed: almost 1,000 rapes in prisons in England and Wales since 2010

Nearly 1,000 rapes were reported to have taken place in prisons since 2010, exclusive data obtained by the Observer from police forces in England and Wales can reveal. A further 2,336 sexual assaults were reported to police in the same period, and experts warned that the true figure for both crimes may be far higher because not all attacks would be reported. In response to the Observer’s findings, Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform , said there has been “minimal research – and a worrying lack of coherent and consistently applied policies – in relation to consensual and coercive sex behind bars”. The investigation comes amid growing concern about the safety of prisons , both for those who are incarcerated and for prison staff. Prisons face continuing issues with overcrowding , staff reductions and budget cuts , fuelled by more than a decade of austerity measures from successive Conservative-led governments. The impact of austerity has left English prisons “unable to provide safe environments for rising prison populations”, according to research by Nasrul Ismail, a lecturer in criminology at Bristol University . As of September 2022, just over half (52%) of prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded, said a government report. The government last year announced a £500m funding injection to create thousands of new prison places for men and women. There are just under 90,000 people in prison in the UK. At the same time, prisons are struggling to recruit and retain staff. The government has launched an inquiry into staffing problems in the prison system after the number of prison officers and custodial managers fell by 600 in 2021-22. Losing staff puts safety at risk. Neilson said that the Howard League had called for staff to be given more training and guidance, “but we know that many experienced officers have since left the workforce and prisons have struggled to recruit and retain people to replace them”. The figures obtained by the Observer saw a notable increase in reported rapes and sexual assaults in the years after 2016, correlating with the period when austerity began to bite. Cuts to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budgets totalled £2.4bn by 2015-16, according to contemporary analysis by the Prison Reform Trust . Durham constabulary received three reports of sexual assault in 2010 – this increased elevenfold to 33 in 2018. Humberside police saw reports of sexual violence double from five to 10 between 2015 and 2018. Cumbria police recorded a similar rise: the number of reported sexual assaults jumped from one in 2014 to eight in 2016. The increase in reports also correlates with eruptions of prison violence, including the 2016 Birmingham prison riot , which involved more than 500 . Other forces saw a rise in reported rapes and sexual assaults during 2020 and 2021, when the country was coping with the coronavirus pandemic. Greater Manchester police received 18 reports of rape in 2020, and Wiltshire police received reports of four rapes in 2022 and three in 2020 – after receiving only three in the previous seven years combined. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion While this investigation has used police reports to measure sexual violence in prisons, other data sources demonstrate that violence and assault rates across the prison estate remain high. The most recent safety in custody statistics published by the MoJ recorded 20,993 assaults in the 12 months to December 2022, of which 12% were considered “serious assaults”. These include sexual violence. The number of serious assaults saw an increase of 19% from the previous year. There were 195 prisoner-on-prisoner sexual assaults recorded in custody, 26% lower than the 265 recorded in 2019. Sexual violence is an issue across the male and female prison estate. Speaking in 2020, Lord Keen told the House of Lords there had been 122 sexual assaults in women’s prisons over the previous decade. The MoJ confirmed that the number of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults, including sexual ones, has fallen by more than a quarter since the year before the pandemic. A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We take allegations of sexual assault extremely seriously and refer all incidents to the police for investigation. Our £125m investment in security measures is making prisons safer, while we have also introduced round-the-clock prisoner helplines and body-worn cameras for all frontline staff.”

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BBC under threat politically under Conservatives, says Ian McEwan

The BBC is “under threat, politically,” the novelist Ian McEwan has said, as he compared sections of the Conservative party to the populist right in Hungary. The author of Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach and Atonement recently collaborated with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for an evening of words and music at the Barbican. The event came as the BBC’s classical music performing groups faced “catastrophic” cuts , and the corporation’s high-profile presenters including Gary Lineker clashed with the government over its policies. “I am very worried for the BBC ,” McEwan said in an interview with the Radio Times. “It’s under threat, politically. Generally, there’s a playbook for the populist right and there are three or four targets: the civil service, the judiciary and independent broadcasters. “You see it in Hungary, and we have our homegrown version of that – maybe a little milder. It’s become a very powerful impetus on a large and influential section of the Conservative party, that somehow the BBC is a head-banging, leftist, pointy-headed sanctuary for all their political enemies and has got to be taken down. It’s just too bad.” McEwan, 74, who broke through in the 1970s as part of a notorious gang of writers that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie, also addressed the eradication of male desire in literature, and recalled recently hearing a young male novelist say he could no longer write about the subject. “I thought: god, that’s terrible. Because that’s the desire of half the world, and it’s a subject just as much as female desire is, or a thousand other things. It needs to be handled. Whether it’s done well or badly, let readers decide.” While he welcomed the “opening up” of publishing to under-represented voices, he said these should be in addition to what was already being published, “not replacement or subtraction. Let’s keep the field as wide and open as possible.” If he were a writer in his 20s today, he said, he “wouldn’t bother writing a novel” and would “go straight to writing screenplays”. Having adapted On Chesil Beach and The Children Act as films, he cited The Bridge, Breaking Bad and Call My Agent! among TV shows he admired. “There’s a lot of junk and mediocrity, but the good ones have all the thrill and compelling qualities of a serial Dickens novel,” he said. In the same issue of the Radio Times, the veteran radio DJ Ken Bruce said he was not given the credit he deserved at the BBC and criticised the handling of his departure from Radio 2 after more than three decades. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books with our expert reviews, author interviews and top 10s. Literary delights delivered direct you after newsletter promotion Bruce, 72, whose new show on Greatest Hits Radio began on Monday, said: “One of the reasons I went is because, having done the show for quite a long time, and with it being the highest-rated programme in Europe for four years, I thought: what’s to achieve? What’s left?” But there were frustrations too, he added, including times when he felt he was not “really noticed by either the BBC itself or some listeners” – such as when he was not included in any BBC promotional materials about its presenters. “So I thought: I’m going to make these people appreciate me. And having done that to my satisfaction, I felt it was time to give myself a little challenge, try something different, rather than become stale and wait for the axe.” Bruce said he was disappointed when Radio 2 asked him to step down before his contract had fully expired . “I thought that after 45 years I could be trusted to do the right thing for the next few weeks. But obviously it’s up to them. It’s their choice.”

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The Observer view on the growing threat to democracy in India

India has many things going for it these days but the growing authoritarianism of prime minister Narendra Modi’s rightwing Hindu nationalist government is not one of them. The economy has rebounded faster than most after the Covid-19 slump, according to the IMF and the World Bank . Annual GDP is projected to overtake Germany and Japan by 2027, making India the world’s third largest economy after the US and China. UN figures published last week indicate India will become the planet’s most populous country by June, with a population of 1.4286 billion compared with China’s 1.4257 billion. The significance of this shift is geopolitical as well as economic. In a world dominated by great power rivalries and blocs, India stands out as an independent force in global affairs, drawing on a proud post-1947 history of non-alignment. Contrasted with the creaking economies, fading influence and ageing populations of western countries such as Britain, the former colonial power’s future looks bright indeed. Yet all this potential is set at risk by Modi’s divisive and destructive actions. He and his ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) pose a fundamental threat to that other crucial pillar of Indian progress: democratic governance based on the rule of law, civil rights and freedom of speech. Evidence to support this contention is plentiful. For example, the continuing defamation proceedings against Rahul Gandhi, one of India’s most prominent opposition leaders and a scion of its best-known political dynasty. Gandhi faces jail and the loss of his parliamentary seat after a court in Gujarat, where Modi long presided as chief minister, ruled against him. It is difficult not to view this case as politically motivated. Since winning national power in 2014, Modi and the BJP have pursued an accelerating, repressive and intimidatory campaign against opponents, independent media organisations, individual journalists, civil society groups and free speech in general. A recent target is the BBC, accused of harbouring a “colonial mindset” after it investigated Modi’s links to a notorious 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in which at least 1,000 people died. Modi’s abandonment of the secular legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and his redefinition of India as a Hindu nation has intensified discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims. Schoolbooks are doctored to remove references to Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition to Hindu nationalism and to pre-Raj (Muslim) Mughal rulers. “For most Indians,” the author Arundhati Roy wrote recently , religious persecution is “the texture of our daily lives: sword-wielding mobs, saffron-clad god-men routinely calling for the genocide of Muslims and the mass rape of Muslim women, the impunity with which Hindus can lynch Muslims on the street... [and be] congratulated for it by senior ministers.” Impunity continues, judging by last week’s acquittal of 69 Hindus accused of many murder in the Gujarat pogrom. Gross human rights abuses in Kashmir , the only Muslim-majority state, corruption allegations swirling around the Gautam Adani business empire and “state capture” by industrial conglomerates are other aspects of a growing democratic deficit. Yet the all-controlling Modi machine appears unstoppable. India will vote next year. Modi, the BJP, and their ugly brand of intolerant Hindu hyper-nationalism look set to win again. India’s friends have a duty to speak up. The US and Britain, like other western democracies, have been too ready to overlook Modi’s authoritarian trajectory as they seek his backing in their battles with Russia and China. This is short-sighted. They should be braver. Democracy in India is a global asset. Its loss would be a global tragedy. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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In my freezing house, gripped by fear, I scrawl ‘things can get better’ on a chalkboard

I have a visitor that stops me sleeping, wakes me early in the morning and hangs around most days uninvited and unwanted: I am living with fear. Each day when I open my eyes, there’s a few seconds of semiconscious calm before my heart sets off to sprint in this race without end. Sometimes I try to calm myself down with deep breathing, but mostly I simply flee from my bed, the cold biting deep as I descend the stairs to make tea and talk myself down. Breakfast is impossible with adrenaline coursing through my body at max strength. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I used to write shopping reminders. Now I use it to self-medicate, with greetings card therapy written in my scrawly hand: “Things can get better” and “Nothing lasts for ever”. I repeat them out loud to try to will them to be true. I feel constantly vulnerable from the insecurity that has invaded my life: the rented roof over my head, precarious freelance work, the cost of living now I’m in my early 60s. I’m not the only one going through tough times, but when I close my front door, I am alone. I share about my predicament, up to a point. I recently house-sat for a friend, who left a note beside the central heating thermostat: “Don’t be cold.” The pure joy of hot radiators and oven-roasted vegetables was a great respite. But I tend not to talk about the darker stuff around losing work and having no safety net, because I am embarrassed and ashamed. Friends’ lives are neat and orderly. Mine is a cold mess. Seated at a friend’s dining table, in their warm house, I prefer to savour every minute rather than dredge up the fears that are following me. And the thought that perhaps I could end up homeless. I play a game of sliding doors in my head and wonder how it must feel to live their lives. How close I came to being them. Everyone has demons, I decide. We’re all human. When I was little, my mum took Valium from the doctor “to control her nerves”. Back then, mental illness was stigmatised. You were told to pull yourself together, to get on with it. When things improved, Mum still kept a single Valium in her purse, a red and green torpedo to neutralise whatever threatened to spiral out of control. It got gnarled and squashed, and eventually she threw it away. I assume that was the day she no longer felt afraid. I long for a time when fear is no longer my shadow. These days, I can access mental health support with the click of a computer mouse, but it is harder to solve the systemic inequality that pervades some of our lives: the NHS on its knees, social care in tatters, food banks barely keeping working families afloat . Talking therapies help to dampen anxiety, but what is there to do about the cold, hunger and poverty that perpetuates the terror in the first place? There’s a bigger fear too. In 1980, the Protect and Survive leaflet dropped through our letterbox, advising families on how to protect themselves in the event of nuclear attack. I was 19 and took the advice seriously, determined to do what I could to face off the threat of nuclear war. My dad had been in Hiroshima after the bomb dropped, and I’d grown up knowing it must never happen again. When the leaflet arrived, I felt angry that the world was on the brink, yet resilient enough to believe my generation could save it. Forty years on, the war in Ukraine has turned the world upside down again. And I am in a different position. This world, my world, is scary. My only hope is to protect myself, to survive. Each day I work hard to shore up my mental health. I resist thinking about the future too much and try to believe those in charge will see sense, before it’s too late. For the world. And me. Marin lives in the south-west of England and is in her 60s. Her name has been changed The Trussell Trust is an anti-poverty charity that campaigns to end the need for food banks. Show your support at: trusselltrust.org/guardian Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

BAD

Fifa may talk tough but it has paved the way by undervaluing women’s football

Prepare the spandex: women’s football superman Gianni “I have four daughters” Infantino is here to save the day. The president of Fifa has threatened a broadcasting blackout of the Women’s World Cup in the “big five” European countries of England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France, blaming bids for the broadcast rights for the tournament that he said were a “slap in the face” to the players and “all women worldwide”. Speaking at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva, Infantino repeated his call from October for broadcasters to up their bids, saying: “To be very clear, it is our moral and legal obligation not to undersell the Fifa Women’s World Cup. Broadcasters should put their action behind their words, because they rightfully criticise organisations for not paying women and men equally … otherwise we’ll simply not sell these rights at these undervalued prices to them.” What a man. And surely now a shoo-in for the rather bizarre Male Football Ally of the Year award at next year’s Women’s Football Awards, with this year’s inaugural shortlists sadly already announced. Why the sarcasm and frustration at Infantino and Fifa for what seems like a perfectly sensible thing to say? Because there is a heavy dose of irony in the architects of the chronic underfunding of women’s football, and a real lack of ideological as well as financial investment in it, speaking up against the undervaluing of the women’s game. It is almost four years since chants of “equal pay” rang round Lyon’s Groupama Stadium after the US lifted a fourth Women’s World Cup title. Far from the start of a campaign, that was the crescendo of it. Finally, in March of this year, Infantino announced that Fifa would make the prize fund for the women’s competition match the men’s by 2027, with the 2027 Women’s World Cup prize pot equalling that of the 2026 men’s edition. When it comes to undervaluing women’s football, Fifa has paved the way, underserving 50% of the world’s population despite being a not-for-profit body empowered to govern world football. In terms of broadcast rights, the longtime bundling together of the rights, and commercial rights, for the men’s and women’s World Cups, up to and including the 2019 World Cup, has meant that Fifa has engineered a culture which has attributed no value to women’s football. Previously, broadcasters and sponsors got a two-for-one deal, with the women’s tournaments thrown into the mix as a bonus. All the value in those deals was attributed to the men’s tournaments. Never mind that 1.12 billion viewers watched the women’s World Cup in 2019, about 31% of the 3.572 billion who watched the men’s in 2018 – the prize fund for the women’s tournament was 7.5% of the men’s. Sign up to Moving the Goalposts Informative, passionate, entertaining. Sign up to our weekly round-up of women’s football now. after newsletter promotion Fifa and Infantino are panicking, because if broadcasters and commercial partners don’t flood money in they will have to dip into their hefty coffers to meet the commitment to equal prize money. That was not a commitment made out of the goodness of their hearts, for equality and fairness and the good of the game; it was a result of protest and pressure and has been timed so that the new money coming into the game comes into their orbit. If Fifa and Infantino really care about women’s football, and investment in the World Cup and the integrity of their flagship tournament, they should do more to address the calendar issues that have resulted in a club v country row over the release of players for the tournament amid concerns for their health, and invest heavily in research around the crisis in anterior cruciate ligament injuries that has robbed the tournament of some of the world’s best players.

BAD

Fraudsters conned UK holidaymakers out of more than £15m in 2022

Holiday fraudsters conned UK consumers out of more than £15m last year – twice as much as the year before – according to the UK’s scam reporting centre. Action Fraud said there had been a surge in the number of people being conned into paying for fake flights and accommodation bookings as more people sought cheaper holidays, partly as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. The reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime – which has launched a national awareness campaign hoping people “don’t get burnt before they are on the beach” – said the average loss per victim last year was £2,372. The figures chime with the experiences of readers who have contacted the Guardian and a similar surge this time a year ago. Fraudsters struggling to overcome bank security have looked to move into other areas and have found fake online accommodation listings to be fertile ground. In March, Guardian Money featured the case of a Londoner who was scammed out of £6,500 after booking a Greek holiday villa she found on the Vrbo website. The listing turned out to be fake, but this emerged only after she had sent the money as a bank transfer. Although Vrbo later repaid her, most victims of such scams never see their cash again. Action Fraud said almost half (44%) of the holiday fraud reports it received last year came from people aged in their 20s or 40s. Pauline Smith, the anti-fraud body’s head, said: “With summer only just around the corner, we enter a period where fraudsters ramp up efforts to catch out unsuspecting members of the public. Scammers prey on people wanting to find a good deal online – whether that’s cheap flights, great hotels close to the beach at discounted rates or package holidays that undercut well-known travel operators and brands. “When booking a holiday here or abroad, it’s important to do your research before handing over any money and to double-check any website. We encourage people to stop, check and research before paying. If it sounds too good to be true, it most definitely is.” She said the most frequent frauds involved cloning the websites of price comparison companies, holiday providers and airlines, duping victims into believing they were entering payment details on genuine sites. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Fake confirmation emails are often sent, meaning some victims only realise what has happened when they attempt to check in for their flight at the airport and are told no booking has been made in their name. Others have found themselves standing outside villas, suitcases in hand, only to be told by the legitimate owner that their booking was a scam.

GOOD

Anger grows as illegal construction partly blamed for landslide deaths on Italian island

As rescuers continued to search for five people still missing after a catastrophic landslide in Ischia, anger was growing on the southern Italian island on Sunday over the years of rampant illegal construction that contributed to the disaster. Seven people, including a three-week-old baby and a pair of young siblings, are confirmed to have died in Saturday’s landslide , which was triggered by a violent storm that sent mud and debris from Monte Epomeo, a 789-metre (2,590ft) peak, crashing into the hamlet of Casamicciola Terme. One victim – 32-year-old Eleonora Sirabella – has been named. The others, who include the infant boy’s parents, a five-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother, a 31-year-old island resident and a Bulgarian tourist, have not yet been officially identified. “Mud and water tend to fill every space,’’ Luca Cari, the spokesperson for Italian firefighters, told RAI state TV on Sunday. “Our teams are searching with hope, even if it is very difficult.” The same hamlet was hit by a landslide in 2009, when a 14-year-old girl died, and damaged again by an earthquake in 2017. Dozens of homes were destroyed, trees uprooted and cars swept into the sea in the latest tragedy. Giorgia Meloni’s government, which came to power in October, announced a state of emergency on Sunday, adding it has set aside €2m (£1.7m), the first tranche of a fund that will be spent on repairing the damage. But for many, the move is too little, too late. “I’m furious,” said Franco, as he cleared mud from the entrance of what was a hotel owned by his family. “This is the second time I’ve had to do this – after the 2009 landslide they made lots of promises to make the area more secure. They knew the risks but did nothing.” The storm, which followed days of heavy rain across much of Italy , is reported to be the worst in 20 years to have hit Ischia, an island in the Gulf of Naples, with 126mm of rain falling in six hours. Casamicciola Terme is home to just over 2,000 people and lies in an area of the island – known for its natural hot springs and popular with Italian and foreign tourists – that is extremely vulnerable to landslides and seismic activity. Seventy-two landslides were registered to have occurred in the hamlet between 2018 and 2021. The number of illegally built homes and other buildings – estimated at 28,000 across the island – has been blamed for exacerbating the damage. “They’ve been giving permits to people to effectively build illegally since the 1920s,” said Vincenzo Capuano, as he assessed the destroyed premises of what was his cultural association. “So we’re not talking about just a few years. These were permits given for houses, hotels, you name it.” Capuano, whose car was swept away in the disaster, is friends with a man in his 60s who was hospitalised on Saturday after being pulled alive from the thick mud. The illegal building also meant that trees, which play an essential role as buttresses in reducing landslide risk, were torn down. Experts also say that a geological survey assessing the risks in the area was last done 20 years ago. “This is a region predisposed to landslides,” said Micla Pennetta, a professor of geomorphology at Federico II University in Naples. “So much of the devastation in the past has influenced the current morphology of Ischia. Seismic activity also plays a part, but on top of the natural aspects we have deforestation and subsequent cementification – this reduced the capacity for water to be absorbed, enabling it to rapidly reach roads and homes, causing extreme damage.” Pennetta added: “Not only has the geological map done 20 years ago not been updated, but it was never detailed enough to properly identify the risks. And if no proper studies are done, then people can build wherever they want.” Ischia has a population of about 22,000 and although it attracts far less attention than its more glitzy neighbour, Capri, over the years the island has drawn a crowd who prefer more low-key holidays, including the former German chancellor Angela Merkel, and who want to experience its natural hot springs. The island enjoyed a robust tourist trade this summer, the busiest season since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. “We had a great summer,” said Raffaele, a taxi driver whose colleague is waiting for news of a relative who is among those missing. “This is a terrible tragedy for the island.” Several historic spas, including Belliazzi, a vast complex built in 1854 that sits upon hot springs dating back to the Roman era, have been badly damaged. “The springs have been totally saturated,” said Carmine Bernardo, the spa’s owner. As the sun set, a crowd of people gathered at the port of Casamicciola, where rescuers were searching the sea for possible victims. Vehicles retrieved from the sea lined the shoreline. The wind had again picked up strength, and more storms are forecast in Ischia and other parts of Italy in the coming days. “This is a tragedy that should never have happened,” said Pascquale Manco, who partly blames the scant maintenance of Mount Epomeo, the highest peak in Ischia, for the catastrophe. “They [the authorities] also set aside money after the 2009 landslide for maintenance, but it was never used. The mountain has not been taken care of the way it should have been. They only act in an emergency, when what we need are prevention measures.” Manco was at the port with Rosa Pisani, whose husband’s cousin is among those missing. “We can only carry on hoping they find people alive,” he said. “Hope is the last thing to fade even if the reality tells us something different.”

GOOD

Almost two-thirds of young women have been sexually harassed at work, says TUC

Almost two in three young women have experienced sexual harassment, bullying or verbal abuse at work, according to a TUC poll. However, most victims do not report it for fear of not being believed or of damaging their relationships at work or their career prospects, the TUC said. Overall, almost three in five women (58%) have experienced harassment at work, the poll showed. The figure rises to 62% of women aged between 25 and 34. Most of these cases were not isolated incidents, with 57% of women saying they had experienced three or more incidents of bullying at work. More than two in five (43%) had experienced at least three incidents of sexual harassment. The TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak, said: “Every woman should be safe from sexual harassment. But every day we hear stories about the extent of sexual harassment in our workplaces. “And we know many women in public-facing jobs – like retail workers and GP receptionists – suffer regular abuse from customers and patients. Sexual harassment and bullying have no place in modern workplaces.” Separate research by the public sector union Unison recently showed that only one NHS trust in England provided dedicated training to prevent sexual harassment, even though one in 12 NHS staff had experienced such behaviour at work in the past year. Meanwhile, the CBI , the UK’s biggest business lobby group, has been rocked by a series of sexual misconduct allegations reported by the Guardian. The TUC alleged that some Conservative MPs and peers were trying to sabotage new laws to protect workers from sexual harassment and assault at work. The worker protection bill, a private member’s bill put forward with ministers’ support by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, would introduce a new preventive duty on employers to tackle sexual harassment in the workplace. The bill would also protect workers from harassment and abuse by third parties such as customers, clients, patients or members of the public. The TUC said these were two big gaps in the current workplace protections for women. But it said Tory backbenchers were trying to delay the bill to ensure it does not pass within the parliamentary time available. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion The TUC poll found that in two out of five of the most recent incidents, the perpetrator was a third party rather than another member of staff. Most incidents of sexual harassment, bullying or verbal abuse happen in work premises (71%), but they also happen over the phone or by text message (12%), or online, by email, on social media or on a virtual meeting (8%). However, fewer than a third of women who said they experienced sexual harassment at work told their employer about what was happening, and only two in five (44%) of those being bullied, and half (50%) of those suffering verbal abuse, reported it. Of those who did not report it, some felt they would not be believed or taken seriously (39%), while others thought reporting it would impact negatively on their relationships at work (37%) or on their career prospects (25%). “Ministers promised to bring in long overdue new laws to prevent workplace sexual harassment and tackle abuse from third parties like customers and clients,” Nowak said. “But they are now backsliding under pressure from their own backbenchers who are trying to delay and derail these vital new protections. “It will be a disgrace if the government allows this bill to fall. Ministers must urgently ensure this bill passes in full or they will let down working women right across the country.”

GOOD

Blind date: ‘We’re already planning his trip to visit me in France’

What were you hoping for? It was impossible not to speculate about a musical man whose loving daughter felt inclined to submit his profile to Blind Date. First impressions? I was 15 minutes late but Graham smiled and made up for lost time with rapid-fire questions and great listening skills. What did you talk about? We started at the beginning and told each other how we both came to be sitting at that table – I’m afraid my stories went on for too long. Most awkward moment? Graham drove me home, leaned across the back seat to get me my bag, and the contents spilled everywhere. Good table manners? We shared almost every course. Subsequently, it was more a matter of who was more masterly at taking their fair share, with – but Graham politely allowed me seconds of everything. Best thing about Graham? His reaction when I told him I also had a serious job. You had to be there, I guess! Would you introduce Graham to your friends? Yes, no hesitation. Describe Graham in three words. Kind. Funny. Hugely interesting. (Oh, that’s four!) What do you think he made of you? That I’m a handful. Did you go on somewhere? Yes, to a club in Soho with a wonderful pianist. And … did you kiss? Not this time. If you could change one thing about the evening what would it be? Having to get up so early the next morning to go to the airport. Marks out of 10? A solid 8, but I’m a tough taskmistress. Would you meet again? Yes. I believe it was discussed before the evening was over. I live between Provence and the UK, and we are already planning Graham’s trip to visit me in France. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Blind date is Saturday’s dating column: every week, two strangers are paired up for dinner and drinks, and then spill the beans to us, answering a set of questions. This runs, with a photograph we take of each dater before the date, in Saturday magazine (in the UK) and online at theguardian.com every Saturday. It’s been running since 2009 – you can read all about how we put it together here . What questions will I be asked? We ask about age, location, occupation, hobbies, interests and the type of person you are looking to meet. If you do not think these questions cover everything you would like to know, tell us what’s on your mind. Can I choose who I match with? No, it’s a blind date! But we do ask you a bit about your interests, preferences, etc – the more you tell us, the better the match is likely to be. Can I pick the photograph? No, but don't worry: we'll choose the nicest ones. What personal details will appear? Your first name, job and age. How should I answer? Honestly but respectfully. Be mindful of how it will read to your date, and that Blind date reaches a large audience, in print and online. Will I see the other person’s answers? No. We may edit yours and theirs for a range of reasons, including length, and we may ask you for more details. Will you find me The One? We’ll try! Marriage! Babies! Can I do it in my home town? Only if it’s in the UK. Many of our applicants live in London, but we would love to hear from people living elsewhere. How to apply Email blind.date@theguardian.com What were you hoping for? That’s a difficult one, because I’ve learned that setting one’s expectations too high simply leads to disappointment. So I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to make an excuse to leave early. First impressions? Wow. What did you talk about? Conversation was extremely easy, mainly because for the first 60 minutes Deborah talked without taking a breath. I learned about Canada, Italy and Norfolk. The steel industry. The Famous Five. The journey to Provence. Her family. Her career. Her misdemeanours. Her friendships. Her romances. Her attitude to life. But above all we talked about music, ranging from Beethoven to Bacharach to the blues… and beyond. Most awkward moment? We tried to make one up, and couldn’t … unless, of course, Deborah was just being polite Good table manners? I didn’t notice anything, which suggests they were impeccable. Best thing about Deborah? Her joie de vivre. Would you introduce Deborah to your friends? Without a shadow of a doubt. Describe Deborah in three words. A one-off. What do you think she made of you? Somewhere between thinking I was a complete idiot and believing me to be the answer to her dreams. Did you go on somewhere? We went to the Groucho Club and stayed until they threw us out. I have a vague recollection of Deborah standing on the stairs, overlooking the pianist and launching into a Whitney Houston – or was it a Dionne Warwick – song? She’s got a great voice. And … did you kiss? No … If you could change one thing about the evening what would it be? Move it to Provence. Marks out of 10? 9.5. Would you meet again? Yes. Graham and Deborah ate at Ottolenghi , London, N1. Fancy a blind date? Email blind.date@theguardian.com

GOOD

Blood test for sleepy drivers could pave way for prosecutions

A blood test to measure whether a driver who has caused an accident was impaired by lack of sleep could be available within two years, making it easier to legislate against drowsy drivers or their employers. The research, funded by the Australian government’s Office of Road Safety, comes as fresh evidence suggests that driving on less than five hours’ sleep is as dangerous as being over the legal drink-drive limit in many countries. It could also provide a “line in the sand” that could enable people to be prosecuted for driving while fatigued, which many sleep experts are calling for. “There has to be a system to check whether someone has had enough sleep, because they could be putting other people’s lives at risk,” said Prof Steven Lockley, a sleep expert at Harvard medical school, who advises Nasa on sleep safety. Prof Clare Anderson, at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, who is leading efforts to develop a blood-based test, said: “When you look at the major killers on the road, alcohol is one of them, speeding is another, and fatigue is one of them. But even though the solution to fatigue is quite simple, which is to get more sleep, our capacity to manage it is impaired because we don’t have tools to be able to monitor it like we do with alcohol.” Many sleep experts agree that legislation is needed to reduce deaths from drowsy driving. Almost half of UK drivers have admitted to driving after less than five hours’ sleep, while experts estimate that fatigue-related crashes are likely to account for up to 20% of all UK vehicle collisions, and one quarter of fatal and serious crashes. Anderson’s team has identified five biomarkers in blood that can detect whether somebody has been awake for 24 hours or more with greater than 99% accuracy. “They are really strongly related to how long somebody’s been awake, and they’re consistent across individuals,” said Anderson. “Some of them are lipids, some of them are produced in the gut, so they’re from different parts of the body – which is interesting, because sleep is implicated in a number of different health problems. But they are not metabolites that are involved in things like caffeine or anxiety or adrenaline, which could be affected if somebody has been involved in a motor vehicle crash.” Follow-up studies conducted in conditions closer to real-world situations have also indicated that these biomarkers can detect whether or not someone has slept. “We still get close to 90% accuracy at being able to detect sleep loss, which is pretty high considering all the things that are going on in people’s lives beyond just sleep,” Anderson said. Further work is needed to validate the markers and investigate whether they can quantify whether someone has slept for, say, five hours or just two. Anderson believes that a forensic blood test for sleep deprivation, which could be conducted alongside existing drug and alcohol tests if somebody is taken to hospital after a vehicle crash, could be ready in as little as two years. Portable roadside tests will take longer, because sensors and devices to detect the biomarkers still need to be developed. However, Prof Shantha Rajaratnam, also at Monash University, said that “with the right investment to be able to scale this, I reckon that within five years we will be able to implement these biomarker-based tests – at least in safety-critical industries such as trucking, commercial aviation and mining”. Rajaratnam leads an Australian government-funded research and development consortium called the Alertness CRC , which Anderson’s research forms part of. Dr Madeline Sprajcer, a sleep researcher at Central Queensland University in Wayville, Australia, said such tests would go a long way to solving some of the enforcement issues associated with setting a legal drowsy driving limit. “This seems to be a barrier to a lot of the people we’ve spoken with,” she said. “You can’t have a law if you’re not able to enforce it.” Also needed is an agreed legal threshold for the minimum sleep that a motorist requires to drive safely – similar to the 0.05% blood alcohol cutoff, which many countries, including Scotland, have set as their legal drink drive limit. The threshold is 0.08% in the rest of the UK. The research, funded by the Office of Road Safety, is a step towards this goal. Sprajcer and her colleagues pooled the results of 61 laboratory and field studies to determine a point below which it may be legally possible to state that an individual is impaired owing to fatigue. “Based on our meta-analysis, it appears that between four and five hours of sleep would be a reasonable place to draw that line in the sand,” said Sprajcer, whose findings are published in Nature and Science of Sleep . “In Australia, and in a lot of countries, 0.05% blood alcohol concentration is the legal driving limit, where we see about a doubling of the risk of a vehicle crash. Below about five hours of prior sleep is also where we also see that approximate doubling of the risk when compared with well-rested individuals.” Speaking at a meeting to commemorate 20 years of sleep research at the University of Surrey’s Sleep Research centre last month, Lockley said the impact of drowsy driving was as deadly as drink-driving or secondhand smoking. Prof Derk-Jan Dijk, the director of the Surrey Sleep Research centre, said: “[Legislation] is a scary concept for people, because so many sleep badly, but I think it is reasonable to compare it to drink-driving. If you haven’t slept for more than four hours you shouldn’t be at the wheel.” British road safety organisations welcomed the development of biomarkers to detect sleepiness. Sonya Hurt, the chief executive of the Road Safety Trust, said: “Driver fatigue is a significant and serious issue. Government statistics show in 2021, 467 people were either killed or seriously injured in collisions where fatigue was noted as a contributory factor. Therefore, any work to reduce the impact of sleep deprivation is welcome as we strive to improve road safety and save lives.” Prof Ashleigh Filtness, a driver fatigue expert for Road Safety GB, said: “There is already legislation stating that all drivers must be fit to drive their vehicles – alertness is no different than any other requirement for safe driving. “Having a roadside test for fatigue would be a useful tool for enforcement. However, such a test would not preclude individual driver responsibility. Tiredness does not come on instantly, it’s a gradual buildup. It is essential to get enough sleep before driving and to be aware of peaks in tiredness – typically between 2-4pm and 2-6am.” The UK Department for Transport said: “Drivers have a responsibility to ensure they are awake and alert on the road and should seek rest when feeling tired. The government is not considering this type of testing, but we always note new ideas to make our roads safer.”

GOOD

Police must get a grip of ruthless eco-fanatic saboteurs rather than aiding them

BRITS are fed up to the back teeth with the selfish stunts of the eco-fanatics. It is sickening to hear their leaders gleefully planning to shut down the whole of London on a day of mass action. But our undercover investigation at the HQ of Just Stop Oil and other extreme activists reveals zealots boasting that police officers actively aid their protests. Veteran protester Judy Bruce tells trainee demonstrators how the police “facilitate’’ their chaos, which is “really nice’’. What a kick in the teeth for taxpayers who fork out hard-earned wages to fund our cops only to find them helping the eco-nuts who stop them getting to work. PM Rishi Sunak rightly says the public want an end to the selfish saboteurs. Will his new police powers work? Only if Chief Constables are ordered to get a grip before the wreckers target the Coronation and cripple our cities. The eco rabble discredit their own cause and are hell-bent on destruction. But don’t expect Keir Starmer ’s Labour to stand up to them. Not only has Sir Softie consistently opposed giving the police the extra powers they need. But it turns out that the party’s links to the extremists run deep. Labour has pocketed a thumping £1.5million in donations from Just Stop Oil cheerleader Dale Vince. WHY do our children always have to suffer? Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital is near breaking point because of the nurses’ strike . In a U-turn, the Royal College of Nursing said some emergency staff can work there during the action. But how could sick kids be drawn into an industrial dispute in the first place? Now hard-left activists from the teachers’ NEU and the nurses’ RCN plot to join forces to stage a mass walkout. There are thousands of nurses and teachers who deserve a fair pay rise. But if union leaders get their way the children who lost so much during lockdown will once again pay the price. THE Government’s Stop The Boats bill faces opposition from unelected peers in the Lords. But people smugglers are certain to try to exploit the conflict in Sudan , which is being stirred up by Russia ’s ruthless Wagner Group. Meanwhile, Italy has seen its overall migrant numbers mushroom. It is more vital than ever that this bill gets on the statute books.

BAD

The targeting of Epsom is open to debate – but the right to peaceful protest is not

All human life is present and cheerfully incorrect in William Powell Frith’s famous painting The Derby Day . Lords and ladies, rakes and scoundrels, circus performers and card sharps, high society and lowlifes and everything in between, all cheek-by-jowl at one of the very few events in Victorian Britain at which the classes mingled with relative freedom. If Frith were to return to Epsom for the Derby next month, 167 years since the one he initially sketched in 1856, he would still find a rich assortment of characters both in the grandstands and roaming free on the Hill – with, in all likelihood, one new addition. The pink T-shirted activists from the recently-formed group Animal Rising, some of whom delayed the start of the Grand National by 15 minutes last month and also staged anti-racing protests at Ayr and Doncaster in recent weeks, are long odds-on to have Epsom on their target list too. Animal Rising’s opposition to the use of animals for any human purpose or form of entertainment is absolute. It allows for no nuance or argument, or any appreciation of, say, the differences between an industry that breeds and rears animals for slaughter, and one that breeds and rears them to race. Every month in Britain last year, almost a million pigs were slaughtered for meat – and an average of four racehorses sustained fatal injuries while racing on the Flat, or around one for every 1,250 starts. And without the sport that created the thoroughbred breed in the first place, it would soon be extinct, because racing is what they are born and bred to do. From the activists’ point of view, however, these distinctions are irrelevant. Protest and disruption at a showpiece event like the Grand National or Derby will garner far more publicity than a sit-in outside an abattoir. And Epsom on Derby day is, by its very nature and tradition, arguably the most obvious open goal in the whole sporting calendar for activists planning non-violent direct action. Alongside major events like the FA Cup final, Wimbledon and the Open golf championship, the Derby is an annual fixture that needs no introduction. Unlike those other sporting crown jewels, however, anyone can turn up with a picnic and watch the Derby for free. Even with a couple of weeks’ notice of protests at the Grand National, it ultimately proved impossible to secure Aintree entirely. Epsom, with its Hill enclosure which is and always has been free to enter , is a whole new level of wide open. And even with the FA Cup final stomping on to its turf on 3 June – thanks for that, Fifa and Qatar – the attention of millions both in the UK and around the world will still be on Epsom for the two and a half minutes it takes to run the world’s most famous Classic. Some form of protest or disruption may well be inevitable on Derby day, a prospect that the sport’s professionals and fans have greeted with a range of emotions, from fury to frustration and occasionally a side order of bemusement too. It is entirely possible to be a racing fan and care deeply about animal cruelty, the climate crisis and inequality. As it did when Frith painted Derby day, racing still draws fans from across the social and political spectrum. The Morning Star – “for peace and Socialism” – still has a racing column for a reason. So it could also be something to bear in mind that opposition to horse racing is nothing new. There will always be a minority in any British population that objects to its existence, and it would be a strange state of affairs if there was not. Even in the days when parliament held an annual debate on whether it should adjourn for Derby day – before voting, overwhelmingly, that it should – Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the radical Liberal MP for Carlisle, always provided robust opposition to the motion. “It is all nonsense,” Lawson told the house in 1880 . “Do not tell me they run horses for sport. If all these noblemen and gentlemen ran for nothing but sport, there would be no stakes and no added money. I say that the whole system of racing is an organised system of rascality and roguery from beginning to end.” Chepstow 1.30 Bantry 2.05 Vidi Vici 2.40 Peachey Carnehan 3.15 Rich Rhythm 3.50 Moveonup 4.25 Ivy Avenue 4.55 Sympathise Newcastle 1.40 Special Rate 2.15 Fourth Of July 2.50 Starlyte 3.25 Marshalled 4.00 Deluxe Range 4.35 Magic Mike 5.10 Red Vision 5.45 Tommy Time Beverley 1.50 Rowayeh 2.25 Bombay Bazaar 3.00 Montelusa 3.35 Gustav Graves 4.10 Jazz Samba 4.45 Blueflagflyinghigh 5.20 Book Of Tales Wetherby 4.50 Marroof 5.25 Gold Guy 6.00 Platinum Girl 6.30 Al Baahy 7.00 Morning Sun 7.30 Bert Kibbler 8.05 Swinging Eddie 8.40 Premiership Sandown 5.40 Miss Mach One 6.15 Enochdhu (nb) 6.45 Finn’s Charm 7.15 Artistic Star 7.45 If Not Now 8.20 Gert Lush (nap) It is only fair to note that in 1892, 45 years after the House first voted to adjourn for the Derby, Lawson finally won the debate – 144 Ayes, 158 Noes – and the tradition that the parliament would always rise for Epsom was no more. Nearly a century and a half later, however, racing is still with us, and so too are its opponents. Infuriating and baffling though it is to many racing fans, and outnumbered 1,000-to-one as they will probably be by spectators at the Derby, Royal Ascot and elsewhere, Animal Rising’s activists are likely to be around for some time to come. The group is not, of itself, an existential threat to racing, nor is it ever likely to be. Football now dominates the British sporting landscape as the turf once did, but racing remains one of the country’s most popular spectator sports, turning over billions of pounds annually, shifting millions of tickets and keeping around 80,000 people in full-time employment. But it is precisely because of the Derby’s history and enduring popularity that it will be such a tempting target for protest. If it did not still pull in an audience of millions from Britain and around the world, Animal Rising would surely look elsewhere. And personally, much as I enjoy horse racing and want to see it thrive, I want to live in a country with a meaningful right to peaceful protest – about racing, the monarchy, climate change or anything else – a great deal more.

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Britten Sinfonia review – immaculate playing illuminates a programme that takes us back to 1953

After the ragbag of new pieces composed for the coronation earlier this month, it was good to be reminded of some of the music that was written in Britain 70 years ago, at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II. The Britten Sinfonia’s concert included three works for string orchestra that were premiered or composed in 1953. Strictly speaking, only one of the three was directly connected to the royal celebrations – the fugal finale that William Walton contributed to the collective Variations on an Elizabethan Theme that six British composers (all male) were invited to write for the Aldeburgh festival that year. Brief and extrovert, here it provided a last athletic workout for the 30-strong sinfonia, whose playing, with leader Thomas Gould directing from the violin, had been immaculate throughout. But the other works from 1953 were far more substantial, and among their composers’ finest achievements. Michael Tippett ’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, preceded here by the Corelli concerto grosso from which its themes were sourced, and with Gould, violinist Miranda Dale and cellist Caroline Dearnley as the concertino group in both, sounded as radiantly ecstatic as one remembered, even if the warmth of the Milton Court acoustic was a bit too much of a good thing when it came to separating out some of the denser contrapuntal passages. Conducted by Agata Zając, Elizabeth Maconchy’s Symphony for double string orchestra made a wonderful contrast. Driven by fierce Bartókian motor rhythms in the first movement and the playful scherzo while uncovering deeper, darker currents in the slow movement and final passacaglia, its almost total neglect is hard to explain. There was a new work in the programme, too, Joseph Phibbs’s Flame and Shadow, which the Britten Sinfonia had premiered the previous week at the Brighton festival. Taking its title from a collection of poems by the US writer Sara Teasdale, it’s an impressively accomplished sequence of movements, full of thoroughly idiomatic string effects, but perhaps just a bit too well mannered; it really could have been written in 1953, too.

BAD

Half of British female gamers experience abuse when playing online

Millions of women who do online gaming experience harassment and have received inappropriate messages, often of a sexual nature, a report has found. A survey into online gaming reveals half (49%) of British female gamers have suffered abuse online, rising to 75% among those aged 18-24. Of those affected, 80% said the messages they got were sexual in nature. Over half (52%) of women said they felt worried about harassment. One in 10 of respondents were left feeling suicidal, and 25% of women said such messages made them depressed. A quarter, however, said they would not tell anyone about the negative comments they received. The findings have been released as part of a campaign to raise awareness of the issues female gamers face. The campaign is fronted by Stephanie Ijoma, founder of the gaming organisation NNESAGA, and content creator and 3D artist Danielle Udogaranya, and features a series of images showing abusive words women have been targeted with while playing video games. The survey of 4,000 gamers, half of whom were women, was commissioned by Sky Broadband, and over a third (35%) of female respondents said they had received violent messages in the past. Of the women surveyed, half said they had felt uncomfortable while livestreaming due to hate received from other players. Just under a third (31%) of female players have also lied about their gender and remained anonymous as a result. Over a third (40%) of women have felt personally threatened by the abuse they’ve experienced online, with 27% worried about being attacked in real life after threats made online. Ijoma said the abuse women received was “simply unacceptable” and that the gaming world should be made “safer for women”. She added: “There is absolutely no room for abuse.” YouTuber and presenter Elz the Witch said that she hoped the campaign would lead to change. She said: “I’m proud to be part of this campaign which is shining a light on the real challenges women that play or stream games online face – which is often worse for women from racially diverse backgrounds.” Over half (51%) of the men surveyed said they had witnessed female streamers being harassed on live streams and 66% of men and women agree that women are more likely to experience negative comments. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Amber Pine, managing director, broadband and connectivity at Sky Broadband, said the results were “shocking” and “should alarm” the gaming community. She said: “It is completely unacceptable for this type of sexist abuse to be so prevalent.” Women are being encouraged to share awareness on their pages with the tag #NoRoomForAbuse. Advice has also been issued for those experiencing difficulties.

GOOD

The Guardian view on Suella Braverman: masking failure with bombast

Whether the home secretary, Suella Braverman, keeps her job is up to the prime minister, Rishi Sunak . That is in keeping with his prerogative powers to organise the composition of the government as he sees fit. But what happens when ministers hardly hide their disagreements or make a habit of defying the norms of behaviour expected of office-holders? That is the place where Ms Braverman seems to be heading – and she’s been there before. Last October, Ms Braverman was forced to resign as home secretary after confessing to a “technical” breach of the ministerial code. Her departure had been a long time coming. Ms Braverman had publicly contradicted her government’s more liberal stance on immigration. She left office a day before the Truss administration fell. Mr Sunak reappointed Ms Braverman to the Home Office less than a week later. Last December, MPs on the public administration and constitutional affairs committee warned that this dishonourable affair set a “dangerous” precedent: “To allow this to take place does not inspire confidence in the integrity of government, nor offer much incentive to proper conduct in future”. Those words seem prescient given what is happening now, on Mr Sunak’s watch. This week it emerged that last year, when she was attorney general, Ms Braverman was caught speeding and asked civil servants to help organise a one-to-one driving awareness course so she would not have to appear in a group. They rightly refused, arguing that this was a personal, not a policy, matter. Her request raises the issue of her judgment. But the way this matter is now handled threatens to become one of Mr Sunak’s judgment . The prime minister will have to decide whether Ms Braverman came clean about what happened at the time – and subsequently. Did she tell Mr Sunak about the incident before she was reappointed home secretary? Why did her special adviser deny the story when asked about it by the Daily Mirror earlier this year? If the prime minister feels Ms Braverman has questions to answer then he should have an inquiry into the affair. This would provide cover for Mr Sunak – who will continue to face questions over the episode – and if nothing too serious emerges, he could deliver a slap on Ms Braverman’s wrist. But her fate is tied more to the current fractious politics of the Conservative party than to her conduct with the civil service. Her department is responsible for net migration , so her call to “get overall immigration numbers down” seems connected to her political ambitions. Ms Braverman’s speech to the National Conservatism conference last week looked like an audition to be party leader . The home secretary’s rhetoric is an attempt to divert attention from her failure to meet the government’s 2019 pledge to bring down net migration . Profound disagreements on post-Brexit immigration policy have split the Tories. These will be illuminated this week when, on her watch, net migration figures are expected to hit a record high. Cabinet colleagues rightfully see careerism in Ms Braverman’s “ authority of the people ” bombast. However, her insouciance about the rules ought to make Mr Sunak think twice about a quick reprieve. Ms Braverman prefers politics to be guided by atavistic fears rather than economic self-interest. This lends itself to a competition where those who lie best win. Mr Sunak must surely want better for his party and this country. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

BAD

When your ex gets the cat: the writer who divorced in her 20s – and turned it into a runaway bestseller

In a world where, for many twenty- and thirtysomethings, just about every marker of adulthood – home ownership, grownup holidays, quality furniture – is out of reach, marriage, says Maggie in Monica Heisey’s new novel, is the “only hallmark of what we think of as an ‘adult life’ that’s still accessible”. As long as you can find someone to go into it with, that is. What happens, then, if you get married and then divorce while still young? Have you failed at adulthood? This is what Heisey writes about in her debut novel, Really Good, Actually , which has zoomed up the bestseller lists since its publication last month. Maggie and Jon fell in love at university, moved in together because neither could afford to live alone, and got a cat. Marriage seemed the next step. Then, at 28, Maggie found herself divorced; the same age Heisey was when her own marriage ended. Jon rarely appears in the novel, which charts the aftermath – poignant, sad and funny – over a year, of what it is like to be broke, alone, heartbroken and divorced when barely any of your friends are even engaged. “It is hard to explain,” thinks Maggie, “exactly how mortifying it is to have had a wedding when your marriage ends almost instantly thereafter.” Heisey grew up in Toronto, where the book is set, but now lives in London. We meet at an outdoor cafe in a churchyard, surrounded by deafening birdsong and silent tombs. She has been a standup comedian, a screenwriter (she was in the writers’ room on the hugely successful Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek ), and has published a book of essays, but this is her first novel. She started it just before the pandemic hit; the subsequent disappearance of much of her work gave her the chance to get it done. Maggie and Heisey share superficial similarities. They are both red-haired, formerly cat-owning, and, crucially, divorced. Heisey, now 34, had the idea for the novel when she was going through her divorce, but she held off from writing about it. “I didn’t want to be writing from a place of therapy,” she says. “I wanted to go to therapy for therapy, and write as a creative exercise. But I also didn’t want to wait so long – I don’t particularly want to be talking about it a year from now.” Did it bring back tricky emotions? “I had pretty much talked it to death in therapy. I drew on my own feelings, but almost everything in the book that happens is invented, so it wasn’t like I was reliving my most painful memories.” Maggie is a mess, in a way that Heisey – thanks, largely, to therapy – wasn’t. She shops online too much, and overshares on social media. “I’m fascinated with internet use where people are joking through what seem to be fairly serious instances of pain in their lives. A classic thing is women talking about bad dates online, and they’re writing in a joking tone, but the content is not actually funny. I’m interested in that impulse, and why it might feel good to do that, and what we get from owning those stories.” Maggie, says Heisey, is someone “whose whole – sorry to use the word ‘journey’ – is one of running from the internal and really trying to skip over the part where it hurts, or feels embarrassing. She’s just dealing with it all externally, in pursuit of a glow-up or whatever, and she’s not interested in doing the more unpleasant, internal work of sitting and having a broken heart.” There is pressure to show people you are fine, even when you’re not, but also to reinvent yourself as a better person, to show your ex what they are missing. Just about every breakup film has a makeover montage, says Heisey with a laugh. Did she fall into that trap? “As a child of the 90s and 00s, I don’t know of anyone who came out of that period with totally healthy relationships to body image and food,” she says. “Even if you’ve done a ton of working on yourself, and you can really see what’s going on, in periods where you’re down like that, it can be very easy to pick those scabs.” It’s dreadful to torment your body into fitting societal beauty standards, but, she says with a pained smile: “If you give in to it, the response from people around you is probably positive, which is quite grim.” She wanted to write the book that might have helped her when she was going through it. “I felt the normal feelings of failure and shame when a long-term relationship ends, but also very isolated,” she says. She was the only person she knew, other than people of her parents’ generation, who was divorced. “When I looked for books, or films or TV to make me feel a little less on my own, everything was about people many decades older and many income brackets above me, which was further isolating.” In the book, Maggie reflects that divorce films usually have a “beautiful middle-aged Diane” – Lane or Keaton – “who is her own boss and knows about the good kind of wine”. Or, adds Heisey, they are Kramer vs Kramer-style heavy dramas. But when you don’t have children or financial assets to fight over, “it feels like you’re sort of fumbling around in the dark.” Who gets the cat? (Heisey’s ex-husband did.) Or tells the landlord? “Even in the depths of it, there was something kind of funny about it,” she says. “Heartbreak is this weird thing where it feels like the end of the world. It is emotionally devastating. But equally, it’s a fairly mundane experience. Not an everyday experience but a multiple-times-in-your-life experience, and you know that you’re going to get through it.” She compares it to food poisoning. “There’s a period where you genuinely feel like you live on the bathroom floor now, but you know, because you’ve done it before, it’s going to pass. I thought there was something funny in that.” Heisey was a bookish child, who grew up with her twin sister and a younger sister; her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked for the government. “My parents were obsessed with us reading classic books, which I found a little dry, but when we found funny ones, it was a sweet spot for their interests and mine, like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.” Heisey loved British writers, PG Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and characters like Adrian Mole. At her performing arts high school, she wrote plays and, she says with a grimace, performed in the improv troupe. “Worse than that, we thought the improv team was cool.” She came to the UK in 2010 to do an MA in early modern literature, and started doing standup comedy “to meet people”. She didn’t find it too intimidating? “I think you guys have really generous audiences. The Edinburgh fringe really trains up audiences in addition to comedians, and you can have these crazy mixed bills where there’s someone doing comedy poems, and a double act, and someone’s singing and everyone can kind of roll with it.” She did perform at Edinburgh, roped in by her friend, the comedian Cariad Lloyd. After a few years on a student visa, she says: “I ran out of options. I was a freelance writer at the start of my career and the government was like, ‘Please leave.’” She had been in a long-distance relationship with the man who is now her ex-husband, and when she went back to Toronto, they got married. It did feel grownup, she says, though, looking back, the other trappings of adult life didn’t magically materialise. “We got married and then we took the streetcar back to our house, our roommate gave us a beer.” Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books with our expert reviews, author interviews and top 10s. Literary delights delivered direct you after newsletter promotion There was, however, some power in this state-sanctioned new level. She remembers someone telling her that their older relatives started treating them with more respect after marriage, and Heisey found the same. “There’s no thrill like telling your landlord, ‘My husband and I would like …’,” says Heisey with a smile. “And then also you can’t discount being in love, thinking it’s romantic. It is romantic.” Heisey had been working on Schitt’s Creek when she got divorced, but moved back to the UK. “I was very lucky that I have a group of friends here who I really love, and also nobody in London knows me as someone’s ex-wife. Toronto is a really small place. In a lot of ways, the book is like a nightmare version of what it would have been like to get divorced and stay in Toronto.” She can’t help thinking that if it were normal to have lavish 30th birthday parties, “where you spend thousands of dollars on your outfit, and everyone agrees to go because of the power of this institution, and photographers came and your friends gave speeches about how you’re a beautiful genius, we might have fewer weddings”. Ceremony, she says, “is very appealing. It’s nice to feel like you’re gathering your community to celebrate a milestone. Does it have to be marriage? I don’t know.” Even though marriage is in decline , and we are all supposed to be wise to the trappings of patriarchy, it does still have a cultural hold, particularly if you are a woman. “People start asking if you’re going to get married again, instantly. They’re obsessed, which I found very odd. Like, let me sign the divorce papers first.” Heisey is in a new relationship now, and says: “People seem to think that’s the bow on my story. To me, working really hard to process something and writing a book about it feels like a much bigger achievement. But people are always so psyched to hear that you’ve found someone else. And then you’re right back into: ‘Do you think you’d ever get married again?’” At some point soon, Heisey probably won’t talk about divorce so much (though a TV adaptation of the book is planned). A comedy she has written for Sky is out later this year, she is on the writing team of a US show at the moment, and is about to start writing another novel. “I’m interested in writing something that’s a little less connected to my own experience,” she says. Her divorce seems very much in the past, which must be comforting to anyone in the midst of it. “I was really sad,” she says. “I meant what I said when we got married, I really wanted to try [to stay together]. But a failure doesn’t need to make you feel terrible. There’s lots of failure in life and I think weathering it with a bit of grace and resilience is probably a very important skill to develop.” The other day, a woman recognised Heisey in a coffee shop and came up to her. “She said: ‘I just have to tell you, I left my husband last week.’ She seemed really excited but she also just really wanted to give me the info, like, here’s a safe person to tell. I think it’s all-consuming.” Heisey remembered her own isolation. “It’s a very lonely time so if the book makes people feel less lonely during that time, that would be great.” Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

GOOD

NHS disruption warning as ambulance staff strike in south-east England

Ambulance staff in the south-east of England are to strike over pay for the second time on Tuesday, prompting warnings from hospital bosses of further pressure on overstretched emergency services. Members of the Unite trade union employed by two ambulance trusts are striking after rejecting the government’s pay offer of a lump sum cash payment for 2022-23 and a below inflation increase of 5% for 2023-24. Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, urged ministers to reopen negotiations and make a “proper wage offer” to NHS workers. She said: “The strike action by our south-east ambulance workers is part of Unite’s escalation strategy to exert greater pressure on the government. We have always said that a non-consolidated lump sum for 22-23 would not cut it. So it has turned out. The current offer does nothing to resolve the recruitment and retention crisis crippling the NHS.” Unite is carrying out a series of ballots to increase the number of workers able to take strike action. The move comes despite the NHS staff council, which covers 12 unions, voting to accept the pay deal . Unite was among the unions that failed to back the deal at the vote earlier this month. Unite members employed at both South Central and South East Coast ambulance trusts will strike from 12pm until 10pm on Tuesday. This is their second strike, though some other ambulance trusts have held five days of industrial action. Julian Hartley, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents health service trust leaders, said the strike would “pile even more pressure on already overstretched NHS services”. Hospital leaders, he said, were anticipating another day of disruption including rescheduled patient appointments, handover delays and increased pressure on emergency departments. “Leaders across the health service had hoped the NHS staff council’s welcome acceptance of a new pay deal signalled an end to the most disruptive period of industrial action in NHS history, but they continue to face more walkouts,” said Hartley. “We need to see serious talks between the government and unions to resolve these ongoing disputes and to avert further strikes.” He said added that trust leaders were working hard to minimise the impact of the strikes, and urged people to continue to call 999 in a life-threatening emergency and to use NHS 111 online services for non-urgent health needs. Picket lines will be in place at Portsmouth patient transport service base and Thameside ambulance station in Northfleet, Kent. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said it was disappointing that strike action was continuing after some unions voted to accept the pay offer. She said: “These strikes will put more pressure on the NHS and will be disruptive for patients. Most unions on the NHS staff council voted to accept our pay offer and we hope the unions who choose to remain in dispute – despite many of their members also voting to accept this offer – will recognise this as a fair outcome that carries the support of their colleagues and decide it is time to bring industrial action to an end.”

GOOD

Conor Benn was charged with alleged clomifene use in April, Ukad confirms

UK Anti-Doping (Ukad) has announced that Conor Benn was charged with the alleged use of clomifene, a banned substance that boosts testosterone, this month. The charge could result in a two-year ban for the British boxer who has been trying to resume his troubled career abroad without clearing his name in public first. This latest development marks a further hardening in Ukad’s approach to the case, which first made news last October when, in the week of his planned and heavily hyped fight against Chris Eubank Jr, it emerged that Benn had returned a positive test result for clomifene . Despite initial efforts to proceed with the bout, the media and public uproar forced its cancellation. Later that month Benn admitted he had also returned a second and earlier positive test result for clomifene. Both these results were recorded by Vada (the Voluntary Anti-Doping Authority) and, while Benn had not failed any Ukad tests, the British agency took serious note of the two separate positives. On Tuesday it was reported that Ukad had provisionally suspended Benn on 15 March. While Ukad would not confirm or deny that news then, as it only comments on unresolved investigations in “exceptional circumstances”, on Thursday it made a public statement that began with the assertion that the Benn case is one of those “limited and rare examples”. Ukad declared: “Following reports in the media and comments made by professional boxer Mr Conor Benn on Tuesday 18 April 2023, and in exceptional circumstances, UK Anti-Doping confirms that Mr Benn was notified and provisionally suspended by Ukad on 15 March 2023 in accordance with the UK Anti-Doping Rules … Ukad can also confirm that on 3 April 2023 it charged Mr Benn with an Article 2.2 violation for the alleged use of a prohibited substance (clomifene). The charge against Mr Benn is pending and will now follow the results management process in accordance with the UK Anti-Doping Rules.” Benn, who has always protested his innocence, responded with an attempted dismissal of Ukad’s intervention. “Another day, another attempt to create a headline with my name,” he wrote on Twitter. “I am involved in a confidential procedure and I have respected my confidentiality obligations. Yet each day brings a new leak and a misrepresentation of what’s actually happening. There is no news. Being ‘charged’ is a start of a process by which an athlete has to defend themselves. I have not been sanctioned by anyone & I’m not banned from boxing. I remain free to fight in events that are not sanctioned by the BBBoC [British Boxing Board of Control]. I don’t even have a BBBoC licence.” The boxer relinquished his British licence in late October but attempts by Benn and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, to obtain a licence to box in the US have so far remained unfulfilled. Hearn has suggested repeatedly over the past month that Benn’s comeback would be in the Middle East on 3 June but plans to announce that fight have been delayed. While Benn could fight in another territory, should he be granted a licence to box elsewhere, his trainers and Hearn, as his promoter, would be at risk of sanctions from the British board as they adhere to Ukad regulations. They could lose their British licences, at least temporarily, should they ignore Benn’s Ukad suspension. The Ukad statement continued: “Whilst provisionally suspended Mr Benn is prohibited from participating in any capacity (or assisting another athlete in any capacity) in a competition, event or activity that is organised, convened, authorised or recognised by the British Boxing Board of Control or any other World Anti-Doping Code-compliant sport.” Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s action after newsletter promotion Benn has long insisted that a 270-page report produced by his team provides scientific proof that clears him. But until recently that document had been shared only with the World Boxing Council (WBC), the sanctioning body. The WBC returned him to its list of top 10 welterweights after concluding Benn had not intentionally ingested a banned substance but it disputed his attribution of blame to the testing laboratory . Ukad apparently now has the report and its charge against Benn has been laid. On Thursday, Hearn blamed Ukad and the BBBoC for the “mess” and said: “Now [Benn] has to go through the Ukad situation, and who knows how long it’s going to take? We have to go through the process, but the whole thing stinks.” Benn’s legal team did not respond when approached by the Guardian for further comment.

GOOD

A moment that changed me: the empty sock drawer told me my marriage was over

It was the sock drawer that broke me. Left half-open and completely emptied, somehow it signified the final, irreversible death knell of my marriage, a hard stop in a meandering nightmare that had been going on for months. It shouldn’t have been a surprise – I’d been away travelling in China for a week, and I’d agreed with my husband that he would move his things out while I was away. Somehow, though, I hadn’t properly prepared myself for the terrible emptiness of unclothed hangers, no coat on the hook and a bathroom devoid of any products but mine. Looking at the wooden tallboy my mum bought us for a wedding present, two of the drawers suddenly empty, it was the first tangible moment of realisation that it wasn’t just our marriage that was over, but the life we had created together and shared for 13 years. Nothing prepares you for the trauma of divorce. As I stood in the half-empty bedroom, the reality of what we had done crystallised. Friday night drinks in our local pub, Sunday morning walks in Regent’s Park, that easy back and forth through the day, someone checking what time I’d be home and what I fancied for dinner, all of that was suddenly gone, crumbled completely like some black hole devouring itself until an entire galaxy has disappeared. I remember sinking down on our bed – just my bed, now – and sobbing: the kind of choking, gut-deep grief where you become unable to express the emotions rising in your body. I sobbed because we had failed, because we had loved each other once, and then our love faded and finally died. Neither of us had tended it or fought hard enough to keep it alive. And I sobbed the next day, and the day after that, when I would wake alone, go to work and come home to a silent, empty flat that would only come alive with the TV or radio. I suspect everyone who gets divorced has a moment like this. For so long it’s an unthinkable end point. Even as you’re inching towards it, you still can’t quite believe you’ll ever reach that stage. Disentangling two lives is more complex than we ever imagine – a cat’s cradle of stories, moments, possessions, financial arrangements and everything in between. And that was almost what broke me more than anything: the realisation that after a long, difficult year, I would have to find the energy to begin again, brushing away the ashes of a life that no longer existed. I wasn’t wrong to be apprehensive about the weeks and months to come. Every day brought something new to manage alone , from health concerns to finding a plumber and suddenly being the single woman at get-togethers. I remember going to Ikea to buy a new set of dinner plates and thinking: what is my taste? If I am me, just me, what do I like? It was sobering to realise how much of my sense of self I’d lost along the way. Now I look back at that time as the most challenging – and most valuable – period of my life: five years of being single, when I slowly grew into the woman I had never quite become. It wasn’t easy. When friends or family came to stay, I’d often find myself in tears after they’d gone, the flat even more creakingly empty after a sudden burst of life. I struggled with feelings of inadequacy and failure, compounded by my now ex-husband’s almost immediate immersion in a new relationship and circle of friends, giddily shared on Facebook. But slowly, my world brightened . I took a new job, went back to university and finally moved out of London to sunny Hove in East Sussex . Most importantly, I learned to rely on myself, to trust that whatever happened next, I would be able to cope. Fifteen years later, I’m happily remarried (having sworn I would never marry again), my third novel is about to be published and, crucially, I am content – a state that always eluded the younger me. I don’t feel like a failure, I don’t feel like a divorcee. I am just me. I wish I could have told myself, sitting on the edge of the bed that chilly October Friday, that the empty drawers and unclothed hangers signified not just the end of something, but also a beginning. I didn’t know it then, but what lay before me was the chance to discover who I really was and what I was capable of – an extraordinary journey that would take me to a far happier, healthier place. The Enemy of Love by Annabelle Thorpe , published by Aria (£20), is out on 13 April

GOOD

‘The reasons couples separate are mostly mundane. That doesn’t mean they’re not painful’

There are particular moments in family law that are universal among practitioners. Most of these happen during the first meeting, when a client comes in with requests for a “fair” property division or anticipating “justice”, only to have their misapprehensions about our family law system explained and their expectations dashed. These clients imagine the law as a nimble thing, able to fit the situation, to tread delicately and repair only what is broken. They are shocked when they learn that their grievances will be treated in the same way as a thousand others. They expect to explain everything to a judge who will be sympathetic to their point of view and scold their ex. In fact, the chances of even seeing a judge are small; the chance of addressing them directly, negligible. “Law is reason free from passion,” said Aristotle. That makes it all sound very clinical, surgical. And yet, reading a list of all of your failings as a parent in affidavit form can feel not just cold but downright cruel. I’ve worked as a family lawyer for over 10 years, doing both legally aided and private work. In that time I’d estimate that I’ve spoken to 500 husbands, wives, partners. The work undulates with the seasons. We always seem to be busiest late in the old year or early in the new. People either want to get things out of the way before Christmas so that they can have a fresh start, or decide after the stress of the Christmas break that they are well and truly done. It is work that can be tremendously rewarding. But it can also be like lifting up a beautiful, smooth rock only to be confronted by a nest of venomous spiders. People who seem entirely together, caring and kind, can be nasty, mean-spirited, sadistic. The reasons couple separate are, for the most part, mundane. It is people who have worn each other down through fundamental differences in attitudes to money or parenting or what makes a good life. That the reasons are mundane does not mean they aren’t painful. But rather, when salacious details do rear their heads – affairs, secret second families, hidden second houses – they are a symptom rather than a disease. Occasionally an act of God will intervene in an otherwise happy relationship – a workplace accident, a mental or physical health crisis, an addiction. But these are the exception not the rule. When I meet with clients, they invariably say they want things resolved quickly and cheaply. It is usually possible to predict whether this is realistic by observing the way they talk about their ex. If they are referring to their wife of 20 years as “her” and “she” and have a mental list of every time “she” used the heater when it wasn’t cold, chances are they are spoiling for a fight. People often assume they will receive the same outcome as their brother, cousin, neighbour. They have heard the stories, compared the asset pool, the number of children. But outcomes are dependent on highly personal values and beliefs. One client may want to take a case to trial over $40,000 worth of superannuation because to them, winning or money or both are everything. Another might be willing to sacrifice time with a child just to have things wrapped up quickly. One client withstands the rigours of cross-examination with composure; another might let their ex’s counsel get under their skin. A registrar once said to me that every person tells their version of the truth. For the most part, I agree. I think people tend to tell us their “emotional truths” which do not always accord with the facts as they appear in bank statements, medical records, emails. The way a person feels that events transpired is their story. This is, I think, also why some leave the system claiming they were robbed or that they lost their house or children. The parenting matters are the saddest. The easier, less conflict-ridden of these are often sifted out before they reach a lawyer’s office via compulsory mediation. By the time I am consulting with a client about their children, the arguments are bigger and nastier: serious family violence or abuse allegations; one parent wanting to move overseas with a child; a toddler being exposed to an unacceptable new partner or drug use or anger. These are the cases where the views about what should happen to the children are so divergent that litigation becomes necessary. There are always surprises. The surprise of realising that the client whose story I genuinely believed had actually been lying to my face. The surprise of a client in whom I had little faith doing the parenting program that they were ordered to attend. The couple who were at each other’s throats for months only to reconcile at court and leave the building holding hands. There are beautiful moments too. The client who will freely admit that the ex-partner who dragged them through the court system is “a good mum”. The client who volunteers to lend their ex their car so that time with their children can keep taking place. The people for whom a lightbulb finally illuminates something, who realise that a behaviour must stop, that change is imperative and promptly follow through in bettering themselves. It is these moments that can make lifting up that rock worth it. Mali Waugh is a family lawyer and author of the thriller Judgement Day, published by Pan Macmillan

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Uber suspends diversity chief over ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ events

Uber has suspended its head of diversity, equity and inclusion after Black and Hispanic employees complained about the workplace events she moderated exploring the experience of white American women under the title “Don’t Call Me Karen”. The ride-hailing app has confirmed that it has asked Bo Young Lee, who has led its DEI department for five years, to take a leave of absence while the company works out “next steps”. Her suspension is the latest wave of chaos to strike the $72bn company over its corporate culture. Lee’s suspension, which was first reported by the New York Times , follows mounting internal discontent over two “Don’t Call Me Karen” sessions that she convened on Zoom for up to 500 employees. The events, one in April and the second last week, were billed as “diving into the spectrum of the American white woman’s experience from some of our female colleagues, particularly how they navigate around the ‘Karen’ persona”. The sessions were held as part of a “Moving Forward” series of discussions on race and minority experiences organized by the company in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The focus on the discomfort of white women specifically over the term “Karen” was denounced by several employees as being insensitive towards people of color. In internal Slack channels for Black and Hispanic Uber employees seen by the Times, workers said they had felt lectured at. “It was more of a lecture – I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting,” one Black woman wrote. Another said that she didn’t understand the premise of the session: “I think when people are called Karens it’s implied that this is someone that has little empathy to others or is bothered by minorities others that don’t look like them. Like, why can’t bad behavior not be called out?” “Karen” has become shorthand for the actions of entitled white women who report Black and minority ethnic people to bosses or the authorities. In a notorious case in 2020, a white woman called the police on a Black man who was peacefully birdwatching in New York’s Central Park. According to the New York Times, after the first “Don’t Call Me Karen” event, a Black staffer argued that diversity sessions should not include “tone-deaf, offensive and triggering conversations”. Lee is reported to have replied: “Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do.” Uber has labored hard to improve and modernize its workplace culture after the 2017 resignation of its chief executive, Travis Kalanick, following months of scandals. Under his leadership, the company was alleged by a whistleblower to have fostered widespread gender discrimination and sexual harassment. Kalanick’s replacement as chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, vowed to turn around the culture . His efforts have included a focus on DEI, led by Lee, whom he brought into the company in 2018.

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Skipton’s 100% mortgage for renters offers hope – but not without risk

With hindsight, one of Britain’s biggest building societies could definitely have picked a better day to launch a first-of-its-kind 100% mortgage. On Tuesday morning, just as the press release was being sent out and Skipton building society boss Stuart Haire was preparing for his BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview, the Halifax reported that average UK house prices fell in April, by 0.3% month on month, and that “we should expect some further downward pressure on house prices over the course of this year”. To add to the gloom, the struggling online estate agent Purplebricks reported a further worsening in trading , there was a profit warning from another firm reliant on the housing sector, and many housebuilders saw their share prices fall. The Skipton’s new mortgage is the UK’s first 100% home loan exclusively for renters. It has been described by some commentators as a “revolutionary” way to help people off the high rents treadmill and into homeownership, and by others as not too dissimilar to the risky loans that contributed to the 2007-08 financial crash. Wherever you stand, Tuesday’s wave of negative housing market news throws the spotlight on the elephant in the room with this type of deal: even a small fall in house prices going forward will put those who sign up into negative equity, where people are trapped in properties worth less than their mortgages. To be fair to the Skipton, it has structured its new deal in a way that addresses at least some of the risks. Standard home loans where the borrower does not have to put down a deposit used to be fairly commonplace – there were deals that let you borrow up to 125% of a property’s value – but the last was axed in 2008 . The financial crisis ushered in a clampdown on easy credit and lax lending and led to much tighter rules on who can get mortgages and how much they can borrow. There are a lot of hoops that applicants for the new 100% deal will have to jump through. Notably, the monthly mortgage payment must be equal to or lower than the rent they are used to paying. So tenants paying an average of £1,290 a month over the last six months will have a maximum monthly mortgage payment of £1,290, and this will also determine the maximum amount they can borrow. Applicants also have to meet the standard mortgage affordability requirements and pass credit score checks. In an attempt to iron out potential volatility, the mortgage has been designed as a longer-term product – it is a five-year fixed-rate deal - and the 5.49% interest rate is pricier than the current average new five-year fixed-rate, which is about 5%. This mortgage could certainly appeal to those keen to get on the property ladder but who cannot afford to save up a five-figure deposit and do not have access to “family money”. It may prompt other banks and building societies to look at launching products to help people trapped in the private rented sector, where the average monthly costs keep soaring to new record highs. Most mortgage brokers were reasonably or very positive about the new deal. David Hollingworth, an associate director at the broker firm L&C Mortgages , said it “offers a measured approach that gives credit for the fact that many tenants will have built up a strong track record of managing their housing costs responsibly”. However, some commentators raised red flags about the risks. Graham Cox, founder of the Bristol-based broker Self Employed Mortgage Hub, said he was “amazed” that regulators had given Skipton the go-ahead to launch the product. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion “It’s like we’ve learnt nothing from the global financial crisis … The grave danger is that borrowers will overextend themselves. The slightest fall in house prices – and I believe they’ll fall significantly over the next 12-18 months – will leave homeowners in negative equity. Not a great place to be if your income drops and you need to sell,” he added. Of course, a great deal depends on what happens to the housing market going forward. There’s no agreement even on how it is faring right now: while the Halifax said property prices fell last month following three consecutive months of growth, rival Nationwide said they rose in April (by 0.5%) after seven months of declines, suggesting “tentative signs of a recovery”. However, an interest rate rise by the Bank of England on Thursday this week, which is widely anticipated and would be the 12th in a row, would clearly pile more pressure on many would-be buyers.

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‘Potheads, go giggle elsewhere’: public weed ban begins in Amsterdam

Thick fumes of cannabis smoke were noticeably absent from the air of Amsterdam’s red light district on Thursday, the familiar smell replaced by dank canal water and rats on the first day of a ban on smoking marijuana in public. After years of complaints from residents about wild behaviour from 18 million annual visitors, a crackdown on nuisance tourism is in full swing. Last month, the municipality started a “stay away” campaign – aimed first at misbehaving Britons – that banned alcohol sales in shops at the weekend and imposed earlier closing times for window brothels and pubs. Now, tourists and residents alike face a €100 (£87) fine for public cannabis smoking in and around the red light district, to “reduce crowding and nuisance in the area”. For locals sick of rowdy stag nights, piles of rubbish and their doorsteps being used as lavatories, the ban in De Wallen – “the old city walls” – is a sign their concerns are being taken seriously. The Amsterdam mayor, Femke Halsema, and all political parties agree that crowds of post-pandemic tourists have compromised livability, while at peak times emergency vehicles cannot access the narrow, medieval streets. “Finally, smoking cannabis is banned in public spaces,” said Diederik Boomsma, a Christian Democratic Appeal councillor who has long campaigned for tourists to be banned from buying cannabis at all. “This will send an important message to the gormless and feckless who think they can come here on a holiday from morality. Newsflash to all potheads: go giggle elsewhere! Let’s hope that the citizens of Amsterdam reclaim their ancient, beautiful city centre from the glassy-eyed zombies.” Els Iping, a local resident, and the “ Stop de Gekte ” (stop the madness) group had got so sick of the nuisance that in recent months they had mounted vigilante “Wallen Watch” patrols on weekend nights, asking tourists to behave. “We don’t want that image of sex and drugs any more,” she said, adding that the patrols had been suspended due to intimidation from local businesses. “Tourists have never sworn at us: they just say sorry, because they also think it’s all a bit strange. We are happy with every step the council takes.” The city has bigger plans. Halsema is talking to private developers about building a controversial, large-scale erotic centre elsewhere and removing 100 brothel windows from the Wallen. She has not given up on the idea of enforcing a national residents-only law for coffee shops – where semi-legal cannabis is for sale. Meanwhile, there is a national determination to crack down on drug-related criminality that research suggests is behind some of the cash-based red light district businesses. But on the evening before the ban began, business owners were gathering worriedly on the streets, cursing resident activists and worrying that tourists would stop coming. Jim Zielinski, a spokesperson for the Bulldog coffee shop and a board member of business group Biz Burgwallen, said some were angry. “The soul of the neighbourhood, what makes it so extraordinary, is slowly being pulled out,” he said. “It’s like a game of Jenga: each time they take a block away and at some point the whole pile will collapse.” Sign up to This is Europe The most pivotal stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion He believes the answer is more policing of existing laws against public alcohol drinking and drug dealing. “The city simply cannot get a grip on safety, littering, the people who walk around the streets screaming and have no respect,” he said. Some tourists in the area on Thursday morning thought it was reasonable to ban public cannabis smoking while continuing to let people buy and smoke in coffee shops. Ethan Nordberg, 19, an American studying in Germany, was surprised at the new fines. “We did see signs but we thought they were just there ,” he said. His friend Jason Diehl, 18, added that the Netherlands was still relatively permissive. “There’s a €140 fine for public urination, but in the US, you would go on the sex offenders list for indecent exposure!” he said. A middle-aged English man sitting on a cafe terrace furtively smoking a joint had not heard about the “stay away” campaign. He decided he didn’t want to talk to the press. Some locals worry Amsterdammers are just as likely to be caught up in the fines, especially after long-running battles with the council over new Airbnb-style rental regulation. “The rules will be difficult for visitors to understand, because they might be able to smoke on the other side of the canal, or on a private terrace in the red light district,” said Maarten Bruinsma, chair of the Amsterdam Gastvrij, and a bed and breakfast owner. “So we can only hope the council doesn’t treat unwitting offenders as disproportionately as they did short-stay hosts, who made unintentional mistakes thanks to complex rules.” The policy sparked contrarian instincts among others. One occasional joint smoker commented: “It almost makes one want to sit on one’s front step smoking cannabis in public.”

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Britain must hold firm on the Northern Ireland Protocol

After weeks of speculation, the Foreign Secretary confirmed in Parliament today that the Government will bring forward a new law to unilaterally suspend parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol . Liz Truss emphasised that it was about being pragmatic in the face of practical problems. The preference remained a negotiated solution with the EU – and certainly the plan was not to scrap the Protocol in its entirety. But the Good Friday Agreement is being undermined and, in the absence of any movement from Brussels, legislation was needed to bring about revised arrangements. Some are attempting to claim that the Government is cynically retreating from a deal that both sides entered in good faith. But the Protocol was agreed at a time when Remainers in Parliament were doing everything in their power to undermine the UK’s position, including removing the option of walking away with a no-deal Brexit. The sequencing of the talks, as well as the EU’s refusal to consider more innovative solutions to the Irish border issue, had tied the Government’s hands. Moreover, ministers do not want to scrap the Protocol in its entirety, and appear to have won over some critics of the deal to the position that it is better to seek changes. Nobody can credibly claim that it is working perfectly, not least because the opposition of unionist parties in Northern Ireland has resulted in the collapse of power-sharing. In the short term, the question is whether Ms Truss’s statement will be enough to encourage Brussels to change the terms of the mandate given to its negotiator, allowing for more productive talks to take place. Even now, the EU, with its fanatical commitment to protecting the “integrity” of the single market, may be incapable of shifting from its ideologically determined position. The early signs are not promising. In which case, ministers will have to decide whether it is worth risking economic retaliation from Brussels to push ahead with its legislation. To avoid further compounding the cost of living crisis, they should be clear about what that would necessitate: radical shifts in tax and regulation to make the economy more competitive. The worst outcome would be for the Government to raise the stakes and then shy away from action for fear of the consequences. Britain has paid the price before for showing weakness in the face of EU threats.

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I used to hide behind my hair. But cancer gave me a buzzcut and helped me find my voice

There’s a saying my grandmother liked to use: little girls should be seen and not heard. I internalised that idea for much of my life, but when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, something changed. Cancer took a great deal from me, but it gave me back my voice, and now I don’t think I’ll ever be silent again. I must have been a difficult child. Much of my childhood features people telling me to be quiet. Schoolteachers. Family members. The man who tried to rape me. The adult who, when I told her, and after having satisfied herself that nothing much had happened, decided that it would be best for me never to mention it again. At school I was labelled “dogmatic” by a teacher who liked to stare down my blouse during lessons. When I called him out, I acquired the additional label of “troublemaker”. And so I grew up believing that silence was a virtue. I became self-conscious about my voice and its effect on others. I was already more than self-conscious about the effect my appearance had on others, and did my best to mitigate this by hiding behind a curtain of hair. For a time, I forgot what it felt like to be myself, except in the safe space of the page, free from scrutiny and judgment. When my third book became unexpectedly successful, I was suddenly under more scrutiny than I’d ever known before. No more than was directed at any other successful woman, but enough to help confirm the voices of my childhood: that when you’re a woman, physical appearance is the first thing people notice; and that no one wants you to be loud, or flippant, or opinionated. My agent agreed. A grande dame in the old style, she took me in hand in a manner that brooked no refusal: decided what I should wear, what I should say, what I should write next and how best to keep out of trouble. The implication was clear: if I showed my true self, if I failed to conform to her expectations, if I spoke out about my politics – in short, if I was difficult – then something dreadful would happen. But in spite of this, somehow my voice was coming to life. It started with being a mother. My instinct to protect my child brought out my confrontational streak. I became a troublemaker again, at least in certain circumstances. But a lifetime of self-effacement takes a lot of breaking down. It took me another 20 years to learn to be myself again. By the time my agent and I parted ways, the internet had taken over as arbiter of what I should be. Women on the internet are often commented upon, told their experiences don’t count. When they push back, they receive abuse. For someone like me, raised on keeping the peace, it was sometimes tempting simply not to engage. But some events are too huge for that. The US election of Donald Trump, then Brexit, Covid, lockdown and Boris Johnson’s premiership seemed to demand some comment. On those issues, at least, I found myself growing outspoken. I got the usual abuse in response, even the occasional death threat. It was upsetting, but not as much as I’d imagined. With age comes a feeling of “fuck you”. Menopause had made me rethink my relationship with my body. Insults about my appearance made little impression on me. Even 20 years before, I’d never understood the need for strangers to see me as sexy. Then I got cancer. I spoke about that online, too, and found that others in the same situation found it comforting to hear about my experience. There was something oddly liberating in actually saying something was wrong . My old agent would have been horrified: she hid her own cancer treatment from everyone – including me – for fear of revealing weakness. I didn’t feel weak, however. I felt as if, at long last, I had taken back control. I declined the offer of a wig and opted to shave my head before chemo took my hair. Suddenly there was more to life than worrying about optics. So what if I didn’t look as people expected me to? So what if I expressed a view that made someone else despise me? I realised that I had been hiding away – under my hair, under my fear of upsetting people – all my life. Now, in the face of cancer, I felt I’d rediscovered myself. Acknowledging the effects, the fear – felt like a superpower. My scale of priorities had shifted. The dreadful thing had already happened. What was left for me to fear? I found myself engaging in discussions I would have avoided 12 months before. An angry man on Twitter lambasted me for my “woke hair”. I laughed to think he’d mistaken my chemo buzzcut for a political statement. Three years later, I’m cancer-free. My body has mostly recovered. Even my hair has begun to grow back. But the effect remains. I no longer stay silent for fear of causing trouble. Recently, I found the origin of the “seen and not heard” saying in a collection of old English proverbs by an Augustinian clergyman called John Mirk in 1450: A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd – although if Mirk already considered the proverb old, then it must have dated from long before that. Remembering his advice , I wonder what he would have said to a woman who was no longer a mayde ? I like to think he learned the hard way. I like to think that some 15th-century version of me told him “fucke you”, and left him forever speechless. Joanne Harris is the author of Chocolat and Broken Light Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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‘What did the pope know?’: Poles divided over John Paul II abuse cover-up claims

With under six months to go before a parliamentary election that is expected to be closely fought, a surprise figure has entered the Polish political field, despite the fact he died in 2005 : Pope John Paul II. The legacy of John Paul II, who was born Karol Wojtyła and was archbishop of Kraków before becoming pope in 1978 , is under scrutiny after a recent book and television documentary accused him of covering up for paedophile priests before he became pontiff. Poland, historically staunchly Catholic, has slowly been coming to terms with the scale of historical sexual abuse in the church, but until recently the figure of John Paul II, whom many Poles revere for his role in the ending of communist rule in the country, has remained untouchable. That convention has been upturned by allegations in a documentary aired on Polish television station TVN earlier this year, and a concurrent book by the Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek, who has lived in Poland for more than two decades and written extensively on child abuse in the Polish church. Overbeek said he found documents in the archives of the communist-era security services that prove beyond doubt that the sexual abuse of children by priests was an issue during Wojtyła’s tenure as archbishop of Kraków, and that the future pope helped to cover it up. “It’s obvious from the documents that he knew about the abuse. He reacted to it by allowing the priests to continue their ministry. He was very forgiving towards the priests, whereas no evidence shows that he ever gave attention to the victims,” said Overbeek, in an interview at a Warsaw cafe. The response to the allegations has been one of denial and fury. Two public events to promote the book were cancelled by the publishers, citing security fears after a sustained campaign against Overbeek in government media. In the Polish parliament, the Sejm, MPs from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party arrived for a session in March holding photographs of the late pope, and passed a resolution to defend his name. “The Sejm … strongly condemns the shameful media campaign, based largely on the materials of the communist apparatus of violence, whose object is the Great Pope – Saint John Paul II, the greatest Pole in history,” the resolution read. Wojtyła was born in the town of Wadowice in 1920; he was ordained in 1946 and made archbishop of Kraków in the early 1960s. He would become the first non-Italian pope for more than four centuries, and made several visits back to Poland as pontiff. He was widely credited with galvanising opposition to communist rule and continued as pope until his death in 2005. “I was very upset when I watched the documentary,” said Sławomir Abramowski, the 58-year-old priest in charge of a parish named after John Paul II in Bemowo, a neighbourhood of Warsaw. The church was built shortly after the church canonised John Paul II in 2014, and has a portrait of the late pope close to the altar no smaller than the images of Jesus. The documentary used a “crude manipulation of the facts” to smear John Paul II, said Abramowski, who credited the late pope with inspiring him to join the church in the early 1990s, after he had trained as a doctor. Among his congregation on a recent Sunday, when the church was full for mass and worshippers listened via speakers in an overflow area outside, there was a mood of defiance. Kamila, a 38-year-old woman carrying a baby, claimed John Paul II was a “huge opponent of paedophilia” and said the accusations were political. “ The aim of this game is to discourage people from going to church, to destroy Polish identity and to repel people from family values.” Barbara, a 70-year-old worshipper, said it was unfair to make accusations against someone who was dead and thus could not defend himself. “The ones who accused him should think about their conscience. I think they might have had problems in their childhood and have been doing this to boost their deficient self-worth,” she said. This strength of feeling helps explain why PiS have seized on the topic, before parliamentary elections in October that are delicately poised. A PiS-led coalition has ruled Poland since 2015 , and draws much of its support from a rural, staunchly Catholic electorate. Mateusz Klinowski, the former mayor of Wojtyła’s hometown, Wadowice, and an outspoken critic of the church, said he had no doubt the allegations against John Paul II were true. Sign up to This is Europe The most pivotal stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion “Among educated people, it’s been obvious for a long time that he was covering it up, but of course for politicians it’s a sweet piece of cake for preparing their campaigns,” he said. Jacek Karnowski, the editor-in-chief of the pro-government Sieci magazine, said he expected the pope’s legacy to be one of three key issues the government would focus on in the upcoming election campaign, along with cost of living and the war in Ukraine. “ They know that on the abortion issue, the majority is against them so they stay silent. But 74% of Poles say John Paul II is an authority so this is very fertile ground for the government,” he said. In early April, thousands of people joined marches in Warsaw and other cities to defend the pope’s name, including the defence minister and the head of the constitutional court. Karnowski claimed the whole scandal had been part of a “political attack” on John Paul II coordinated by the liberal opposition to PiS, but others say that the opposition has been blindsided by the allegations and is trying to stay neutral, aware of how sensitive the issue is. A poll also showed that nearly half of Poles said they would not want to hear allegations against John Paul II even if they were true. Even the editor-in-chief of Wyborcza, Poland’s leading liberal newspaper, has said it would be wrong to discredit the Pope’s historical role. “Wojtyła was a child of his time. And what is obvious to us today was not obvious 40 years ago,” said Adam Michnik, in an interview published in his own newspaper. John Paul II’s papacy, which lasted more than a quarter of a century, coincided with the first public scandals about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, which have since broken in numerous countries. Often, culprits were simply moved to different parishes rather than banned from practicing or reported to police. “Ever since these scandals broke, the question has always been ‘How much did the pope know?’” said Overbeek. “The answer was in Poland, and now we have the answer. He was aware of this issue from the very beginning.” It is a conclusion that a lot of people in Poland don’t want to hear, fearing the accusations could undermine John Paul II’s role as part of Polish history and his reputation as one of the key figures in the defeat of communism. “Poland doesn’t have many recent characters we can use as role models. That’s why people are so eager to defend him,” said Klinowski.

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Toulon rout Glasgow to win Challenge Cup final after Serin’s sizzling start

Glasgow’s dream of becoming the first Scottish team to secure a major European rugby title was comprehensively shattered in Dublin on Friday by a Toulon side who claimed their own little slice of history. The French club had lost all four of their previous Challenge Cup finals but ran in six tries in a comfortable win over below-par opponents who only spluttered into life late on. Even the early loss of a dazed Dan Biggar could not throw Toulon off the scent, with French scrum-half Baptiste Serin contributing 16 points and the soon-to-retire Sergio Parisse, now 39, scoring a valedictory try. Glasgow did their best to recover after going 21-0 down inside the first 25 minutes but never looked like conjuring an improbable comeback on what was, atmosphere wise, a disappointingly low-key evening. Aside from a brace of second-half tries for captain Kyle Steyn and another consolation effort for Sebastián Cancelliere, Glasgow could make relatively few inroads and the final margin could have been wider. It brought a triumphant end to Toulon’s long list of previous disappointments in this competition. Starting with Cardiff in 2010 they had also finished runners-up behind Biarritz, Bristol and Lyon, most recently in Marseille last year. As a club more often associated with winning a hat-trick of European Cups between 2013 and 2015, it was a habit they were visibly keen to kick. They also had plenty of players more than accustomed to the biggest stage. Charles Ollivon has captained France, Parisse has led Italy and Biggar has skippered Wales. The latter, though, was jogging back down the tunnel after only four minutes, having taken a high blow in the early seconds. He was reluctant to go off but it would have been a dereliction of medical duty, under the current head injury protocols, had he not been checked out. It did not remotely affect Toulon’s purposeful mood. With nothing much on, Serin collected his own little grubber kick and surged to the line only for the ball to be seemingly held up in the tackle. Referee Wayne Barnes decided he had seen enough, however, and waved away any possible review. On a mild, still evening, Serin potted the easy conversion but then missed a slightly longer penalty. It mattered little with Glasgow finding it almost impossible to escape their own half for any length of time and Toulon had a second try on the board inside the first quarter. Parisse has had a remarkable career, winning 142 Test caps for Italy between 2002 and 2019, but this is his swansong year. There was no shortage of visible emotion, then, when the shiny-domed No 8 burst past the tackle of Huw Jones to score a try which underlined both his enduring desire and athleticism. Could Glasgow somehow get a grip? Whether it was the occasion or simply the strength of the opposition, they were struggling for any kind of foothold even before Serin, with a lovely show and go, plunged over for the second time after 25 minutes before adding a third conversion. With just under an hour still to play, the Warriors were already in need of a minor miracle. Sign up to The Breakdown The latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week's action reviewed after newsletter promotion Moments before the half-time whistle, though, Serin was injured while touching the ball down in goal behind his own line and Toulon were minus a second key playmaker. A flurry of Glasgow replacements appeared in a vain bid to inject some fresh momentum but, even following Steyn’s nice finish, cutting in on the angle from the left touchline, it made little difference. Toulon had too much power and further tries from Jiuta Wainiqolo, Waisea Vuidravuwalu and Ihaia West took them further out of sight, despite Cancelliere’s 69th-minute consolation and the alert Steyn’s second try of the match. Leinster may have home advantage against La Rochelle in Saturday’s Champions Cup final but, unless you front up physically in all areas, knocking over the leading French sides is proving increasingly hard work.

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Majority of NHS trusts provide no dedicated training to prevent sexual harassment

Only one NHS trust in England provides dedicated training to prevent sexual harassment, according to research, raising concerns that the NHS is failing to adequately protect staff and patients. According to health union figures, sexual harassment of staff is pervasive. A 2019 survey by Unison found that one in 12 NHS staff had experienced sexual harassment at work during the past year, with more than half saying the perpetrator was a co-worker. In a recent BMA survey , 91% of female doctors reported sexism, 31% had experienced unwanted physical contact and 56% unwanted verbal comments. Yet research by the University of Cambridge, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine on Friday found that the vast majority of NHS trusts did not provide any dedicated training to prevent sexual harassment. The report analysed data from freedom of information requests from 199 trusts in England and found that just 35 offered their workers any sort of active bystander training (ABT), while only one NHS trust had a specific module on sexual harassment. ABT is designed to give individuals the skills to call out unacceptable behaviour, from workplace bullying to racism and sexual misconduct. It is widely used by the military , universities and Whitehall, including the Home Office . The report’s authors said that failure to implement such training in the health service could thwart NHS attempts to tackle sexual harassment. Dr Sarah Steele, senior research associate at the University of Cambridge and author of the report, said : “It is unacceptable that so few NHS trusts in England provide active bystander training when it is proven to equip staff to tackle harassment and violence when they see it. “The NHS needs to ensure all staff complete active bystander training from the very first days of undergraduate degrees through to those nearing retirement. Without this, the problems of sexual harassment will continue to be a problem in the NHS and across wider society.” Responding to the findings, Scarlett McNally, president of the Medical Women’s Federation, said there was an urgent need to improve the working environment for female doctors. “Active bystander training should be mandatory, including interventions to stop sexual harassment,” she said. “The emphasis should not only be on reporting appalling behaviour, but stopping the behaviour and changing the culture so everyone is treated with respect.” Medina Johnson, chief executive of IRISi, a not-for-profit organisation that helps healthcare professionals identify and respond to gender-based violence during consultations, said: “It’s deeply concerning that sexual harassment training and wider training on gender-based violence are not prioritised by NHS trusts … We can’t begin to challenge and prevent sexual harassment if people don’t know what it is or how to recognise it.” Helga Pile, Unison’s deputy head of health, said: “Every employer should be training its staff to call out sexual harassment when they see colleagues being targeted. In the NHS, the pressures on staff are extreme, so making sure they’re trained and feel confident to challenge unacceptable behaviour is all the more important. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion “NHS managers must step up, do more to protect staff and ensure there’s no place for any kind of inappropriate conduct by patients or other health workers.” Kate Davies, the NHS director of sexual assault services commissioning, said: “We will work with the government and other partners to ensure the NHS is a safe space for all staff and patients. Local services must not tolerate sexual misconduct, violence, harassment or abuse – it is totally unacceptable. “All NHS trusts and organisations must have robust measures in place to ensure immediate action is taken in any cases reported to them, and we’d encourage anyone who has experienced any misconduct or violence to come forward, report it and seek help – there is support and care available for anyone who needs it. “Preventing these attacks from occurring in the first place is a priority and we have a programme of work dedicated to this and have appointed our first national clinical lead to drive forward action. Together we must do all we can to keep staff and patients in our services safe.”

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At least 21 dead as wildfires rage across Urals and Siberia

At least 21 people have died in wildfires in Russia’s Ural mountains, state media reported. Wildfires have raged in the Kurgan region of the Urals and in Siberia all week . Local media reported that most of the dead were older people unable to leave their homes. According to local authorities, many of the deaths occurred on Sunday in the village of Yuldus, in Kurgan province on the border between the Urals and Siberia. A resident of western Siberia’s Tyumen province died attempting to extinguish a fire, Regional emergency service officials said the death toll could increase. A state of emergency was introduced in Kurgan province, where more than 5,000 buildings have burned down. Fires have also engulfed thousands of hectares in Sverdlovsk province, and areas of Siberia’s Omsk and Tyumen provinces. During a visit to Kurgan province on Monday, Russia’s emergency situations minister, Aleksandr Kurenkov, said settlements were no longer at risk from the blazes, though local media reported on Tuesday that fires still burned there, as well as in Sverdlovsk and Tyumen. The EU’s Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service (Cams) said its data showed “active fires burning in a band stretching from Russia’s Chelyabinsk region across Omsk and Novosibirsk regions to Primorye in the far east, affecting also Kazakhstan and Mongolia.” Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Cams, said: “The scale and intensity of the current fires are reflecting increased fire risk following some weeks of drier than usual conditions. Wildfires are not particularly unusual in the boreal forests spring, and we have monitored fires in both Canada and Eurasia at this time of year in the past. Nonetheless, we will continue to monitor these conditions as we approach summer when the boreal fire season starts to reach its peak.” In recent years, Russia has experienced especially widespread forest fires, which experts have blamed on unusually dry summers and high temperatures. The link between the climate crisis and wildfires is complex, but a Carbon Brief analysis quotes Dr Cristina Santin , a wildfires researcher from Swansea University , as saying increased temperatures “can increase the risk of severe fires by causing vegetation to dry out”. The experts also cited a 2007 decision to disband a federal aviation network that spotted and fought fires. Its assets were turned over to regional authorities, leading to the force’s rapid decline and attracting much criticism. While the government later reestablished the agency, its resources remained limited, hampering its ability to monitor the massive forests of Siberia and the far east. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Forest fires were especially bad in 2021, when more than 18.16m hectares were destroyed, a record since satellite monitoring began, according to Greenpeace. The fire that raged through Siberia that year was bigger than fires in Greece, Turkey, Italy, the US and Canada combined. A year ago, Vladimir Putin urged authorities to take stronger action to prevent wildfires and to increase coordination between official agencies in dealing with them. AP contributed to this report

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From Haaland to Gordon: what happened to Next Generation 2017?

Talent spotting in football can be a brutal and precarious business. There are so many pitfalls on the way and a player who is outstanding at 16 may not make it for a variety of reasons: loss of form and/or confidence, injuries and a host of personal reasons. Every now and then, however, a player comes through who is so good that he or she seems destined to make it to the top. Erling Haaland – or Erling Braut Håland as he was known back then – is one of them. Of course, a serious injury could have derailed his career but he was one of those kids who stand out from an early age. Haaland was part of our Next Generation worldwide pick in 2017 and, as we look at how the players have got on in the past five years, he is the outstanding name on the list. Some would say he is the best player in the world (although that is a different discussion). In an excellent piece for The Coaches’ Voices , Alf Ingve Berntsen, Haaland’s first coach at Bryne in Norway, pointed out that the environment the player grows up in also plays a part: “Having a safe and good environment, having Inge as a father, and being surrounded by his childhood friends has helped him a lot. Besides the influence of his father it was very important for him to grow up in a town like Bryne, a place where he didn’t have all the media attention that surrounds young footballers today. “If he had grown up in a big city – like Madrid, Paris or London – he would still have become a good player, because Erling always wanted to have fun and loved to train. But maybe in Bryne it is easier than in other cities to let young players grow up without pressure and enjoy football without taking it too seriously.” Hilariously, Berntsen says that Haaland was considered “too small and skinny” even at 15 and 16. It just shows that different players develop at different ages. But not even Michael Yokhin, who picked Haaland for our Next Generation 2017, or Berntsen, could have predicted quite how good the Norwegian would become. The stats, as we all know, are staggering. At Molde he scored 20 goals in 50 games , at Red Bull Salzburg 29 in 27, at Dortmund 86 in 89 and he has started his Manchester City career with 14 in 10 games. But Haaland is far from the only player out of the 60 to have done well. Other players on the list are Alphonso Davies, Vinícius Júnior, Ferrán Torres, Jadon Sancho and Pedro Neto. In fact, 22 of the players have gone on to play for their country’s senior men’s team (it was 18 when we summarised the class of 2016 last year ). We also pick 20 of the best talents at Premier League clubs each year, although here the age group varies slightly in that it is picked on players born between 1 September and 31 August in a certain year when they are first-year scholars. For Next Gen 2017 that meant that they had to be born between 1 September 2000 to 31 August 2001. This list had some outstanding players too, no more so than on Merseyside, Andy Hunter picked Anthony Gordon for Everton and Curtis Jones for Liverpool. Both have played more than 40 Premier League games for their clubs. Gordon stands at 56 and was the subject of several bids from Chelsea in the summer. This is what Andy wrote in 2017 about Gordon: Everton’s under-18s endured a painful night in the first ‘mini-derby’ of the season recently – losing 3-1 to Steven Gerrard’s Liverpool at Kirkby, where Curtis Jones scored twice – but not before Gordon gave another demonstration of his potential. The attacking midfielder is developing a reputation for his ability to beat an opponent and clinical finishing, and both attributes were in evidence as he put Everton ahead against their local rivals. The 16-year-old was one of 12 academy graduates taken on full-time by Everton this summer. Neither Gordon nor Jones tops the list for the most top-flight appearances made by the 20 players. That accolade goes to Ivan Ilic, who was at Manchester City at the time but has gone on to play 17 top-flight games in Serbia on loan at FK Zemun and 68 Serie A games for Hellas Verona – and he is still only 21. Other notable players on the Premier League list were Callum Hudson-Odoi, who is spending this season on loan at Bayer Leverkusen, and Nathan Collins, who signed for Wolves this summer for £20.5m, a record fee for an Irish player. Not everyone has stayed in England, several players following in Ilic’s footsteps and moving abroad, some to their home countries, such as Arnau Puigmal, who left Manchester United for Almería in 2021 and is playing in La Liga football for them. As always, there will be players who drop down the divisions or stop playing. Two players are in the seventh tier and one appears to be no longer in the game. What is a successful career? That is probably up to each individual to decide. One thing is for sure, however: there is no point in comparing anyone with Erling Haaland because that is only going to end badly. “He is a freak,” his international teammate Joshua King once said. “I have never seen anyone eat as much as he does. He eats like a bear.”

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Sharon Stone says she lost custody of her son because of scene in Basic Instinct

The actor Sharon Stone has said that judicial prejudice caused her to lose custody of her son after the presiding judge in her 2004 divorce case asked the four-year-old whether he knew his mother made “sex movies”. Stone was speaking on the Table for Two podcast and alleged that her role in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 psychological thriller Basic Instinct was “weaponised against her” in the fight for custody of the son, Roan, whom she had adopted with her then husband Phil Bronstein in 2000. “I lost custody of my child,” Stone said. “When the judge asked my child – my tiny little boy: ‘Do you know your mother makes sex movies?’ Like, this kind of abuse by the system – that I was considered what kind of parent I was, because I made that movie.” Stone continued, making reference to the infamous interrogation scene in Basic Instinct in which her genitals may be glimpsed briefly. “People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now and you saw maybe like a 16th of a second of possible nudity of me – and I lost custody of my child,” she said. “Are you kidding?” Stone was granted visitation rights to her son, who is now 22. The judge’s decision contributed to her being admitted to hospital later that year with cardiac problems, she said. “It broke my heart,” said Stone. “It literally broke my heart.” Stone’s long career has largely been defined by the glancing nudity in Basic Instinct, and the actor spoke of being upset when peers at the 1993 Golden Globes ceremony laughed when her name was read out as a nominee. “It was horrible. I was so humiliated,” Stone said. “Does anyone have any idea how hard it was to play that part? How gut-wrenching? How frightening? To try and carry this complex movie that was breaking all boundaries and everyone was protesting against, and the pressure. I auditioned for it for nine months. They offered it to 13 other people and now you’re laughing at me. I just wanted to crawl into a hole.” Last year, Stone published a memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, in which she reiterated her belief that Verhoeven had duped her into exposing herself in the scene, saying she had no idea such a shot would be used until she was in a screening alongside agents and lawyers. “That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, ‘We can’t see anything – I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on,’” Stone wrote. “Now, here is the issue. It didn’t matter any more. It was me and my parts up there. I had decisions to make.” Stone has said she then went to the projection booth and slapped Verhoeven across the face. He has long claimed she was always cognisant of the nudity.

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Lachlan Murdoch’s decision to drop the Crikey defamation suit atones for the misjudgment of suing in the first place

Lachlan Murdoch’s federal court defamation action against Private Media Pty Ltd, publisher of Crikey, was never likely to end well. His decision on Friday morning to discontinue the proceedings was, nonetheless, stunning. Murdoch is the CEO and executive chairman of Fox Corporation, which operates the Fox News channel. He sued over a 29 June 2022 article by Crikey’s politics editor, Bernard Keane. The article concerned former US president Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Referring to coverage of that claim by Fox , and the parlous state of American democracy, Keane opined that “the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis”. Murdoch identified 14 defamatory imputations that he said arose out of Keane’s article. The central imputation was said to be that Murdoch had “illegally conspired with Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election result”. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads The bringing of the proceedings was surprising enough. At the time Murdoch sued, Fox was already the defendant in multiple suits in the US. The first and most prominent was brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which produces electronic voting machines that were used to process votes in 28 states during the 2020 election. Dominion claimed US$1.6bn in damages, arguing that its business had been damaged by Fox broadcasting false statements by Trump and others to the effect that its machines had caused votes that had been cast for Trump to be counted for the winner of the election, president Joe Biden. Because of the idiosyncrasies of American defamation law, whether Fox’s executives and presenters knew that those claims were false, and had amplified them for commercial benefit, was centrally in issue. As the pre-trial processes unfolded, a slew of embarrassing internal messages and other documents came to light. Murdoch, his father Rupert, and other Fox executives, were deposed on oath, giving rise to admissions and statements that would have provided fertile ammunition had the Dominion case proceeded to trial. Fox’s competitors were no doubt salivating at the prospect of wall-to-wall coverage of the Dominion trial, including the cross-examination of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch in addition to Fox’s star presenters, including Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson. The case was an ongoing nightmare for Fox and the Murdochs. That nightmare was entirely foreseeable, even at this distance. It is one thing to be an unwilling defendant in an action with the potential for embarrassment, reputational damage and financial consequences. No one chooses to be sued. It is quite another, however, while that nightmare is unfolding, to open another front, as a plaintiff, in relation to related subject matter, on the other side of the world, against a minnow of a publisher. Murdoch’s decision to sue Crikey is even more remarkable when one reflects upon the players. Proprietors of media organisations argue, with real force, that Australia’s defamation laws inhibit freedom of expression and of the press to the detriment of healthy public discourse. Yet in this instance, one such proprietor, with unlimited access to platforms to put his side of the story, exercised his right to seek a remedy under those same laws against a fledgling competitor. On Wednesday, Dominion and Fox settled their dispute in the US. As with most commercial settlements of litigation, the parties compromised. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $US787.5m (A$1.17bn), about half the amount Dominion had claimed. Fox acknowledged that it had aired falsehoods about Dominion, well short of the admissions Dominion was seeking. The settlement spared Fox the embarrassment and reputational damage of a trial. It spared Dominion the risk of not reaching the high threshold required to succeed in a defamation action in the US, as well as the likelihood of cascading appeals, whatever the outcome. Considering the stakes for both sides, the fact that they worked to reach and achieved a settlement is not particularly surprising. Prior to the settlement, however, the Dominion litigation was reverberating on our shores. On 11 April, the Crikey defendants amended their defence to plead reliance on a large volume of admissions and other statements made by Murdoch and others in their depositions in the Dominion case. They also added a defence of contextual truth, signalling that they would seek to prove – relying substantially on revelations from the Dominion case – that Murdoch was morally and ethically culpable for the violent storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, because Fox News, under his control and management, had knowingly promoted and peddled Trump’s lies. It can hardly have come as a shock that developments in the litigation in which Fox was a defendant in the US – developments that were themselves foreseeable – might provide fodder in the case in which Murdoch was a plaintiff in Australia. The amendments to Crikey’s defence upped the stakes. Instead of the focus being upon whether Keane had crossed the line in describing the Murdochs as the “unindicted co-conspirators” of the crisis in American democracy, the battleground shifted to whether Murdoch was in fact ethically and morally culpable for that crisis. On Friday, unexpectedly, Murdoch discontinued his action. There was no compromise. He simply dropped the case, almost certainly meaning that he must pay Crikey’s costs of the entire proceeding. The most his solicitor, John Churchill, could say, when announcing the discontinuance, was that while Murdoch remained confident of victory, he did not wish “to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits”. The amendments to Crikey’s defence and the settlement of the Dominion case certainly provided cover for that explanation. It leaves unanswered, however, how anyone could have thought it was a good idea to bring the case in the first place. Matt Collins KC is a media law barrister and a former president of the Australian Bar Association and the Victorian Bar

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Give customers a fair deal or else, finance regulator warns sector

New rules, taking effect in just over two months, aim to ensure that people are treated better by the companies from which they get their mortgages, current accounts, insurance and other financial products. Banks, building societies, insurers, investment firms, and many other businesses have been warned they must be ready for one of the biggest-ever shake-ups of consumer finance in the UK. The new regime, from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), will see the introduction on 31 July of the so-called “consumer duty,” which sets higher, clearer standards of protection, and explicitly requires companies to “put customers’ needs first”. This could mean being told about better interest rates on a mortgage available to you if you are coming to the end of a fixed deal, or halting unreasonable exit fees, which stop people from leaving a financial product to go to a better one. The drive is aimed at producing what the FCA calls “good outcomes” for consumers: reduced call-waiting times, an end to rip-off charges and fees through clearer promotions, and making it easier to cancel or switch investments. And last week, Sheldon Mills of the FCA warned firms which ignore the new rules that they faced swift action where there was risk of harm to consumers. “In some cases firms can expect us to take robust action, such as interventions or investigations, along with possible disciplinary sanctions,” he said. Tim Hogg, at consultants Oxera, says the new rules are among the biggest reforms of financial regulation in the last 15 years. “I hope, when it comes to buying new products, it’s less of a head-scratcher for people in terms of what is the right one for them.” The FCA says it wants consumers’ needs to be put first and for there to be a higher level of consumer protection in the retail financial markets. This is at a time when people are under financial strain because of the cost of living crisis, and are being forced to make complex decisions when taking out mortgages, loans and other products. Some financial firms present information which is confusing, or difficult to understand, making life more difficult, which can result in people buying products that are not right for them or do not offer good value, says the regulator. Under the consumer duty, it will be up to firms to stop practices that are not in the best interest of their clients. The changes will affect the 52 million who use financial services in the UK. It is unlikely consumers will see a complete change in how they deal with their mortgage provider or insurance company come 1 August. Rather, this will happen over time, says Andrew Strange at accountants PwC. There will not be a list of what can and cannot be done for the thousands of processes involved. But consumers will be able to complain if they feel they are not being well served. Some examples of how this might happen include: A consumer may have a financial product which has a large exit fee if they want to switch to one with better rates. Or it could be that a customer would have to physically go into a branch to cancel. These would both breach the new rules, says the FCA. Where there is a life insurance policy that pays out if a customer develops a medical condition, and subsequently has a life expectancy of less than 12 months. They may find it difficult to navigate the claims process when they are clearly vulnerable, or there could be complications in getting a payout. The FCA has told firms they would need to ensure they tell people about any limits with the policy and avoid “foreseeable harm”. So-called packaged bank accounts may have additional features such as travel insurance attached, but the customer may be unlikely to use them. Or bank accounts which are sold with the daily cost of the overdraft advertised, rather than the “significant cumulative cost”. Both would fall foul of the new rules. Hogg says the duty will ensure people are getting the right product at a fair price. “Another way of thinking about it would be: if you were to sit down with a consumer after they bought a product, and talk them through exactly what happened and read out the T&Cs, would they ever say ‘I regret that’? It is trying to embed that regret test in how the industry operates.” If someone, after coming off a good fixed-rate mortgage deal, was put on to a variable rate but did not switch to a better deal. “I hope what will happen is that providers take more action to identify people who are suffering from inertia and not switching on to the cheapest rate for them,” says Hogg. Strange says that in the case of a person suffering a death in the family and needing money from their bank account, the bank may be expected to waive exit fees. If consumers have trouble with how a financial services firm is dealing with them, they must first complain to the firm, which has a duty to look into that complaint. And then, if the consumer is not happy with the response they receive, they can go to the Financial Ombudsman Service. It says it “welcomes the consumer duty, as this will raise standards so that consumers are better protected and can make good financial decisions. “We will continue to work closely with the FCA to ensure a consistent and complementary approach to the application of the new rules, while respecting the different statutory roles we deliver”.

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From bankers to ambassadors: how Soas gives its students a deeper understanding of the climate crisis

Soas University of London has been a fixture in London’s Bloomsbury for more than 100 years. The elegant brick building was formerly known as the School of Oriental and African Studies, and had been a training ground for Britain’s colonial administrators. Now, however, it has developed a reputation for supporting the unorthodox and offering courses that question the status quo in the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. According to Tom Tanner, director of the university’s Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, the aim is to “break away from the western-centred view that we see on the news, that tends to pigeonhole and stigmatise certain countries”. It’s a way of thinking that is suited to tackling the climate crisis, and addressing the complexities of weaning whole countries off fossil fuels, while ensuring a just transition. Take India, he says. Officially, the state-run coal industry employs about 250,000 people, but with subsidiary industries and supply chains, the figure is three times that. As well as the jobs, there are also the freight trains run by the coal industry, which subsidise the vast rail network used by millions of Indians every day, he says. “You can’t just close Indian coal and re-employ people building wind farms and putting up solar panels. It doesn’t wash. You have to actually think through the transition. “It’s about the politics of change rather than just talking about how many tonnes of carbon have been saved.” Similarly, he says, in South Africa the fact that many of the coal mines are Black-owned and in poorer ANC areas means that there’s a lot more to the transition than a simple switch to green energy. “It’s bound up in social and political tensions, as well as pure economics. Thinking those through is what we are trying to teach,” he says. Soas’s postgraduate courses in development are run online as well as on campus, and have proved popular with professionals looking for specialist knowledge about the climate emergency. They have attracted a diverse range of students, from ambassadors and bankers, to international development professionals. “They recognise that to do their job they need to be better grounded in the science of climate change and it’s not just something they can absorb in a brief,” Tanner says. Annick Gillard-Bailetti, from Toronto, recently completed her master’s in climate change and development , having put her career in international development on hold. She was concerned by the impact of the climate crisis and environmental degradation on the global south, and feared that much of the work she had been involved with for the likes of Save the Children and Care International could be undone. The course offered her the opportunity to specialise, and the flexibility to learn online, which fitted in with her home life, she says. It also gave her a global perspective that she doesn’t feel she would have got otherwise. “Studying alongside a cohort of people from all over the world, which the virtual programme helps facilitate, is wonderful,” she says. “Everyone had a different outlook or set of experiences to bring to the programme. “There were people who were practising in this space already but wanted to go deeper,” she continues. “And people like me who wanted to develop specialist knowledge so we can apply the climate lens to our work.” The course helped Gillard-Bailetti to re-pivot her career, and rather than going back to work at a non-governmental organisation (NGO), she has moved into consultancy. Her dissertation on gender equality and climate change has since formed the basis of a major mangrove restoration project in Kenya, and she is now providing technical advice on its implementation. Jeannot Boussougouth, executive vice-president power and infrastructure at South Africa’s Standard Bank, is also reaping the practical benefits of his master’s. It is helping him to see the bigger picture, he says, and the role that the energy sector has to play in a just transition. He now has a better understanding of the bank’s role in a lower carbon economy, and where it sits when it comes to climate change mitigation. And that is influencing where the bank chooses to lend its money, with support for initiatives that are diversifying the country’s energy mix. Thinking differently about the effects of the climate emergency is a major part of Soas’s campus-based undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and students across the whole university are being urged to consider the impact of the climate crisis, regardless of what subject they’re studying. As well as delivering climate change and sustainable development programmes, Soas is now integrating climate and sustainability issues across its wider module offerings. “The justice dimensions of sustainability and climate are absolutely essential,” says Tanner. “Who makes the decisions around climate, and who suffers the consequences?” But it’s not just about challenging the models that are causing the problems, he adds. “It’s about asking what ideas are there for putting this back together in a way that deals with the crisis – that’s the Soas way.” Learn to see the world differently – find out more about postgraduate courses in development at Soas

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Radio 2 DJ Ken Bruce pays tribute to listeners on final show

The radio presenter Ken Bruce paid tributes to listeners as he hosted his final show on BBC Radio 2 . Bruce, who has hosted the morning programme for 30 years, chose the medley of Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End, which closes The Beatles’ album Abbey Road, to end his last show on Friday. Opening the programme, he warned listeners not to “expect hidden messages” in the songs he played. He thanked listeners, members of the Ken Bruce Preservation Society who gave him a bottle of Irish cream liqueur, and his production crew. Echoing a Beatles lyric, he added: “In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make and I have loved being here with you.” Bruce received on-air tributes from BBC Radio 2 DJs including Zoe Ball, Richie Anderson and Jeremy Vine. He told the PA Media news agency outside the building, he would “absolutely” look back on his last few weeks with fond memories despite the broadcaster asking him to leave earlier than he initially expected. Bruce has spoken of his sadness at coming off air before his BBC contract ended, saying it seemed a shame he could not complete his final month. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the decision was “entirely within the BBC’s right” but that “for the sake of 17 days, which was all that was remaining … it seems a shame”. Bruce, 72, announced in January that he was leaving the BBC after 46 years to join Greatest Hits Radio (GHR) in April. He has presented a morning radio show on Radio 2 since 1986, with a two-year break in the early 1990s. He was put on gardening leave for the last three weeks of his contract amid concerns that his continued presence on the BBC would in effect be advertising for a rival show. Vernon Kay is returning to the BBC to take over Bruce’s slot. In the interview on Today before his last show Bruce spoke of his regret at not being able to work to the end of the month. “My belief is that when I’m given a contract, I work to it and complete it and I haven’t had, over the last 46 years, very much time off ever,” he said. “I’ve attempted to turn up whenever I’m required to turn up, so my natural feeling as a broadcaster is if I’ve got 17 days to do I want to do them. “I love daily broadcasting, it’s what I’ve done for years and years. I’ve been on BBC Radio every day, five days a week, since 1977. So it’s going to be different, it’s going to change me a bit but I still want to be on the air every day.” Born in Glasgow, Bruce trained as an accountant and began his career working on the hospital broadcasting service in the city. As his favourite two tribute songs to his show, he picked Marvin Gaye’s I Heard it Through the Grapevine and Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder. Describing interviewing Stevie Wonder at Abbey Road Studios, Bruce said: “He was in a dressing room. I was there. He had a little keyboard just on his knees, and he answered questions and played to illustrate the answers, which I thought: ‘I may have died and gone to heaven here. This is beautiful.’ A BBC spokesperson said: “Ken decided to leave Radio 2 and it’s always been known he’s leaving in March. Returning to Wogan House for a week after a month of broadcasting the Piano Room sessions at Maida Vale provided a natural break. We wish Ken all the best for the future.”

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This Morning’s stand-ins make mincemeat of Rish!’s record

It was a no-brainer, I guess. A choice between doing the Today programme and Sky News, or a 20 minute stint on This Morning, on the day your government yet again misses its immigration targets. Though judging by how uncomfortable Rishi Sunak looked on the ITV sofa, maybe even that was a step too far for the prime minister. He just doesn’t have the homey, man of the people vibes. Principally because he isn’t. Rish! oozes privilege out of every pore. The country merely a Goldman Sachs case study. “It’s great to be here,” said Sunak, looking like he couldn’t wait to head for the exit. As if he had realised that even the soft format could soon become rather uncomfortable. Alison Hammond may be a stand-in for Holly Willoughby and Craig Doyle may be a stand-in for a stand-in – Dermot O’Leary, the replacement for Phillip Schofield, was off celebrating his 50 th birthday – but neither of them are mugs. Worryingly for Rish! they also talk human. So there was bound to be a culture clash. Craig cut to the chase. Net immigration was at 606,000 . Lower than expected – thanks mainly to the new way the Office for National Statistics calculates the figures – but still much higher than last year. What was going on? “The numbers are too high,” Sunak said confidently. As if they were nothing to do with him. That they were just things he had inherited. Or he hadn’t been part of a Conservative government that had repeatedly promised but failed to bring them down. Yet again, he was going to be in for a hell of a shock when he found out who the prime minister was. Though he did have a plan to cut the numbers of dependants overseas students could bring with them. Who would be doing their jobs was anyone’s guess. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the Brits. It’s out of control, Craig observed. Absolutely not! Rish! was mortified by the suggestion. Immigration was far higher than he wanted it to be, far higher than he had planned for it to be, but the idea that it was out of control was untrue. It was just that it wasn’t fully under control. There was a difference, apparently. Yet again we were in one of Sunak’s parallel universes: two contradictory statements can both be true. And both untrue. He then insisted he spent lots of time out and about in cafes and restaurants meeting real people who all congratulated him on what he was doing about immigration. As if he spends most mornings in Caffè Nero. And he hasn’t met a real person for years. If ever. The whole point about being rich and being prime minister is that you never have to meet anyone who might think differently to you. Within seconds, Sunak was at it again. Everyone he spoke to thought the Rwanda plan was a brilliant idea. Which is true only if you assume that the only people he has spoken to about it are Suella Braverman and the right wing of the Tory party. Everyone else has severe doubts about it. Either because they don’t think it will ever work or because it’s immoral and illegal. Alison seemed in no doubt. She thought it was unfair. She also observed that the NHS and social care would fall to bits without immigrants. Rish! just shrugged. Que sera, sera. You can’t have everything. Alison moved on to Suella. Why had he let her off the hook when she had clearly done something wrong? We were straight back to Schrödinger’s Sunak. It wasn’t that she had done something wrong. More that she hadn’t done something entirely right. She had tried to game the system – the rules are for the little people – but in the end had failed and had to take the three points. So there wasn’t a story. She had tried to do the wrong thing and failed. We then moved on to Sunak’s latest idiotic idea. An NHS app that will give patients more choice by directing them to hospitals on the other side of the country that either also have no capacity or worse outcomes. It’s not even half witted. That would be to credit it with some merit. The solution is not to expand demand to even up the waiting lists across the country; it’s to increase supply. But this was also the day we learned that the 40 new hospitals weren’t going to be a reality before 2030 at the earliest. If then. There was no time to discuss the cost of living crisis. There were far more important things to cover. Like Jilly Cooper. Did he really like her bonkathons? Ooh yes, said Sunak, not altogether convincingly. It sounded more like a PR stunt to make him sound more interesting that had somehow got out of control. Try and imagine him reading the smutty bits of Riders on the beach. You can’t, can you? He ended by being unable to thing of anything he regretted. Not even appointing Suella as home secretary. Or not putting the kibosh on Boris’s resignation honours list months ago . Or not occasionally taking responsibility for his actions. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Meanwhile, Braverman had once again made herself unavailable. You’d have thought a vertebrate home secretary would step up to defend her record. To explain why immigration had gone up despite everything she had supposedly done to prevent it. But no, she had gone to ground. Probably too busy getting civil servants to fill in her tax return. Can you pass off a speeding fine as a legitimate business expense? If not, why not. So it was left to Robert Jenrick to answer the inevitable urgent question on the ONS figures. Alas poor Jenrick, I knew him well. He was a man of infinite vest… Honest Bob, the man who sorts out any former pornographer’s planning requirements , is rapidly morphing into Hopeless Bob. SpongeBob. Poor man. His best explanation for why none of the government’s plans had worked was that opposition parties had voted against them. He seemed clueless that the laws had actually passed anyway. Just to prove that Hopeless Bob is ready to enter the crowded Pantheon of Useless Tory ministers, he then went on to say that the reason the government had been so slow to process asylum claims was because they didn’t want to make the UK too attractive to refugees. Despite it being government policy to expedite proceedings to get everyone to Rwanda. An admission that no one in government really has a clue. We should appreciate SpongeBob while we can. We won’t see his like again. Hopefully.

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Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 453 of the invasion

Fighting has broken out along the Russian border with Ukraine after self-described Russian partisan forces launched a cross-border raid and claimed to have overrun a border settlement for the first time in the war. The Freedom of Russia Legion, which describes itself as an anti-Kremlin militia seeking to overthrow the Kremlin and liberate Russia from Vladimir Putin, claimed to have crossed the border and overrun the settlement of Kozinka, while sending units into the town of Grayvoron in Russia’s Belgorod region. Any capture of territory in Belgorod has not been independently confirmed by journalists on the ground. The militia has mostly existed on social media and it is not known to have participated in any major battles during the war. But both Russia and Ukrainian officials have confirmed fighting at the border and social media video has shown armoured vehicles appearing to overrun a Russian border post near Grayvoron. The Russian-imposed leader of the occupied Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, has said that Russian forces have begun demining operations in Bakhmut. Tass quotes him appearing on the Rossiya-24 TV channel and saying: “There is a preliminary demining of the city. It is important for us to carry out a complete, thorough demining. This is a very painstaking and difficult work, given the scale of the hostilities that took place there.” In another report, Tass quotes a source from the local Russian-imposed officials saying that “a few dozen more residents” remained in Bakhmut , but that “perhaps, the figure will change as the basements of houses are examined”. The source said that the “evacuation” of civilians continues. Ukrainian troops are still advancing on the flanks of the devastated city, although the “intensity” of their movement has decreased and Russia is bringing in more forces, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said on Monday. She said that Ukraine had a small foothold inside the city itself, again denying Russia’s assertion that it has established full control over Bakhmut. Russian president Vladimir Putin congratulated Wagner and Russian regular forces on “the completion of the operation to liberate Artemovsk [the city’s Soviet-era name]” after Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin posed among the wreckage, and said his mercenary group controlled the entire city at the weekend. It has not been possible for journalists to verify the battlefield situation in the city for months. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been reconnected to the electricity grid after it was switched to standby and emergency power supply generators were used. Russia-installed local official in the Moscow-controlled part of the region Vladimir Rogov said the plant was “completely” disconnected from external power supply after Ukraine disconnected a power line it controls, Reuters reports. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, but Anatoliy Kurtev, Zaporizhzhia city council’s secretary in Ukraine, said that work was ongoing since early Monday to restore power to the city. Rafael Mariano Grossi , director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has said the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) “cannot continue”. The Washington Post is reporting that the UN nuclear watchdog is pushing for a last-minute agreement to safeguard Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant ahead of any counteroffensive. At least eight people were wounded and scores of buildings were damaged in a Russian air attack on Dnipropetrovsk region. “The Russian invaders attacked military and infrastructure facilities of the eastern outpost of Ukraine – the city of Dnipro,” Ukraine’s air force said on the Telegram messaging service. “The attack was carried out by 16 different types of missiles and 20 Shahed-136/131 strike drones,” the air force said, adding that air defences brought down 20 Russian drones and four cruise missiles. At least one person was injured, and images from the city show destruction of emergency services equipment in what appears to have been a strike on a fire station. Russia’s ambassador to the US appears to have warned Washington that any strike on Crimea could be considered a strike on Russian territory by Nato after US president Joe Biden said he would support training for Ukrainian pilots on US F-16 fighter jets. In remarks published on the embassy’s Telegram channel, Anatoly Antonov wrote: “I would like to warn representatives of the administration against thoughtless judgments on Crimea, especially in terms of ‘blessing’ the Kyiv regime for air attacks on the peninsula. Let me remind you that strikes on this territory are considered by us as an attack on any other region of the Russian Federation. It is important that the United States is fully aware of the Russian response.” Mykhailo Podolyak , adviser to the head of the office of president of Ukraine, has said “ Crimea is an indisputable and inseparable part of Ukraine. It was, it is and it will be. The liberation of Crimea using any military force and means is the only rational way to stop ‘Russian aggressions’ and bring the world back to international law. It is Ukraine’s direct obligation and necessity today” The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region has claimed on Telegram that an explosive device dropped from an unmanned aerial vehicle in Novaya Tavolzhanka , without causing any injuries. The governor of Russia’s Bryansk region has claimed this morning that Ukraine has shelled a village. The EU’s top diplomat will propose further sanctions against Russia, following a promise by G7 leaders to intensify western restrictions on Vladimir Putin’s ability to wage war on Ukraine. Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said he hoped to soon present “concrete proposals to implement the decision of the G7 on new kinds of sanctions against Russia”. Zelenskiy secured fresh military aid from the US during a day of frantic diplomatic activity at the G7 summit at the weekend . US president Joe Biden announced military assistance worth up to $375m (£300m) to Kyiv, telling Zelenskiy the US was doing everything possible to strengthen Ukraine’s defence. The package includes ammunition, artillery, armoured vehicles and training. Biden told a press conference that he had received a “flat assurance” from Zelenskiy that he would not use western-provided F-16 fighter jets to go into Russian territory . Biden said F-16 warplanes could, however, be used “wherever Russian troops are within Ukraine and the area”. Biden told G7 leaders that Washington supports joint allied training programs for Ukrainian pilots on F-16s warplanes, although Kyiv has not won specific, public commitments for delivery of the fighter jets. In a G7 speech, Zelenskiy said Kyiv’s plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine was “an obvious expression of rationality” , and sought support for his “peace formula”. He thanked western leaders for achieving “a level of cooperation which ensures that democracy, international law, and freedom are respected”, but questioned: “Is this enough?” Zelenskiy played down the fact he did not meet Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the sidelines of the summit , saying it was likely because of scheduling. Lula has said Zelenskiy and Putin bear equal responsibility for the war and accused western powers of encouraging the conflict. Berlin police have opened an investigation into the suspected poisoning of two Russian journalists visiting the city for a conference last month organised by the Russian Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky . The probe comes after Russian investigative media group Agentsvo wrote that the two women had reported symptoms that pointed to possible poisoning around the time of the event at the end of April.

GOOD

The Guardian view on Labour’s plan for the NHS: now build on this beginning

The Conservatives’ stewardship of the NHS over the past 13 years offers an open goal to Labour. In 2010, when Gordon Brown left Downing Street, a record 70% of the public were satisfied with the NHS. Last year, satisfaction with the health service fell to a record low of just 29% . So Monday’s speech by Sir Keir Starmer was timed to coincide with the date when the Tories’ time in office equalled the last period of Labour government. This makes for easy comparisons. In 2010, 2.5 million people in England were waiting for hospital treatment. Thirteen years later, there are 7.3 million . (Around 2 million more are waiting for care in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.) Quoting his wife, who works for the NHS, the Labour leader said the service is not on its knees but “on its face”. The Labour leader’s pitch is that a government led by him will put the health service back on its feet. Specifically, he pledged to reduce deaths from strokes and heart attacks by a quarter in a decade, improve the diagnosis of cancer, and reduce the number of suicides – currently the biggest cause of death in young people. Clearing hospital backlogs by integrating health and social care is the right policy, but its successful implementation has eluded the Tories. Sir Keir says times and technology have changed, and Labour would update the way it cures what ails the NHS. It was good to hear the Labour leader throw his weight behind the principle of healthcare that is free at the point of access, and funded by general taxation. All health systems can be improved and it is reasonable to suggest changes such as replacing primary care partnerships with salaried GPs – partly to deal with emerging shortages as family doctors retire and aren’t replaced. But the emphasis on reform, and reluctance to answer questions about funding, suggest Labour’s spirit is willing but its flesh is weak. Sustained investment will be needed if gaps in the workforce are to be filled. Currently, there are around 300,000 vacancies across health and care in England, and the situation is getting worse rather than better. Sir Keir and his shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, want to empower patients by giving them choices, and tackle regional and racial disparities at the same time. But where there is not enough capacity, choice is an illusion, and evidence shows that where the role of private providers has increased this has exacerbated inequalities , not reduced them. Health policy is not limited to the NHS, and Labour is rightly emphasising housing and air quality. Sir Keir is right to promise to end the advertising of vaping, junk food and sugary snacks to children. A mountain of data points to how socioeconomic determinants – the conditions in which people are born, grow up, work, live and age – influence our health. Labour must be unafraid to speak clearly about this, as well as about acute illnesses. Workforce problems cannot be solved without new funding, which could come in the form of subsidised childcare or housing as well as salaries. These are the challenges facing the country that voters need to understand. It makes sense for Labour to position itself as the party of the NHS. But there is no room for complacency. Even an open goal can be missed.

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Student survey strengthens campaign for ‘Harry’s law’ on suicide data

Almost 90% of students want universities to be more transparent about suicides, according to a survey carried out after the death of Harry Armstrong Evans, an undergraduate who killed himself in 2021 after suffering a mental health crisis. Armstrong Evans’ parents said the survey added weight to their campaign for a “Harry’s law” under which universities would have to publish the annual student suicide rate. A coroner last year strongly criticised Exeter University for its care of Armstrong Evans’ case, concluding it had failed to respond effectively to his “cry for help” after a disastrous set of exam results that followed months of isolation in near empty halls of residence during the pandemic. A survey carried out by the student news site the Tab asked 4,000 students at more than 30 UK universities including all the Russell Group ones: “Do you wish your university was more transparent about the amount of suicides that happen at your uni?” Eighty-eight per cent said they did. Izzy Schifano, contributors editor at the Tab, said: “Students have had it really rough over the past three years, and this hasn’t been spoken about enough in the press or by the government. “The class of 2023 has endured a pandemic, hundreds of hours of lost teaching due to the strikes, and a student rent crisis, all while dealing with the everyday pressures of their degree. So it’s no surprise that student mental health is at its worst and students want their universities to be held accountable. Students don’t deserve to be left in the dark about suicides in their community.” Armstrong Evans’ mother and father, Alice and Rupert, said they felt vindicated by the survey. “Students should be permitted to know about suicides,” said Alice. “Potential students will then be able to decide what action to take – whether to continue and take up the course or otherwise.” Alice said they had not talked to their son, a physics and astrophysics student, about suicide and were shocked after his death when they found there had been a series of other suicides involving Exeter students. “We would do anything to get Harry back. I would not wish the terrible pain we are going through on any other student’s parent, siblings and their friends,” said Alice. “What we are seeking is transparency from universities about student suicides at each university. We would like a proper analysis of deaths of students from suicide by each course subject. We want to prevent any other parents from suffering as we have and their families being destroyed like ours has been.” Alice visited Exeter University’s campus in March on University Mental Health Day . “I was rather nervous about walking about the campus,” she said. “But the students could not have been more welcoming and interested. Some hugged me, some wanted me to have their love and some listened in to my discussions and wanted my leaflet as they had heard of Harry’s suicide but they did not know the details.” Rupert said: “I can only conclude that commercial objectives are taking preference over student welfare, as it isn’t in a university’s interest to be open and honest about suicides.” Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Suicide rates among students are lower than among people of a similar age who are not in education, and compared with the general population. Jacqui Morrissey, the assistant director for policy, practice and influencing at Samaritans , said: “University can be an exciting but challenging time, so it is vital that students have support available – and feel encouraged to open up about their feelings. “While student suicide rates are lower than the general population, both the government and universities need to take appropriate action to ensure that suicide is not seen as a taboo subject. “Talking about what you’re really going through can be life-changing – ultimately it is silence that costs lives.” Exeter University said it was deeply saddened by Armstrong Evans’ death. It said: “Following the inquest, we have undertaken a detailed review of the many ways in which we support student mental health and wellbeing, and we have introduced further enhancements across our university community.” In the past six years there had been five confirmed deaths by suicide of Exeter University students, determined by coroners, as well as three deaths of students that the university understands are likely to be determined as suicide at forthcoming inquests, and three suicides of people who were on interruptions from their studies, often for a considerable time, and not registered students. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org , and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 and you can text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

GOOD

Once Upon a Prime review – why maths and literature make a winning formula

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” That’s how Jorge Luis Borges starts The Library of Babel , beloved by maths geeks and book nerds alike for the way it toys with the mathematical concept of infinity. I liked the short story so much I nicked its main idea when I started my Libreria bookshop, blanketing the store’s insides with mirrors to trick you into thinking you are in a “perhaps infinite” space. (The mirrors require a near infinite amount of cleaning, but there we go.) As for maths professor Sarah Hart, she’s so enthralled by the ways her academic field has enriched the work of poets and novelists that it is the subject of her ebullient debut book. “By seeing mathematics and literature as complementary parts of the same quest to understand human life and our place in the universe, we immeasurably enrich both fields,” she writes. She’s not wrong. Some of Hart’s examples will be familiar to readers – such as the way numerology shapes the structure of Eleanor Catton’s Booker prize-winning The Luminaries , or how maths puzzles are dotted throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (written by a maths professor, of course). Most, however, were new on me. I’ve read Moby-Dick , but the references to mathematical curves known as cycloids totally passed me by. Hart does a great job of showing how Melville’s epic work “abounds with ideas that a mathematically attuned eye can detect and explore” (which probably explains why I missed them), and these can “add an extra dimension to our appreciation”. It’s the same with Middlemarch – I didn’t register that the mocking of Mr Brooke includes a clever little mathematical construct: “We all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.” As Hart rightly points out, “The world of mathematics is a glorious source of metaphors” – and “once you are on the lookout, you’ll see [maths] everywhere”. Hart uses Melville and Eliot to make a broader argument about how “the perceived boundary” between maths and other creative arts “is a very recent idea”, and that “for most of history, mathematics was part of every educated person’s cultural awareness”. That’s why these writers felt comfortable using mathematical ideas – and they also knew their readers were similarly attuned. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book looks at little-known works, such as the slim volume by French writer Raymond Queneau that was published in 1961 and somehow contains a 100 trillion poems. Queneau managed to squeeze in that many by printing 10 sonnets with each line capable of being combined with any from the nine others, creating a preposterously large number of possible poems. As Hart suggests, it raises some interesting philosophical questions, such as whether can we say Queneau wrote all of these potential sonnets, or in what sense the different poems even exist at all. Small wonder Hart makes the bold claim that poetry is “simply the continuation of mathematics by other means”. The book is not perfect – like a messy mathematical theorem, it could have done with being stripped back and made shorter, more elegant. But you can’t help but be won over by Hart’s playful exuberance – and she’s up there with Richard Dawkins or Marcus du Sautoy in having the rare gift of being able to explain thorny scientific ideas using canny cultural references. At a time when the British education system is becoming suffocatingly narrow, with arts and music being dropped by schools, and our universities falling behind America in encouraging multidisciplinary studies, Once Upon a Prime is a joyous reminder of the way so much human creativity comes from joining the dots between seemingly disparate fields. Hart helps bring to life what she calls “the enduring conversation between literature and mathematics” – encouraging us to read and roam more widely, whether it is scientists getting stuck into novels, or fiction-lovers throwing themselves at maths conundrums. I’ve no idea if you’ll end up happier if you follow her advice. But one thing’s for sure, as Hart herself warns: “You’re going to need a bigger bookcase.” Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart is published by Mudlark (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

GOOD

Six lifestyle choices to slow memory decline named in 10-year study

A combination of healthy lifestyle choices such as eating well, regularly exercising, playing cards and socialising at least twice a week may help slow the rate of memory decline and reduce the risk of dementia, a decade-long study suggests. Memory is a fundamental function of daily life that continuously declines as people age, impairing quality of life and productivity, and increasing the risk of dementia. Evidence from previous research has been insufficient to evaluate the effect of healthy lifestyle on memory trajectory, but now a study suggests that combining multiple healthy lifestyle choices – the more the better – is linked with softening the speed of memory decline. “A combination of positive healthy behaviours is associated with a slower rate of memory decline in cognitively normal older adults,” researchers from the National Center for Neurological Disorders in Beijing, China, wrote in the BMJ . Practising multiple healthy lifestyle choices together “was associated with a lower probability of progression to mild cognitive impairment and dementia”, they added. Researchers analysed 29,000 adults aged over 60 with normal cognitive function who were part of the China Cognition and Aging Study. At the start of the study in 2009, memory function was measured using tests and people were checked for the APOE gene, which is the strongest risk-factor gene for Alzheimer’s disease. The subjects were then monitored for 10 years with periodic assessments. A healthy lifestyle score combining six factors was calculated: a healthy diet; regular exercise; active social contact; cognitive activity; non-smoking; and not drinking alcohol. Based on their score, ranging from zero to six, participants were put into lifestyle groups – favourable (four to six healthy factors), average (two to three healthy factors), or unfavourable (0 to 1 healthy factors) – and into APOE-carrier and non-carrier groups. A healthy diet was deemed as eating the recommended intake of at least seven out of 12 food groups: fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, dairy, salt, oil, eggs, cereals, legumes, nuts and tea. Writing, reading, playing cards or other games at least twice a week was the second area of healthy behaviour. Other areas included drinking no alcohol, exercising for more than 150 minutes a week at moderate intensity or more than 75 at vigorous intensity, and never having smoked or being an ex-smoker. Social contact at least twice a week was the sixth healthy behaviour, including activities such as visiting family and friends, attending meetings or going to parties. After accounting for factors likely to affect the results, the researchers found that each individual healthy behaviour was associated with a slower-than-average decline in memory over 10 years. A healthy diet had the strongest effect on slowing memory decline, followed by cognitive activity and then physical exercise. People with the APOE gene who had healthy lives on the whole also experienced a slower rate of memory decline than those with APOE who were the least healthy. Overall, people with four to six healthy behaviours or two to three were almost 90% and almost 30% respectively less likely to develop dementia or mild cognitive impairment relative to those who were the least healthy, the BMJ reported. Dr Susan Mitchell, head of policy at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “This is a well-conducted study, which followed people over a long period of time, and adds to the substantial evidence that a healthy lifestyle can help to support memory and thinking skills as we age. “Too few of us know that there are steps we can all take to reduce our chances of dementia in later life.” This article was amended on 26 January 2023 to include the words “recommended intake of” in relation to eating at least seven out of 12 food groups.

GOOD

Only a welfare and training revolution will cure our economy of its addiction to foreign workers

WE will never wean our economy off mass immigration without training Brits to fill jobs. We are simply failing to do so. That is not some fatal flaw of Brexit , as Remainer bores tediously claim. It is neither wrong, nor impractical long-term, to control our borders as Leave voters wanted. It is in fact every sovereign country’s right and duty to its citizens. But we had to become more self-sufficient rapidly after Brexit and we have not. Indeed Covid has made us less so. So here we are, even importing fishermen . David Cameron rightly calls for welfare reform to prise legions of our 5.2million jobless back into work. We also need far more training and apprenticeship schemes, as he says. Today’s vast migration total is shocking, even after discounting Ukrainian and Hong Kong refugees. The Tories’ failure over it has somehow allowed Keir “free movement” Starmer , of all people, to pose as tough on immigration. The total must be slashed. It is unsustainable for our housing stock and public services. The clamp on foreign students bringing their families is a good start. But only a welfare and training revolution will cure our economy of its addiction to foreign workers. THE only way to stop civil service leakers concocting faux-scandals hoping to get ministers sacked is by refusing to buckle. So Rishi Sunak did right by his Home Secretary Suella Braverman yesterday. The overblown saga over her speeding points never looked a resigning matter. The Government’s ethics adviser confirmed that. But the PM must now be alive to the war being waged against his Government from within Whitehall. Lefties mock claims of a Labour­backing “Blob” sabotaging No10. But it is self-evident from the hysterical exaggerations briefed anonymously about Braverman, Dominic Raab and others. Plus the incessant claims about Boris Johnson — already stripped of his office. Some political scandals are genuinely grave. But accusations now being thrown at Tory front-benchers are ludicrously thin and designed solely to help Labour . The PM must face down the Left, their media allies and their Twitter mob . . . and blunt the plotters’ blades. RAF veteran Peter Brown died a lonely death at 96 — but today hundreds will give him the splendid send-off he deserves. Flt Sgt Brown came from Jamaica and flew Lancaster bombers in the war. He never married or had kids. But we are delighted to have helped trace his long-lost family . . . and that they will join dignitaries and Forces stalwarts for his magnificent military funeral. He was a hero, a lovely man — and a Sun reader. It’s the least we could do. RIP Peter.

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La Liga accuses Fifa of ‘complete disregard’ for football with cup changes

La Liga has accused Fifa of showing “complete disregard” for the importance of national competitions after world football’s governing body approved a 32-team Club World Cup as well as an expanded World Cup with 104 matches . Fifa announced before its Congress in Kigali, Rwanda, that the 2026 World Cup would have 104 matches instead of the traditional 64 because of the expanded format with 48 teams. It also approved a 32-team Club World Cup which will be played every four years from June 2025. “Fifa continues its malpractice of making unilateral decisions on the world football calendar, showing complete disregard for the importance of national championships, and the football community in general,” Spain’s La Liga said. “Fifa completely neglects the economic damage these decisions inflict on leagues around the world. Leagues were not consulted about any of the changes presented today, especially about the new annual club competition … these decisions do not take into account the competitive, sporting and economic impact on national leagues, clubs and players, by further cramming an already overloaded schedule. Fifa only takes into account a small group of clubs and players.” La Liga said that it and other leagues in the World Leagues Forum (WLF), an organisation representing professional football leagues, would “analyse Fifa’s decisions and decide on the most appropriate next steps”. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion In December, the WLF criticised the announcement of a 32-team Club World Cup, saying it could have damaging consequences for the football economy and player welfare. Reuters has approached Fifa for additional comment.

GOOD

Melbourne public housing tower residents offered $5m payout over Covid lockdown

Thousands of residents forced into a sudden Covid-19 lockdown in public housing towers in Melbourne in 2020 are set to collectively reap $5m in compensation. The Victorian government has settled a class action over measures intended to stop an outbreak of the virus in nine towers at the height of the second wave. About 3000 residents lived in the Flemington and North Melbourne towers at the time of the lockdown, which led to police surrounding buildings and temporary fences being set up. The plaintiffs claim people were wrongly detained for up to 14 days and threatened with physical harm if they tried to leave the towers, though the state of Victoria denied those claims. Notice of the settlement has been posted to the Department of Health’s website last week but still needs to be approved in the supreme court Alfred Street tower resident and community leader Barry Berih said residents would discuss the offer but wanted an apology instead of a financial settlement. “I feel very disgusted in terms of this offer, but we have to actually work together as a community to move forward,” Berih told ABC radio. Under the agreement, affected adults who opt in to the scheme would receive equal shares and children would receive half of that. Legal fees would not be taken out of the $5m fund for residents but instead paid for by the state. The government has repeatedly refused to apologise to the residents despite the state’s complaints watchdog recommending one was in order for the harm and distress caused by the suddenness of the lockdown. Sign up to Guardian Australia's Afternoon Update Our Australian afternoon update email breaks down the key national and international stories of the day and why they matter after newsletter promotion In a 2020 review, the Victorian ombudsman, Deborah Glass, found the state government breached the human rights of residents by locking down the towers without notice and its timing did not follow health advice. Senior health officials had agreed to the lockdown at a morning meeting on 4 July 2020, and expected it would be another 36 hours before coming into effect. But Andrews then announced it would start immediately at a 4pm press conference, with many residents unaware of the order until police arrived outside. The premier refused to reflect on whether the multimillion-dollar offer could have been avoided if he or his government had apologised, citing the settlement was not finalised. “I would, however, direct you to my earlier comments I’ve made on numerous occasions well before this was in the courts,” Andrews said on Tuesday. “We made very difficult decisions and those decisions saved lives. There’s no question about that.”

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NHS lung cancer trucks boost early diagnoses in deprived areas of England

Growing numbers of poorer people are being diagnosed early with lung cancer after the NHS began on-the-spot chest screening in the back of trucks at supermarkets and health centres. Lung cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK and also the country’s biggest cancer killer, claiming 34,800 lives a year or 95 a day. It is a stark illustration of health inequalities. People in deprived communities have historically been less likely to be diagnosed at an early stage, and so more likely to die sooner, than those in richer areas. But NHS England’s decision in 2018 to take lung cancer screening directly into poorer neighbourhoods appears to be paying dividends. The proportion of people in the most deprived 20% of England’s population who are diagnosed with the disease at stage one or two, when it is much more treatable, has risen from 30% and then to 34.5% last year, figures show. Trucks offering “lung MOTs” were first deployed in supermarket carparks in deprived parts of England with the lowest lung cancer survival rates, such as Hull, Blackpool and Doncaster, and were later expanded to Manchester and Liverpool. Current and former smokers were offered immediate and quick scans of their lungs. Dame Cally Palmer, NHS England’s national director for cancer, said the findings were “incredibly important” and showed what could be achieved by persuading certain groups to have checks. “They show the power behind targeted health programmes, with the NHS continuing its drive to detect cancers earlier by going into the heart of communities that may be less likely to come forward,” she said. “While early diagnosis rates for cancer have traditionally been lower for deprived groups … the rollout of lung trucks has turned a huge corner and is now finding and treating those who would otherwise have been undetected.” Lung trucks operate at 43 sites in England. The UK national screening committee last year recommended that lung cancer screening be rolled out everywhere. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Prompted by the positive results seen so far, NHS England and the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation are launching a campaign using social media and posters in areas where trucks are operating to encourage those invited for a checkup to attend their appointment. Paula Chadwick, the chief executive of the Roy Castle foundation, said: “These checks are allowing us to get ahead of lung cancer for the first time, catching the disease at the earliest opportunity, often before symptoms even start and treating it with an aim to cure.”

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Alice Coleman obituary

The geographer Alice Coleman, who has died aged 99, set out to prove that British modernist high-rise council estates were failing because their layout lacked “defensible space”, and that their problematic design reduced social interaction while encouraging crime and anti-social behaviour. In her book Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (1985) Alice condemned such estates as failed idylls, criticising authoritarian and paternalistic planners within the Ministry of Housing, local government and the Department of the Environment. As an alternative she promoted modifications that she believed would tackle some of the problems inadvertently created by poor design. There was much distrust of Alice’s work in the civil service – even open hostility. Yet in 1986 the Audit Commission directly endorsed her findings. The following year, after a face-to-face meeting with the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher , the government provided £50m of funding to support five years of Coleman-inspired design improvements on various council estates, including the removal of overhead walkways and the retrofitting of ground- floor flats with small, gated front gardens. As a result, Alice set up a research unit within the geography department at King’s College London, which, between 1989 and 1991, surveyed more than 40 estates across the UK and recommended design improvements for them. These were presented to local authority councillors and staff at tenants’ meetings, where residents voted on whether or not to accept the proposals. Most of the money went into capital regeneration costs on seven estates: the Rogers and Ranwell East estates in Tower Hamlets, east London; Kingsthorpe Close in Nottingham; Avenham in Preston; Bennett Street in Manchester; Nazareth in Birmingham and the Durham estate in Sandwell. The changes aimed to address what Alice identified as a lack of defensible space in many housing projects, with large communal areas militating against any sense among residents that their immediate surroundings belonged to them. This, she argued, often led estates to become semi-derelict, unsafe spaces, havens for crime or anti-social behaviour and strewn with rubbish and detritus. The design improvements championed by Alice were seen by many as a success and she became a key transfer agent of the idea of defensible space into British housing policy and practice. Its tenets seeped into local and national government thinking and justified the actions of those seeking to demolish or reconfigure modernist high-rise council estates. Her ideas also fed into the establishment in 1989 of Secured by Design , a nationwide police initiative that works to provide safe places in which to live, work, shop and visit. Alice was born in London but grew up in Broadstairs, Kent , where her parents, Elizabeth (nee White) and Bertie Coleman, struggled to make ends meet on Bertie’s modest income as a self-employed handyman. She went to Clarendon House grammar school in Ramsgate but could not afford to go to university, and so settled for teacher training at Furzedown College in Tooting, south London. After five years of teaching geography at Northfleet Central school for girls in Kent, she eventually gained a first in geography from Birkbeck, University of London (1948), followed by a master’s (1951) and a PhD (1957), both from King’s College London. She stayed on at King’s to be a geography lecturer, and in the 1960s led work on the Second Land Use Survey of Britain, the first comprehensive attempt since the 30s to record the use of land, using volunteers to map urban and rural areas. On sabbatical in Canada in 1976 she came across the work of the American architect-planner Oscar Newman, and his book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1972). Its arguments struck an immediate chord with her, for they seemed applicable to the urban deterioration Alice had noticed in British cities during her work on the land use survey. Inspired by Newman, she undertook a survey of “design disadvantagement” on 27 council estates across London, as well as a control estate in Oxford, studying instances of “social malaise” such as littering, graffiti and vandalism. It was this work that led her to write Utopia on Trial, which soon became a major source of debate in the housing world. Alice’s scientifically justified belief in the power of the built environment to determine social behaviour was not well received in some circles, and she was accused of environmental and architectural determinism. The architect Jeremy Till , for instance, argued that “to promote, say, balcony access over chronic unemployment as the cause for social unrest is symptomatic of a determinist approach to architecture [that is] extraordinarily misinformed [and] extraordinarily dangerous”. Alice firmly rebutted such criticisms, pointing out that Utopia on Trial “does not say that badly designed blocks make all their tenants horrible … If the slur mongers were educated enough to read my trend lines properly, they would realise they cannot be deterministic. They show that as the design worsens progressively, more blocks have more social breakdown indicators.” When an evaluation by Price Waterhouse in 1997 argued that there was no clear pattern of success or failure associated with the changes that Alice had encouraged, she countered that the study had been unscientific, and that it had been intended from the outset to undermine her research. Two years after the publication of Utopia on Trial, Alice became a professor at King’s, several years after she might have expected to do so. Up to that point her gender and right-leaning politics had not sat well in academia, despite recognition of her attainments in the form of the Gill memorial award in 1963 and the Busk Medal in 1987, both from the Royal Geographical Society. I initially met her in 1997, on my first day as a geography lecturer at King’s, by which time she had moved into semi-retirement as an emeritus professor. A forceful character, charismatic and successful, she was known for her dismissive brusqueness and Marmite personality, but was friendly, warm and highly supportive of female colleagues, even if she did not identify herself as a feminist. In later life Alice took up graphology, inferring character from handwriting. She became editor of the Graphological Magazine in 1995 and co-wrote, with Mona McNee, The Great Reading Disaster (2007). Her home in Dulwich, south-east London, was open house to many visitors, and she was always surrounded by a circle of family and friends. She is survived by nine nieces and nephews. Alice Mary Coleman, geographer, born 8 June 1923; died 2 May 2023

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‘Fascinating creatures’: how an army of volunteers fights to save Britain’s bumblebees

“If you want to look at bees, go to a city rather than the countryside,” says Sarah Hudson, and on a bright spring day in central London, it’s not hard to see what she means. Hudson, a retired accountant, is carefully picking a path through the overgrown gravestones of the historic Bunhill Fields cemetery, pointing out the bees buzzing through an abundance of wild and cultivated spring flowers. “Oh, there we go, yes, lovely!” says Hudson, gesturing towards a fat, fuzzy bumblebee that has settled on a small, bright blue flower. “That’s a buff-tailed worker . As you can see they dwell on the flower for quite a long time”, she says as it flies off casually in search of more nectar. Though she regularly helps maintain the grounds, once a month Hudson comes here specifically to count bumblebees, tracing the same path, at the same pace, and noting the number, species and whereabouts of every bumblebee she sees. As such, she is one of an army of people at the forefront of conservation efforts to save one of Britain’s best-loved creatures. However plentiful they may be in this tiny urban idyll, times are tough farther afield for the British bumblebee. “Basically, the numbers are decreasing all over the shop for a lot of the [bumblebee] species,” says Richard Comont, the science manager of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust , an organisation founded to try to arrest that decline. Its aim, he says, is “to get people a bit more switched on to the fact that these things are disappearing – and that ‘bee’ doesn’t just mean honeybee”. It certainly doesn’t. There are 270 different species of bee in Britain, 250 or so of which are solitary bees , which don’t live in nests or colonies, “and they generally do quite well”, he says. Honeybees, living in hives of 50,000 or more individuals, are now almost all managed by beekeepers, says Comont, “so looking after them is essentially not conservation, it’s animal husbandry”. Bumblebees, however, have “a perfect storm of difficulty going on” – living in nests of 100 or so workers “they’ve got an awful lot of mouths to feed for every breeding individual but only comparatively small nests”. Unlike honeybees, they do not roam far to forage for food. “So they’ve got a big job to do, and it’s not very easy for them to do it,” says Comont. Two bumblebee species have gone extinct in the UK in the past century – one of them only in 2000. Which is where Hudson and her fellow volunteers come in. Between March and October each year, volunteers walk a designated route and count how many bees they see, as part of an initiative called BeeWalk; after a little more than a decade, the trust now has a huge community of almost 800 citizen bee counters, and have amassed one of the largest bumblebee datasets in the world. It’s important, says Comont, “because if you look at abundance year on year, you can see a decline, you get that early warning, you know when you need to be doing stuff”. It is far from the only conservation body drawing on the immense potential of citizen science – the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme , founded in the 1970s, is one of the longest-running insect-monitoring schemes in the world, while more than half a million took part in the RSPB’s Big Garden BirdWatch this year. Volunteers help monitor the national shoreline ; others count reptiles in Cheshire, monitor hedgehogs in Cumbria or survey marine mammals and sea grass in the Solent. ( Recent research has found that taking part in such projects is good for humans’ wellbeing, too.) Sadly, due to habitat loss and the changing climate, the news is not encouraging in many places. In the case of the bumblebee, more than half of British species are getting scarcer, including some that were once quite common. Wildflower hedges and verges are disappearing from the countryside, leaving bumblebee populations with too few and too small patches of flowery habitat. On the other hand, “gardens, window boxes, right the way out to estates, cover an area the size of Somerset in Britain”, says Comont, so from planting bumblebee-friendly flowers in a window box to allowing clover to grow in lawns to not immediately ripping up weeds (“essentially, volunteer wildflowers”), urban gardeners can play an important part. In Hudson’s case, having moved to the Cotswolds after her retirement and “absolutely hating it”, she and her partner moved back to central London where, from a position of almost total ignorance about bumblebees, she has now completed a master’s in ecology, specialising in the insects. “I’m still not an expert by any means. But they’re just absolutely fascinating creatures, for something so small. The things they can learn to do, because they are social animals. They are just amazing.”

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Monday briefing: Five numbers that explain Britain’s broken welfare system

Good morning. What does it cost to survive? If you’re looking for an answer in Britain, you might think it’s £85 a week: from April, that’s the new universal credit standard allowance for a single person, the basic unit on which the benefits system is built. If you have absolutely nothing else, you have that – and it’s up 10.1% on the previous figure. Except, in reality, it’s not enough. I learned something new from Patrick Butler’s story , on the front page of the Guardian this morning, about the basis of that figure: it has no foundation in a robust calculation of the very minimum necessary to live. Instead, it is the product of years of adjustments to a number that appears to have been plucked out of the air. In recent years, the trend has been downward. The basic rate of universal credit is now at its lowest ever level as a proportion of average earnings. The result is familiar by now: on that money, you can heat or eat. You can’t do both. That’s the context for new research by the Trussell Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which attempts to calculate the bare minimum cost of living for an adult in Britain. The report estimates it to be £120 a week – meaning many people on universal credit are living in destitution. In five numbers, today’s newsletter tells the story of that crucial shortfall, the choices that it forces people to make, and what it would take to fix it. Here are the headlines. Brexit | Rishi Sunak is to hold a summit with the president of the European Commission on Monday to sign off a revised deal on the Northern Ireland protocol. But No 10 is braced for a hostile response from Tory Brexit supporters and the DUP as it attempts to sell the deal this week. Here’s an explainer on the key issues . Immigration | A sailing boat thought to be carrying refugees from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan has crashed against rocks off the coast of Italy, killing 58 people, including children . There were thought to have been 140 to 150 people onboard, with 81 survivors. Renewable energy | The Australia-based company Recharge Industries will take over collapsed battery maker Britishvolt after finalising a deal with administrators late on Sunday in the UK. The agreement revives hopes for the construction of a £3.8bn “gigafactory” in northern England. Russia | Vladimir Putin has accused the west of seeking to “dismember” Russia and to turn the vast country into a series of weak mini-states. In an apparent attempt to boost support for the invasion of Ukraine, he claimed without evidence that a plot had been under way since the collapse of the USSR. Cinema | Everything Everywhere All at Once reigned supreme at this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards , winning four major awards and breaking the record for most wins for a single film. The multiverse fantasy film picked up the night’s biggest award for ensemble in a motion picture, female actor for Michelle Yeoh and both supporting actor awards, for Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan. For years , the public discourse around benefits has been dominated by the idea that recipients are shirkers getting an easy ride , who must be pushed back into employment by a system that makes the alternative as difficult as possible. “The idea that benefits might be too low did not have any traction for a long time,” said Patrick Butler. “But with Covid, millions went on to universal credit for the first time. Many of them were astonished to find out how little it was.” Indeed, as Patrick’s analysis notes , a typical worker who loses their job will find universal credit replaces just 13% of their earnings. “This winter, with energy and food prices through the roof, there has been a new focus on whether our most basic safety net is providing enough.” Few seriously claim benefits are adequate today: the argument is more that the state is too stretched to do any better. The research published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and the Trussell Trust starts from the other end of the problem, by asking what a realistic bare minimum might be. “The debate on UC is always about whether it should be kept, or dropped, or what the percentage rise should be,” Patrick said. “This is something different: they’ve sat down and thought about a basket of items which nobody can survive without.” Here are five numbers that tell the story of universal credit in Britain today – starting at the bottom. £16: the cost of essential travel per week The so-called “essentials guarantee” is not exactly a cushy life, with the charities behind it describing it as an estimate at “the more stringent and conservative end of the spectrum”. “It excludes alcohol, cigarettes, Netflix, although it does include £3 a week for the licence fee,” said Patrick. “It assumes you’re a renter – there’s nothing for maintaining your house, or replacing your fridge. It really is a no-fripperies existence.” What does make the list: £37 for food, £41 for utilities, £6 for clothes, £8 for phone and internet, £13 for sundries – occasional expenses like toiletries or cleaning products – and £16 for travel. That last figure emphasises just how lean this budget is – but also, that it’s been put together with the real needs of UC claimants in mind. “That’s two single bus rides, four days a week. It’s not enough to run a car. The researchers initially had a lower figure, but when they heard from claimants in focus groups, they talked about needing to get to the supermarket, to the job centre, for interviews – so it is crucial.” £85: universal credit standard allowance for a single person Universal credit varies a lot according to the particular circumstances of the claimant, who might have children or need support with a disability. But £85 is a decent reference figure, as the money that a single adult claimant gets each week. That is below £95, the figure that a separate piece of research by the JRF found was the threshold for destitution: the inability to even stay clean, dry, warm, and fed . It’s also worth noting that for more than half of households on universal credit, the real figure will be as little as £64 a week, because of monthly caps and benefit deductions. It may be hard for those on decent incomes to imagine the difference that even that £10 a week can make – but there have been many accounts over the last year that have made the consequences all too concrete. “The story I always remember is the kid turning up at school with a lunchbox with nothing in it ,” Patrick said. “It’s parents skipping meals so their kids can be fed. It’s severely disabled people turning off electronic equipment that keeps them alive .” £120: The estimated level of an ‘essential guarantee’ Add up those items on the essentials list and you arrive at a figure of £120 – £35 per week above the current UC minimum. The researchers note that this is only an indicative figure, and argue that there should be an independent process to determine the right level regularly. They point to bodies like the low pay commission, which sets the minimum wage , and pay review bodies that give advice on public sector pay, as obvious precedents. “To my knowledge, there has never been a serious attempt to link benefits to the cost of living in this way,” said Patrick. “Instead there’s been a succession of debates in the political arena that have chipped away at the amount. George Osborne (above) froze it for four years , for example. The real value has constantly been eroded – and that means benefits are at the lowest level they’ve been for 40 years.” £190: The ‘relative poverty’ threshold If destitution is below £95 a week, that shouldn’t be mistaken for an assertion that anything higher means easy living. In the UK, relative poverty is defined as living in a household bringing in less than 60% of the median income that year. The JRF’s estimate for 2023/24 put that at £190 for a single adult. A January report by the charity said that about 22% of British residents are living in poverty, or about 14.5m people, and 31% of children. “None of this is saying that at £120 a week, everything is suddenly fine,” Patrick said. But the terms of the debate mean that fixing “ordinary” poverty is viewed as a pipe dream. £20bn: The cost per year of filling the gap In one sense, £35 a week isn’t much – but tot it up across the whole benefits system and it adds up to a significant sum: about £20bn a year, the JRF estimates. It is unlikely that the same government that made £30bn of spending cuts and £25bn in tax increases in November is going to find the money. “There’s probably zero chance that the government will contemplate it,” said Patrick. “And you have to wonder if Labour in its current mode would look at this.” In its defence, the government points to emergency help like cost of living support payments : a spokesperson said that £1,350 of “direct, targeted support” would go to millions of vulnerable households in 2023/24. “They would say, we’ll help as and when people need it,” Patrick said. “The problem with that is it doesn’t really address the underlying fact that benefits are very low, and keeping them there is storing up all kinds of social problems.” Even if an immediate change is implausible, there may be some value in seeking to shift the terms of the debate, Patrick said. “It clarifies things to talk about the minimum amount a person needs. It takes the discussion out of the realm of academia and poverty campaigners and sets it out in terms anyone can understand. The events of this year have made the reality of destitution inescapable. There has to be some kind of response to that.” Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion A special US edition of Dining across the divide sheds light on the depths of disagreement and prospects for compromise in American politics. They’re all worth reading , but I especially enjoyed a conversation between Heidi and Janalee (above) about guns, abortion, and American history. Archie There are more than just five senses that help us perceive the world that we are living in. Ashley Ward writes that there are as many as 53 senses that condition and alter our realities and ultimately, “make life worth living”. Nimo Helen Pidd spoke to Ewan Frost-Pennington who gave up his high-paying consultancy job to be the custodian of Muncaster castle. His goal is simple: make Muncaster the first zero carbon castle in the country. Nimo Considering questions from “various pleasant people on the internet why I am so ungrateful to the country that naturalised me” and the “low expectations” of a prospective Labour government, Nesrine Malik reflects on how her sense of what life in the UK might be was formed in the mid-noughties, “cultivated in a country that doesn’t exist any more”. It’s a very good piece. Archie Daily life in East Palestine, Ohio was upended after a 50-car freight train derailed and spewed potentially lethal chemicals into the air, water and ground. Three weeks later, the incident has been picked up by rightwing commentators and politicians as an example of white communities being “forgotten” by the Biden administration. Ed Pilkington and Nina Lakhani take a look at how the right racialised this disaster . Nimo Football | Manchester United (above) beat Newcastle 2-0 to win the Carabao Cup final , a result which Jonathan Liew wrote revealed how many Newcastle players “still feel like placeholders, honest triers, temporary solutions”. In the Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur beat Chelsea 2-0 thanks to goals from Oliver Skipp and Harry Kane. Cricket | Beth Mooney’s impressive performance guided Australia to a sixth Women’s T20 World Cup win , its third in a row, comfortably beating South Africa by 19 runs in Cape Town. Meanwhile in the second test, England bowled New Zealand out for 483 and reached 48-1, needing another 210 to win on the final day. Rugby | A breathless, brilliant encounter between France and Scotland in the Six Nations finished 32-21 to France despite a spirited Scotland comeback. Both sides had players sent off early in the first half. “Sunak and Von der Leyen to hold ‘final talks’ on revised Brexit deal” is the Guardian’s splash this Monday morning. The Financial Times packs the keywords in: “UK and EU set to seal Brexit deal on bitter Northern Ireland trade dispute”. “Can Sunak sell his Brexit deal?” asks the Daily Mail . The Daily Express says “Rishi: this new Brexit deal is ‘best for Britain’”. “Brexit: Ursula von der way to Britain” – thanks to the Metro for having a bit of fun with it. “I’ve won big concessions from EU, claims Sunak” – that’s the Times , while the Telegraph has “EU chief flies in to seal Brexit deal as revolt brews”. Away from Brexit, the Daily Mirror reports on the “Energy nightmare” and tells the government to “Act now … or millions face bills hell”. “Justice for Joanna” – the Sun campaigns to stop hammer killer Robert Brown being released. Rewriting Roald Dahl The latest editions of the author’s books for children have had extensive edits made to update the language for modern sensibilities. Lucy Knight and David Baddiel take a closer look Sign up for Inside Saturday to see more of Edith Pritchett’s cartoons, the best Saturday magazine content and an exclusive look behind the scenes A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Growing up, Maggie Zhou never saw her parents kiss on the lips, and says that physical affection “didn’t come naturally to them”. Zhou noticed that conservative attitudes around sex meant that many of the middle-aged Asian women she knew were discouraged from sexual and sensual exploration. That all changed, however, when her 61-year-old mum enrolled in Zumba classes in Melbourne, Australia , and learned to be in tune with her body. In a joyful feature on the “aunties” getting in touch with their sensuality, another regular gym-goer, 50-year-old Thida, tells Zhou about her newfound sense of freedom: “It encourages us to let it all go and be sexy … It gives us confidence.” Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android . Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply

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The real cost-of-living solution is tax cuts

The Prime Minister has asked his Cabinet colleagues to come up with ideas to ease the cost of living crunch that is beginning to have a serious impact on household budgets. The high cost of energy will soon be joined by rising food prices as the impact of the war in Ukraine and the latest lockdowns in China is felt worldwide. Departmental ministers are looking to see if there was any targeted help going largely unclaimed that people who qualified could be directed towards. This includes benefits such as pension credit. The DWP says up to £1.7 billion went unclaimed last year, amounting to around £1,900 for each family entitled to help with living costs. Take-up is low because people don’t know about it or the form-filling is onerous. Access to welfare payments invariably involves bureaucracy that is off-putting. Mr Johnson is also keen to see childcare costs reduced. But there is a simpler way of helping people financially and that is to let them keep more of their own money. New figures show that even as the economy was struggling to emerge from the pandemic, the Treasury raked in more income tax , National Insurance, capital gains and inheritance taxes than at any time in history. HM Revenue & Customs collected £718.2 billion, up almost a quarter from the year before. Tax receipts as a proportion of GDP are now at 30 per cent, up from 27 per cent the previous year. The haul has risen every year since the Conservatives came to power under David Cameron’s 2010 coalition, apart from when VAT was cut to 5 per cent to mitigate the effect of the lockdowns on the worst-hit sectors of the economy. Middle class professionals have borne the brunt of so-called fiscal drag – being drawn into higher tax brackets by the freezing of allowances. Under a Conservative Government ostensibly committed to low taxes, the overall burden is at an all-time high. The Government has rightly identified the cost of living as a serious threat to the wellbeing of voters and, by extension, to the electoral chances of the Tory party. Rather than hunt around for ideas, Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak should look to the solution staring them in the face and cut taxes. The Chancellor does not have a Budget until the autumn and if he announced cuts then they would not take effect until next spring. That will be too late, so an emergency package is in order.

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UK mortgage lender to offer first 100% loans since 2008 crisis

A leading lender plans to launch a 100% mortgage aimed at would-be first-time buyers who cannot save for a deposit, the first since the 2008 financial crisis. Standard home loans where the borrower does not have to put down a deposit used to be fairly commonplace but the last was axed in the wake of the financial crisis . However, Skipton Building Society is getting ready to launch a mortgage targeting those “trapped in rental cycles” and who do not have access to “the bank of mum and dad,” and so are therefore unable to save up enough for a home deposit. Precise details of how the deal will work have yet to emerge, but according to a report in the Times , the new product will be available up to 100%, and borrowers will need to demonstrate a history of paying rent comparable to mortgage repayments for up to two years, with the deal fixed for more than two years to guard against the risk of falling into negative equity. Such a mortgage would differ from other niche products available that let people borrow up to 100% of the purchase price, but involve a family member providing financial help of some sort, such as putting up security on the home loan – meaning they are often only be an option available to those with well-off families. It is understood the deal will be launched in the next few days or weeks. The move could reopen debate about responsible lending at a time of uncertainty about house prices, and coincides with speculation that the government plans to resurrect the help-to-buy scheme , which closed to new applicants late last year . Higher house prices and private rents soaring to record highs are just some of the reasons why many would-be buyers are finding saving up a sufficient deposit a bigger challenge than ever. Data issued by the Halifax earlier this year found that the average amount put down as a deposit by those buying their first home in 2022 was £62,470 – up 8% on 2021. The last UK lender offering standard 100% mortgages, where no deposit was required, withdrew from the market 15 years ago. No-deposit mortgages have proved controversial because homebuyers who take them out are particularly vulnerable to house price falls, as they have no equity to cushion them if there is a drop in the value of their home. Even a small fall in house prices might leave some owing more on their mortgage than their home is worth. The most notorious 100%-plus mortgage was Northern Rock’s Together home loan, which allowed people to borrow up to 125% of a property’s value and was withdrawn from sale in 2008 after a backlash against easy credit and lax lending. Last Friday, figures were issued indicating that new first-time buyers are typically paying £191 a month more on their mortgage than a year ago because of a combination of higher home loan rates and record asking prices for properties. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion In April, Stuart Haire, the Skipton group chief executive, said it was developing a mortgage product “to enable people trapped in rental cycles – where they are prevented from being able to save for a house deposit – to access the property ladder and make a home”. He added that there were people “who have a decent history of making rental payments over a period of time and can evidence affordability of a mortgage, yet their only barrier to becoming a homeowner is not being able to save enough for a deposit and through lack of access to the bank of mum and dad”. Mortgage lenders carry out affordability tests when working out how much to lend someone. David Hollingworth, an associate director at the broker firm L&C Mortgages , told the Guardian that “if you’re not going to have a deposit, you are going to need that affordability to be rock solid”. He added: “If you can use the rental history to help boost that affordability, that will be a big help to a first-time buyer.” The Skipton said it had not announced the details of the deal.

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Boris Becker: UK prison sentence was ‘brutal’ experience

Boris Becker has spoken of his “brutal” prison experience in the UK, adding that during his incarceration he had to surround himself with “tough boys” for protection. The three-times Wimbledon men’s singles champion served eight months of his two-and-a-half-year sentence for hiding £2.5m of assets and loans in a bankruptcy fraud case. He was released from prison in December and deported from the UK . Becker told BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast: “Whoever says that prison life isn’t hard and isn’t difficult, I think is lying. “It was a very brutal … a very, very different experience to what you see in the movies, what you’ve heard from stories.” He said inmates had to “fight every day” for survival and that being a famous tennis player meant nothing in prison, where he had been surrounded by “murderers, by drug dealers, by rapists, by people smugglers, by dangerous criminals”. “You fight every day for survival. Quickly, you have to surround yourself with the tough boys, as I would call it, because you need protection.” His incarceration “humbled” him, he said, adding: “I’m a survivor; I’m a tough cookie. I’ve taken the incarceration, but I’ve also taken the glory and if anything this made me a stronger, better man.” He is now building his life’s “third chapter”, he said. Reflecting on his tennis career and becoming the youngest ever Wimbledon men’s singles champion in 1985, at 17, Becker said there was no “handbook” for how a teenager in such a situation should behave. The fame and fortune had been, he said, “very new”. He said he had never studied business or finance, and after his tennis career he made decisions that were “probably badly advised”, but added: “It was my decision.” Becker, 55, spent the first weeks of his detention at Wandsworth prison in south-west London, and was then at Huntercombe prison in Oxfordshire. He will not be able to return to the UK until October 2024 at the earliest but said he missed London and would “love” to return to his commentating role at Wimbledon. Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime in the UK and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion A deportation order prevents an individual from lawfully re-entering the UK while it remains in force. Once the deportation order is revoked, or is no longer in force, the person concerned will only be permitted to enter the UK if they meet the relevant criteria for entry. Becker revealed he had been in touch with the BBC about being part of its coverage in the future, but that “it’s not my decision”. Speaking before the release of a new TV documentary about his life and career, he said he had learned lessons from his time in jail, including finding out “who’s with you and who’s not with you”. “If anything, it certainly humbled me. It certainly made me realise that whether you’re called Boris Becker or Paul Smith, if you break the law, you get convicted and you get incarcerated; that goes for everybody,” he said. A Home Office spokesperson said: “Any foreign national who has been convicted of a crime and deported is prohibited from returning for as long as the deportation order made against them remains in force.”

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There’s no shame in waging war on old age – long live Martha Stewart

When members of the Hårga – Ari Aster’s Swedish cult in Midsommar – reach the age of 72, they are instructed to jump off a very high cliff. “They have reached the end of their life cycle,” the Hårga explain, Swedishly, to their dumbfounded American guests. As horror films go, it’s an unexpected twist – all the more so because it bucks what might be described as the genre’s most unrelenting theme, which is that the elderly are almost always villains, not victims. Throughout the long history of horror, the old have waited, jealously, to feast on the young, either in over-friendly cabals ( Get Out , Rosemary’s Baby , Hereditary ), or alone ( X , Saw ). All versions, perhaps, of horror’s longest-lived baddie: the vampire. “Old age is a massacre,” wrote Philip Roth, but we have a distaste for those who seek to avoid the axeman, even a fear of them. Morality tales about the quest for eternal life pervade not only horror films but the whole of western culture – and questers are always punished. They are selfish and unnatural. We don’t want the old trying too hard to be young. The feeling is still strong within us: it was particularly provoked in recent days by two magazine cover stories from different ends of the news stands. First, there was the supportive yet squeamish reaction to this month’s Sports Illustrated , which featured Martha Stewart in a bathing suit looking 20 years younger than her 81 years. “Power to Stewart”, a typical article said, unconvincingly. “But what kind of power?… Do we celebrate the potential for human agelessness… or mourn the fact that no one seems equipped any more to deal with the one certainty in life?” Stewart was soon having to defend herself in interviews. Then there was the cover of the New Scientist , which pointed towards a parallel conflict of feelings, this time in the scientific community. It centred on a new generation of anti-ageing drugs , that can lengthen lifespans by killing or suppressing senescent cells, a species of run-down cell that lurks in the tissue, refusing to die and dripping poison into its surroundings. But it also touched on the rather fraught position that anti-ageing occupies in the research community; the field still finds itself partly outside mainstream gerontology and vaguely associated with quacks and deluded billionaires. (The Food and Drug Administration, one researcher says, is yet to recognise ageing as a disease in its own right, which holds back the area.) In the UK, anti-ageing researchers say they struggle for government funding . Why do we so dislike the idea of a battle with age? It is odd, because when it comes to fending off the reaper, what is deemed acceptable often seems to come down to semantics. In medicine, “successful ageing” is a perfectly respectable concept, and anti-ageing less so. But the two fields share precisely the same aims: an old age of healthy vigour, free from disease, engaged in one’s communities. Anti-ageing merely tackles the root cause of the diseases gerontology prefers to deal with one by one (senescent cells can trigger Alzheimer’s, heart disease and osteoporosis). Gerontologists fret that anti-ageing medicine is “against” ageing, but this tension seems largely rhetorical. Even if they avoid the term, they themselves are “against” a loss of function, ill health, a slowing of the system. What is this but anti-ageing? If scientists have taken refuge in euphemism, so have the beauty and fashion industries, which are constantly on the search for new obfuscations through which to flog the same youth-promoting products. The frank ageism of the 1950s and 60s has long given way to the concept of “ageing well” or even “pro-ageing”. Yet it is hard to see where “good ageing”, with its preternaturally vigorous ambassadors such as Helen Mirren and Andie MacDowell, really departs from just “looking and seeming young”. The difference is certainly subtle. “[Helen] Mirren is not someone who is trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, in the way women over a certain age were once expected to be,” one article runs. “But nor is she promoting the implausibly whooshy hair of a 27-year-old supermodel we saw on Martha Stewart…”. Mirren’s hair looks pretty whooshy to me. (One thinks of the reaction someone may have had a century ago to today’s 40-year-old cover stars.) In a way, it is not surprising that euphemism dominates our approach to ageing. We have long treated it as a monster we want to see only out of the corner of our eye. The opposite of the fear of death is apeirophobia – the fear of eternal life – and I wonder whether a version of this, too, enters our approach to anti-ageing. The idea we could suddenly live much longer (scientists recently put the maximum span at 140 years), or seem unusually youthful in our 80s, gives us a vertiginous feeling, where once we had the comforts of fatalism. Where will it end? Then there are the moral objections. Treat ageing, some fear, and we will be soon overrun with an elderly population that will feed on and poison the rest of us – like a body filling up with senescent cells. But this misunderstands the idea. Treating ageing is an attempt to stretch out periods of health, not just the deterioration at the very end. Healthier people can work for longer and will need less help. It makes sense to think of age as a disease to be fought. After all, the diseases of ageing are tightly interlinked – chronic inflammation, DNA damage and mitochondrial dysfunction turn one another on in vicious cycles, producing the illnesses we associate with our 80s and 90s . Age is a driver of disease; it makes no sense to ignore it while bemoaning the ravages of dementia or cardiovascular disease. Instead, we should tackle it head-on. Time to gather our courage and face the monster. Martha Gill is an Observer columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

BAD

Will the coronation bring a UK tourism bonanza – or drive people away?

As soon as the date of the coronation was announced last October, Kathryn Mooney booked a flight to London. “I jumped on it right away,” says Mooney, 54, an executive assistant from Toronto. “All I thought was, I’d better get a property, I’d better get a flight, because I knew there would be huge demand.” Why did she want to come? “I know it sounds really hokey, but I want to go and send them some support and love from the sidelines. And honour the queen.” Although she admits she does not quite have the same esteem for King Charles III as she had for his mother, she says the royals still “represent the palaces, they represent the pageantry – and that’s something that I want to experience. I want to see this. I want to feel it. Because in North America we don’t have anything even close.” Mooney will certainly not be the only person flying to the UK for the coronation – but just how many will there be? A common argument in defence of the royal family is the benefit they bring to the UK economy through tourism. But despite widespread claims of their tourist value, firm evidence that the Windsors are what bring visitors to Britain is hard to come by, with most assertions anecdotal or speculative. The storm-tossed tourist industry may be desperately hoping for a coronation bump, but the benefit the event will bring is not clear. “The problem is that attaching any causality to anything in tourism is exceptionally difficult,” admits Joss Croft, the CEO of UK Inbound , which represents the incoming tourist industry. “Why do people travel to the UK? Actually picking out a particular element as to why people have decided to come at a particular time is almost impossible.” For some, of course, the coronation is an uncomplicated plus. “For us, it’s a great boon for business,” says Lana Bennett, the CEO of Tours International , a specialist inbound tour operator that has sold out of its coronation packages. “We’ve been very fortunate, coming out of the pandemic, that we had the jubilee last year too. People just wanted to be in London for an event like that.” There are people like Mooney, mostly from North America and explicitly royal fans, who want to spend a week visiting Windsor Castle and Kensington Palace and having etiquette lessons on the correct way to partake of afternoon tea. Even for specialist operators such as Tours International, however, this market is comparatively tiny, says Bennett. “Oh yes, it’s not huge. It’s a coachload.” So how significant will the event be on a broader scale? Visit Britain , the national tourist authority, points to an estimated £1.2bn economic boost from the jubilee weekend, though Patricia Yates, the organisation’s CEO, says most of that came from domestic visitors. (For comparison, government modelling would estimate the cost to the economy of an extra day’s bank holiday at £1.36bn, it was reported last year.) But it is not only about the weekend itself, argues Yates. “We know that our history and heritage is a real draw for visitors from overseas, and it will look amazing on television – we just know that, don’t we? So the drive for us is using that as almost a showpiece in international markets, to encourage people to come this summer.” She is right that Britain’s heritage and history is a key factor in its huge £131bn tourist industry , and is spoken of around the globe as the aspect most associated with the UK. But heritage is not the same as royalty, and when pressed for figures for the value of the royals, Yates sidesteps. “We are really careful not to put a number on the value of having a royal family,” she says. “But … does having a living monarchy make a difference? Well, of course it does, in that you have the ceremonials and the constant pattern of family life, with weddings and christenings and death and celebrations.” Visit Britain has attached a number before. A previous head of the organisation claimed that the queen generated “well over £500m a year directly and indirectly from overseas tourists”, arguing before the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton that the event would boost the sum further. The problem is that neither of those assertions stands up to scrutiny . Numerical claims about the value of the monarchy frequently rely on creative interpretation of visitor numbers to sites with any royal connection, however tangential, says Graham Smith, of Republic, which campaigns to abolish the monarchy. “If you look at the Tower of London, where the royals haven’t lived for hundreds of years, it’s far, far more popular than Buckingham Palace,” says Smith. (Almost three million people visited the Tower in 2019, compared to 500,000 at the palace, although it is not open year round.). “So it’s clearly not the living history that people are interested in, it’s the history – and history never goes away. There just isn’t any evidence to suggest that people would not visit if [the royals] were not there.” Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Smith says large-scale events such as the coronation may actually depress visitor numbers, as VisitBritain has acknowledged several royal weddings did in the past . An in-depth Harvard University analysis in 2016 concluded that hosts of so-called “mega events” routinely “vastly overstate” their economic benefits, and in terms of tourism any positive effect was very short-lived. Croft, from Inbound, says that while “most countries around the world would kill to have a brand like the UK”, the association with history “does have its downside as well, which is that people don’t have a sense of urgency. Because you’re based around history and heritage, you don’t have to come to the UK in 2023, because the history and heritage will still be here in 2024 … so often they say ‘yeah, well, I’ll go next year, and this year I’ll go to Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos’.” That said, Bernard Donoghue, the director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, says “all destinations around the world are recovering after the most traumatic period that they’ve ever experienced, so they are looking for that little bit of differentiation to put themselves at the front of people’s minds”. What that means for British attractions is a flurry of activity among sites across the country that may have only the loosest connection to the coronation, he says. “A lot of my members are going into their attics, going into their collections, and seeing how they can tell the story of their place in a way that is connected to coronations and royalty. In the nicest possible way, they’re all jumping on a golden bandwagon.” That might suggest that a coronation tide floats all boats; alternatively one could argue that there is no need for any connection to present-day royalty to benefit from nostalgia tourism. That is the experience of Tours International, which, for all the interest in its coronation-themed tours, sees royalty as just one theme appealing to its key North America market. Tours themed around Celtic Christianity are equally “huge”; so are literary figures such as Shakespeare and the Brontës, says Bennett. “You’ve got the royal family, you’ve got the filming locations – be it Downton Abbey, The Crown – you’ve got the castles and the stately homes.” As for its other major market of French and German visitors – “they will avoid London at all costs” over coronation weekend, she says. This article was amended on 27 April 2023 to clarify that Buckingham Palace is not open all year round and to give a comparison with the Tower of London using 2019 visitor figures.

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Wasps thrown into fresh turmoil as RFU withdraws offer of Championship place

The sad descent of Wasps, champions of Europe just 16 years ago, is now complete after the Rugby Football Union withdrew the club’s licence to play in next season’s Championship and, by doing so, consigned the erstwhile English champions to the basement of the entire league pyramid. In the latest grim illustration of English club rugby’s financial meltdown, the RFU has run out of patience with Wasps’ attempts to find fresh financial backing after the club went into administration in October with debts of £95m. Twickenham officials were concerned about the club’s ability to pay off its creditors and to establish suitable governance structures, also citing a lack of clear progress in engaging coaching staff and players for the new season. It means Wasps are set to experience the same fate as London Welsh, who were relegated to the bottom of the league structure in 2017. In December the RFU announced that Wasps would be permitted to take their place in the Championship after approving a proposed rescue plan from a company headed by Christopher Holland, who still owns the club’s training ground in Henley-in-Arden. “This is not the outcome anyone in rugby wanted and all those involved with the club will be deeply disappointed,” said Bill Sweeney, the RFU’s chief executive. There could also be significant repercussions for the new owners of Worcester, who had been hoping Wasps could relocate to their Sixways stadium in Worcester this season and, in the process, earn them £600,000 in annual rent. Holland had loaned Worcester’s owners, Atlas WWRFC, the sum of £1.15m as part of an agreement to secure a three-year lease to play at Sixways. With Wasps no longer in a position to play professional rugby, this loan will now have to be repaid. The remaining 12 Championship clubs, keen to finalise next season’s fixture list, and the Worcester Warriors Supporters Trust had been putting pressure on the RFU to clarify the situation. The other major issue has been the looming possibility of a ringfenced 10-team Premiership plus a lack of certainty, from an investors’ perspective, around the Championship’s future. “We tried all avenues to achieve our objectives but unfortunately all potential investors could not get past the regulations forced upon us by the RFU and the lack of clarity of the Championship and Premiership structure,” said a Wasps spokesperson. Further trouble is also brewing for Premiership Rugby, in increasing danger of losing a third high-profile club, London Irish, inside nine months. The RFU has set a deadline of 30 May for the club to complete a mooted US-led takeover and show it has the financial means to continue through the 2023-24 season. If not, the club will be suspended from the Premiership. Player wages were paid late in April and the London Irish owner, Mick Crossan, has been trying to sell the club for some time.

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Giant spiders, snakes and storms: what could go wrong with having a baby in a remote village?

‘What if the baby comes in the night?” my wife, Allys, asked, looking at the stretch of the South China Sea that separated us from the nearest hospital. “Helicopter,” said a local resident. I looked around me, taking in the thick jungle of trees and roots, crisscrossed with tiny paths, impenetrable to vehicles. “Where’s it going to land?” The man cleared his throat and shrugged. “Better if the baby does not come in the night.” Three years earlier, in 2015, we had moved to Hong Kong as a pair of young teachers, excited about escaping the grey skies and terrible pay of the UK. Frankly, we were a little bored, and were certain that we wanted to travel across the globe and perhaps never return to the UK, at least not to live. Our first home was a postage-stamp-sized flat high above the streets of Wan Chai, Hong Kong’s red-light district. During the day, we were at the centre of everything – manic wet markets, sprawling computer centres, bustling restaurants and cafes. At night, the neon signs and street sellers imbued the area with the cyberpunk overtones of Blade Runner. It was a different world and, for a while, we revelled in it. It was also overwhelming. Allys, who grew up in a sleepy Northumberland town, struggled to sleep at night. I began to find the packed streets claustrophobic, wishing for more space. We were building careers, making friends, and still felt there was much to explore, but after two years in the thick of it, we needed quiet. A myriad of environments were on offer nearby, from the rolling hills of the New Territories to the quieter greenery of the outlying islands. I was teaching English, but also working on my first novel, and was keen to find somewhere that would offer serenity and inspiration. Just off Hong Kong island, about half an hour on a ferry, is the greener and sleepier island of Lamma. Many who visit fall in love with its old-world charm. No chain shops or restaurants. No cars, the winding paths not large enough to support them, although two‑seater vans zip around the narrow streets like go-karts. Lamma has two main villages – Yung Shue Wan and Sok Kwu Wan – where nearly all of the 7,000 inhabitants live. By this point, even that number of people felt too crowded. We wanted to be surrounded by nature and by the peace that comes with quiet isolation. We found a place in the northern part of the island called Pak Kok: around 20 or so houses spread through the jungle, inhabited by locals and a few expat families, mingled with abandoned buildings completely overgrown with vines and roots. The jungle owned this part of the island, and if you took your eye off your house for too long the jungle would take it back and swallow it up. Our way off the island was a rickety old ferry – black smoke sputtering out of its exhaust pipes. Even getting on it was far from straightforward. A little walk down from our house towards the rocky beach, a set of tyres had been nailed into the wall. The ferry would bump its prow into them and drive forwards, holding its position while people jumped on and off. This worked fine in perfect conditions, but in choppy weather, or if there was a typhoon on the horizon (which there often was), it made boarding the ferry dangerous and sometimes impossible. On more than one occasion, I watched as my sole transport option tried and failed to pull up to the rocks, before giving up and moving on, leaving me stranded. We loved it. After the madness of Wan Chai, it was exactly what we wanted. Sure, we had to plan around the irregular ferry timetable. I had to get up early to get to work on time, hiking through a dilapidated shipyard over broken planks and scurrying rats to reach the school at the other end. Often, I’d have to sprint to make the ferry home. We had to organise food a week in advance. Takeaways or popping to a bar were a thing of the past. But it was beautiful. Standing on our rooftop, looking out at the sunrise over the ocean, and listening to the choruses of croaking frogs and warbling tropical birds –made everything else seem inconsequential. So when we discussed starting a family, we naively thought everything would be OK. Life was more rustic out here, but people did it. We hadn’t taken into account the luxury of having almost complete control of our lives. What we didn’t realise is that when you have a baby, you relinquish that, and that when you live somewhere like we did, that has a tendency to snowball. The worry took over in the lead-up to our son’s birth. We foolishly assumed there would be safety nets in place, but some early chats with another Pak Kok resident quickly disabused us of that notion. We couldn’t discuss our options with a doctor because doctors didn’t go to where we lived. The nearest person approximating to a medical professional was a hefty walk away, through dense jungle, up an absurdly steep rise the locals affectionately nicknamed Heart-Attack Hill, and eventually down into the nearest village. Pregnancy itself was difficult – island life was physically taxing, especially in a Hong Kong summer. Often medical appointments would overrun and make it difficult to get home. There were no luxuries, unless planned for well in advance, or bartered for. We bought cheese like it was an illicit drug deal, texting a man nearby how many grams we needed and exchanging it for cash through his window. With the worry came guilt. What if something went seriously wrong? What would we do? The only “ambulance” was a tiny van that they sent from the nearest village, which I’d once helped push to the top of Heart-Attack Hill after it broke down. Oskar didn’t come early, as we’d feared. In fact, he held on until two weeks past Allys’s due date. Every day, we were on tenterhooks, our anxiety at fever pitch. We discussed staying with friends on the main island, or in a hotel, but had no idea how long that would be for. It was a fortunate twist of fate, then, that Allys had to be induced. The birth was going to happen in the hospital and not in a helicopter or on a police boat. After eight hours of induced labour, Oskar was healthy, Allys was exhausted, and everyone was fine. We thought we would continue to be fine. We were wrong. In the first week, Oskar didn’t feed. It turns out, he didn’t know how to breastfeed. We didn’t realise this could be an issue. By the time we managed to get a specialist out to see us (we paid a premium for a home visit and she missed our ferry stop because, despite my instructions, when the ferry bumped into the rocks, she couldn’t believe that it constituted a pier and that we would actually live there), he was starving, and I don’t mean the term figuratively. He was so dehydrated from lack of food that she had to give him formula within moments of arriving. Guilt seeped into both of us, finding every gap in our marriage. It forced us to reckon explicitly with who we were, not just as parents but as partners. On one particularly fractious evening, after the last ferry had long gone, Oskar writhed in his cot with an awful fever. “We can’t just ignore this,” Allys said to me, pacing back and forth in the living room. “I’m not ignoring it,” I insisted. “But we don’t have many options. I don’t think he’s sick enough to call an emergency police boat.” “You don’t know that,” she snapped back. “Children can go downhill so quickly. If we wait until he’s really bad, it’ll still be hours before someone can get us off this island and it might be too late.” “OK! OK!” I threw my hands in the air. “I’ll call the police.” “You can’t just drag him out into the night when we don’t even know … ” “What do you want me to do?” I demanded, tired, exasperated. “Just tell me what you want me to do!” For months, we argued, pointed fingers and reconciled, but ultimately we had to come to terms with whether we’d ever forgive ourselves if the worst happened. There were long sleepless nights, and not just because of Oskar’s wakings. What on earth were we doing? Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion We started seeing dangers that we had previously ignored: spiders bigger than your face built webs across pathways at almost exactly the height of a baby carrier; bamboo pit vipers so venomous that, if bitten, you’d need to be immediately airlifted to hospital to stand a chance of surviving. One afternoon, I came home to find such a snake wrapped around the handle of our front door. I stood there with a tired, hungry baby strapped to my chest and realised I needed help to get into my own house. Having taken time away from work to raise Oskar, Allys experienced our isolation in a way I never did. Most days I left the island to teach, leaving her alone with our newborn. There were no support groups, no playgroups she could get to and reliably get back from, no family or friends who could pop in. Close friends we’d had in Wan Chai drifted away because Pak Kok was too far to visit. That kind of isolation is life‑changing: it was as though someone had stripped away every part of her old identity. Sickness was a constant worry. Babies get sick, everyone knows that. But it instilled in us a constant anxiety, born not out of a fear that something could go wrong so much as a realisation that we would be powerless if it did. Powerlessness, particularly in the face of responsibility, does strange things to the brain. We both started catastrophising, increasingly illogical intrusive thoughts working their way into our psyche. If we had plans to go to the main island the next day, Allys would wake me up in the middle of night. “What if we get a cab and it crashes and we all die? What if we’re crossing the road and we get hit by a truck?” Travelling out of our remote jungle felt increasingly impossible, fraught with danger. We now understood that living without the trappings of modern civilisation seems romantic, but that there might come a time when we needed those support systems. And then there were the storms. In Hong Kong, typhoon and black-rain warnings (the highest level of alert) are part of day-to-day life. When we lived in Wan Chai, a typhoon used to mean a day off work cuddling on the sofa in front of the TV. We took for granted that we were surrounded by skyscrapers, effective drainage systems and modern buildings designed to withstand high winds. Out in the jungle, we were not so protected. When the first typhoon hit, it was apocalyptic. We lived about 50 metres from the sea and had little protection but for a few lines of trees. With the wind speed outside about 60mph, our single-glazed windows rattled so hard we were certain they would break. Allys sat on the bed in our bedroom, the place that felt the most protected, holding our two-month-old son close and comforting him through what sounded like the world ending outside. By the time I realised the storm had clogged our roof drains, the water was inches-deep and only getting worse. After a few manic calculations about how long our roof could hold under that weight, I went outside. In a typhoon like that, individual gusts can exceed 120mph – enough to pick me up and throw me off the roof. But there was no one to call to help. I had to clear the drains myself, a task that took three terrifying hours, frantically bailing and ducking behind walls to avoid gusts and flying branches. After that encounter, we were hit by a terrifying realisation that if something were to happen, we’d be to blame. No one had forced us to live so far from the safety net of modern society. We had chosen the risks, even if we didn’t fully understand them. The beauty that drew us here still existed, but it became coloured by other feelings. Peace and quiet began to look like isolation. Privacy and remoteness became inconvenience and frustration. Natural beauty became potential danger. It’s no coincidence that the novel I wrote at that time is a thriller and a horror, because the worst horror I could think of was something happening to my son, and feeling like it was my fault. Of course, raising a child in the jungle can be done. We still have good expat friends with families who live out there and have acclimatised to living that remotely. But ultimately, while we both miss it immensely, we knew it wasn’t for us. Nothing underscored that quite like the holiday we took to Edinburgh in the summer of 2019, and it was then we decided to return to the UK. We’d flown back to see friends and family, and just staying in an Airbnb in the New Town was transcendental. The grey skies no longer spoke of drudgery, but meant we could go outside with Oskar without layers of suncream and two electric fans strapped to the pushchair; the day-to-day life that once felt dull was a huge sigh of relief. It was easy. It was safe . “We’re out of cheese,” Allys said, a couple of days after arriving, and, as I instinctively checked my phone to see when our dealer would be available, a lightning bolt of realisation hit me. “I’ll go to the shop,” I replied, a huge grin on my face. “It’s just round the corner.” The headline of this article was amended on 9 May 2023 to better reflect the situation of the family on Lamma island. Nicholas Binge’s new novel, Ascension, is published by Harper Voyager.

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Hot honey halloumi helps usher Everyman back into profit

The allure of luxury sofa seating and a menu including parsley and garlic dough balls and hot honey halloumi helped the upmarket cinema chain Everyman bounce back to profit last year. The group, which started in Hampstead and now has 38 venues across the UK, hailed a post-pandemic return to “business as usual” as admission numbers rose by 70% to 3.4 million last year. Revenues grew by 61% to £78.8m as film fans flocked to its cinemas to see Hollywood blockbusters including Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water. Alex Scrimgeour, the chief executive of Everyman, said: “We were encouraged by strong growth in admissions in the year, marking a return to business as usual. The Everyman proposition feels as relevant as ever.” The company’s film and entertainment revenues grew by almost 60% to £39.7m, helped by an increase in the average ticket price from £11 last year to £11.29. Everyman also pointed to the success of its food and drink offering – cinemagoers can enjoy everything from Korean chicken burgers and vegan hotdogs to wine and popcorn at their seats – in helping to transform an operating loss of £2.2m in Covid-hit 2021 into a profit of £400,000. Food and drink revenues climbed 59% to £32.2m, accounting for 41% of total revenues, helped by average spend per head climbing from £9.07 to £9.34. “Everyman remains a popular and affordable choice for consumers, combining great film, hospitality and atmosphere to provide an exceptional cinema experience,” Scrimgeour said. The chain said the number of blockbuster releases fell in 2022, but noted that the Top Gun and Avatar films were among the highest-grossing films of all time, indicating that “the consumer appetite for film remains undiminished”. The bounce back of Everyman is in contrast to the performance of Cineworld, the world’s second largest cinema chain, which is undergoing a painful restructuring to wipe out a £4bn debt pile in order to exit bankruptcy protection in the US. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Everyman said it was bullish about its prospects, with admission numbers expected to grow again this year. It plans to open six new cinemas a year for the next three years. However, the chain’s premium positioning means it could face pressure if consumers are forced to cut their budgets. Russ Mould, an investment director at AJ Bell, said: “Posh cinema operator Everyman Media has a tricky path to navigate through the cost of living crisis. It needs to keep prices low enough that it remains an affordable luxury for a large enough audience. The company’s model is also reliant on people taking advantage of the opportunity to order food and drink to their seats. If people decide they can’t afford to do anything other than rock up and watch the film, that could weigh heavily on profit.”

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Land subsidence 'will affect almost fifth of global population'

Subsidence, or the gradual sinking of land, could affect 19% of the world’s population by 2040, according to new research funded by Unesco. If no action is taken, human activity, combined with drought and rising sea levels exacerbated by global heating, could put many of the world’s coastal cities at risk of severe flooding. Jakarta has sunk more than 2.5 metres in the past 10 years, leading the Indonesian government to make plans to relocate the country’s capital to the island of Borneo. In Europe, subsidence is responsible for placing 25% of the Netherlands below sea level. Flat coastal regions, as well as urban and agricultural centres in dry climates, are most at risk. Gerardo Herrera-García, lead researcher on the project, who is attached to the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain, said: “Areas that are heavily populated or areas that need irrigation for agriculture because they are located in places that are dry for long periods of time, they need to pump the water from underground. When they pump the water, the natural recharge of the aquifer is smaller than the volume of water they are pumping out.” This extraction of water from the ground causes the surface to sink. But lack of pumping regulations and rapidly increasing human populations are the most likely factors contributing to the rates of subsidence. In Iran, the population has more than doubled in the past 50 years, while groundwater pumping has remained unregulated. The country’s cities are now among the fastest-sinking urban centres in the world, falling by up to 25cm each year. While subsidence was a common issue throughout the 20th century, previously it was analysed only in a local context. The new project, developed by an international team of scientists, sought to consolidate existing research. The scientists produced a universally applicable model to predict which areas were most at risk of subsidence. The results showed that subsidence was a global issue, linked to global heating as well unsustainable farming practices. “The largest aquifers in the world are being depleted for agricultural purposes,” said Herrera-García. According to Herrera-García, groundwater in the US, Mexico, China, and India, is being rapidly drained to meet global food demand. Continued subsidence in those areas will affect populations worldwide. Making global food production sustainable was possible, said Herrera-García, but the problem would have to be addressed soon. Additionally, global warming is predicted to cause prolonged periods of drought, which will accelerate the rate of subsidence as more water is pumped from underground. Meanwhile, sea levels are expected to rise by up to a metre in the next century. This means that more coastal cities will encounter the same problems as Jakarta, as more areas will become prone to flooding. However, Herrera-García said that while subsidence was a big threat to global environment, it could be fixed far more easily than climate change. Technologies, such as satellites and radars, could quickly identify areas of subsidence, while “simple policies and tools” could be used by local authorities to efficiently combat the problem. “In Tokyo they had a very big problem of subsidence in the first part of the last century. They implemented groundwater regulations and they solved the problem.” Other solutions to subsidence include finding alternative water sources, practising efficient agriculture to use as little water as possible, and injecting water back into aquifers. “These solutions are the same everywhere and can be applied to both large aquifers and smaller ones,” Herrera-García said. “I think we are on time. The solutions are there, and this is the time to implement them.”

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Vinícius Júnior and why it’s time to stop talking about the football

On Sunday, for the first time in 1,285 games as a coach and 47 years in football, Carlo Ancelotti refused to talk about the game. He had just seen Real Madrid lose 1-0 against Valencia but, standing in the cramped, narrow tunnel that leads to the Mestalla dressing room where he said his best player sat “angry and sad”, he didn’t care about that and couldn’t comprehend anyone else caring either. So when the standard post‑match interview began with the standard post‑match question, an enquiry as to his thoughts on another defeat, he decided that, actually, no, this wasn’t going to be standard any more. Instead, he shot back: “You want to talk about football?! Or shall we talk about the other thing? That’s more important than a loss, don’t you think?” Maybe this time, at last, some will begin to think so. If the Madrid manager didn’t feel much like talking about football, it was because Vinícius Júnior , the kid in his care, the 22-year-old winger who is probably the most electric, most exciting player in the Spanish league, a genuine superstar for a new generation, didn’t feel much like playing it any more. Why would he, why should he, when as he arrived at Mestalla a group of fans gathered outside had chanted: “Vinícius, you’re a monkey”? When from the south stand he had been told the same? When he had been told that he was an idiot, an imbecile. When he had heard the “oooh, ooohs”? He had had enough. There was a moment in the second half when cameras closed in on Vinícius’s face, tears welling in his eyes. In its simplicity, its sadness, that may be the most powerful of many dreadful images from Sunday night, but the one that made the greatest impact, the one that started something, which gathered the kind of momentum that could yet mean something tangible, came when he literally made a stand, facing down the men who abused him. There were 20 minutes left when he pointed at a Valencia fan behind the goal, saying: “You, you, yes, you”, telling teammates that man there had called him “a monkey”; “he did this”, Vinícius said, imitating an ape gesture, hands tucked under his armpits. Alongside him, Lucas Vázquez confronted fans: “Shitty racists.” The referee arrived on the pitch and police arrived in the stands. Ricardo de Burgos Bengoetxea spoke to Vinícius, explaining the protocol and asking him to trust him: first an announcement is made over the loudspeaker, and then, he told Vinícius, “if it happens a second time, we leave”. Thibaut Courtois told him it had happened in the first half too and Vinícius was ready to go already. The PA announcement, warning the game could be suspended, was met with whistles. Ancelotti, who has been through this before with Kalidou Koulibaly in Italy, spoke to the official and his player. “He didn’t want to continue,” he said, “but I told him it didn’t seem fair that he is the one that has to stop playing because it is not his fault: I told him you’re not the guilty party; you’re the victim.” There was something in that message reminiscent of the awful sight of Mouctar Diakhaby, the victim of racist abuse sitting in the stands watching his alleged abuser play on two years ago . Ancelotti embraced Vinícius, then kissed him, supporting him in going on. Maybe they could have walked, maybe next time they will – “had he wanted to we would have gone with him,” Courtois said – but this time he continued. Until the last minute of a game that overran by more than 10 minutes – when he was sent off for thrusting an arm into the face of Hugo Duro who, in the middle of a melee, had him round the neck. As he went, he gestured to the Valencia fans that they were going down. “The card made no sense,” Ancelotti said afterwards; even if strictly speaking it was deserved, it served to deepen a sense that somehow everything was upside down. As for the gesture, that was natural given everything he had been subjected to, Ancelotti said. Not just here, but in those other grounds too. On social media Vinícius made the point this was “not the first time, and not the second or the third either” – there have been nine formal complaints made about abuse he has suffered this season – and described racism as “normal”, encouraged even. He adopted the league’s slogan to insist that this “is not football, it’s La Liga”. Nothing, he said, gets done, nothing happens. The competition that “once belonged to Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Messi and Cristiano, now belongs to the racists”, he said; Brazilians see Spain as a racist country that had left him defenceless. A subsequent post from his representatives likened him to George Floyd. “If a stadium insults a player racially, the game has to stop – and I would say the same if we were winning 3-0,” Ancelotti said. “Stop the game, there is no other way. The referee says that the fans have to be informed first and if it continues, then we stop the game. But, for me, he doesn’t need to inform them. I am curious to see what happens now.” The last line was pointed, so he was asked what he thought would happen. “Nothing,” he said. “Because it has happened lots of times and nothing happens.” That suspicion was only deepened when Javier Tebas, the president of the league, went on Twitter and accused Vinícius of failing to understand whose responsibility it is to deal with racism and not showing up when they arranged meetings to explain the process to him, accusing him of insulting the country and the competition and suggesting he had allowed himself to be “manipulated”. There may have been a point in there somewhere: the league and the clubs are acting with greater determination, with observers at every game. The nine complaints of abuse directed at Vinícius were investigated and brought by the league and handed to the authorities, while protocols and punishments do not depend solely on them. When the league filed a complaint about the racist abuse sung before the Madrid derby in September, it was state prosecutors that failed to proceed. The Espanyol fans they denounced to the authorities for abusing Iñaki Williams are due in court. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s action after newsletter promotion And yet immediately after the abuse on Sunday, the tweet was alarmingly tone deaf and the feeling that nothing is done naturally hangs heavy; there is something depressingly inevitable about it all and no escaping that the only time a game has been abandoned in Spain was when Rayo Vallecano fans accused striker Roman Zozulya of being a “Nazi”. “Once again, instead of criticising racists, the president of the league appears on social media to attack me,” Vinícius replied. “Much as you talk and pretend not to read, the image of your league is damaged. Look at the responses to your posts and you’ll be surprised. By omission, you place yourself on the same level as racists. I want action and punishments; hashtags don’t move me.” He, though, was moving something. No one else: him. By confronting his abusers and those he sees as their enablers – by making the stand himself – by speaking out, by refusing to back down, by fighting, something started. And although Ancelotti was challenged on his initial claim that the whole stadium had racially abused Vinícius – “this is not one person going mad, it is a ground” – when the chants he referred to had called the Brazilian tonto [stupid] not mono [monkey], there could be little doubt about the coach’s insistence “the league has a problem”. That realisation may end in nothing tangible and there is impotence in lamenting another episode just to watch it happen again. There are still too many of those that chose sides by team, although they are fewer now, at least publicly. There are still those that insist on the buts, even as Ancelotti insisted “there are no ‘buts’”, those that accuse Vinícius of being provocative, as if somehow that makes it OK. He is the only one who gets the abuse, some say, as if that does too, as if that even means anything, as if that limits the impact to him alone when it is the opposite. Others talk about this as just a way of putting off a brilliant player, as if that was a legitimate weapon. But the hope, which may be hopelessly optimistic, is that it is inescapable now: they were being confronted with it. There were messages of condemnation for the competition and support for Vinícius, a media taking this on more before, a sense that it does matter, protocols and assumptions challenged. It came not just from Spain but everywhere, a mirror held up, accusations obliging action. There were statements from the Brazilian football federation and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from other clubs and players, including Valencia’s Diakhaby. Another investigation was announced. Valencia vowed to ban the fans identified for life. The Brazilian foreign minister called the Spanish ambassador. The fight is taken to them, demands made, threats hanging over them. Above all, by him. “He’s sad and he’s angry, but sad most of all,” said Ancelotti, but he isn’t stopping. “I will go up against the racists until the very end,” Vinícius Júnior said, “even if it’s far from here.” And if players such as him go, who is going to want to talk about the football then?

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Tony Doyle led a storied life as his cycling career took him to the top

I first met Tony Doyle in the lounge of a hotel near his home in Woking. He arrived early, smartly dressed and prepared to give up several hours for an interview about his cycling career. He was similarly generous with his time and wisdom during a friendship that lasted another eight or so years. He was also punctual without fail and I never saw him without a formal jacket. Tony was a proud man and the news of his death last Friday came as a shock. I considered him a mate and I hoped the feeling was mutual. If I needed a quote, a contact or just fancied a chat, no request was too much for him. Sure, as a journalist, I was of use to Tony and he was happy to take advantage of that. But he helped me out far more often than I did him. When a personal situation of mine had not quite worked out, he was sympathetic, nonjudgmental and robust in his advice. He offered compliments, too, and I knew them to be heartfelt because Tony was just as quick to point out my shortcomings. With Tony, you valued his frankness even when it stung. I could see why he was a valued mentor to young cyclists. For some reason I could never help him in quite the same way, though I had known about his mental-health struggles since that first meeting in the Premier Inn. At the time he admitted that he had not long emerged from a difficult spell. Quite sensibly he divulged this off the record, but said that he planned to discuss it in an autobiography. He wanted to demonstrate to fellow sufferers how they might come out the other side. The last I heard, the book was unfinished. With the help of his wife Adriana, a teacher, Tony had written several chapters. But without the motivation of a publisher’s advance, they had not managed to finish it. This was a shame. Tony led a storied life. He was twice a world champion in the individual pursuit, in 1980 and 1986, an exceptional achievement when cycling was of strictly minority interest in Britain. Tony recalled training alone on Herne Hill’s outdoor velodrome in the depths of winter. As a young rider he made the commute from his suburban home to a job in central London part of his training programme, improvising an interval session en route. It was hardly scientific but the roads were at least less busy back then. As a professional he was among the main men on the domestic road racing scene. It made a brief appearance on the mainstream in the 1980s through the Kellogg’s criterium series but the real money was abroad, both on road and track. Tony chose the latter, submitting himself to the six-day racing scene. Part indoor entertainment, part brutally-demanding athletic event, it involved several days of near-constant riding across the continent. It required stamina, track craft and, with only a limited number of racing slots available, a strong personality. Tony thrived on it. He became part of the Blue Train of riders who were invited to every meeting and commanded the biggest fees. He won 23 events, the most of any Briton. An imposing, athletic figure, he was known for his fluid, quick pedalling style. He had offers to join European road-race teams but he was doing too well to compromise his career on this winter circuit. In 1989 he crashed at the Munich Six-Day and suffered a terrible head injury. He ended up in a coma and was read the last rites. Even once he came from the brink the doctors feared brain damage, but Tony pulled through and submitted himself to months of rehab. Physically he appeared to make a full recovery, helping Britain win silver in the team pursuit at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, but he wondered if the accident had affected the wiring of his brain. Though purely a self-diagnosis, he said his consistently upbeat approach to life might have been checked. He retired in 1995, aged 37, and turned his focus to the administrative side of the sport. Later that year he was elected president of British Cycling on a platform which, he said, would bring increased transparency to the executive. The ruling body was acutely political back then, however, and he resigned only months afterwards following a dispute with the board. Fortunately, Tony could work a room. He was quick-witted, charming and outgoing. He was unafraid to call a politician, cycling executive or journalist in an attempt to network them. He was diligent and persistent too, qualities that presumably helped him find employment elsewhere in the industry, including his role in helping to set up the Tour of Britain and occasional commentary work on Eurosport. He would have liked a formal position supporting elite cyclists but could not quite crack the new generation’s circle of trust. Perhaps he should have served a coaching apprenticeship. Maybe he had not made the right friends. Whatever the truth, his complaint that his knowledge was going to waste seemed reasonable. He once told me about the time he worked on London 2012, serving as the chairman of the Olympic delivery board for Southwark, and was struck by a bout of depression. In one important meeting, he had struggled not to walk out, such was his inner turmoil. I hope his family do not mind my recounting such personal detail, but the point is this: he stayed. This is partly how I will remember Tony. For his fight. In 2019, a few weeks after his 60th birthday, he told me that the landmark should not denote a shift in this mindset. He retained his “passion” for the sport and still had much to give to it. I was concerned about a year ago, then, when he stopped returning calls. It turned out that the enthusiasm that had fuelled him for so long, taking him from training on the A roads of Middlesex to the summit of his sport, had been extinguished. I hoped it would prove temporary. I wrote to him knowing that he was still reading messages. But I didn’t know he had been taken ill. Few of us did. Possibly there should be some comfort in the knowledge that he went quickly and lived with his cancer diagnosis for only a month. But right now it does not feel like it. Travel well, old friend. Robert Dineen is a sports journalist who has worked for, among others, the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday. He is the author of Kings of the Road: A Journey Into The Heart of British Cycling

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What do you really see when you visit hand carwashes in Britain? Exploited workers and criminality

What’s the reality of your local hand carwash? Would you be surprised if it was exploiting its workers , discharging effluent illegally or not paying business rates? Statistically , at least one or all of these could be happening at an estimated 5,000-plus sites across the UK. Visiting these sites, you are often presented with workers dressed in tracksuit bottoms and hoodies regardless of the weather, with the (infrequent) wearing of wellies being the only concession to PPE. Closer inspection will probably show filthy toilets and cold, chaotic “rest areas’’ that workers share with chemicals and other detritus. In some cases, there are also indicators that workers are living on site. Hand carwashes are found at a variety of locations including retail sites, pub car parks, petrol stations, disused plots of land and, in a recent case, a front garden in a residential property. Structural conditions vary, but they are often visibly run down and unsafe. Other issues include noncompliance such as lack of planning permission, non-payment of business rates, no insurance (employers’ or public), health and safety risks, illegal discharge of trade effluent and noncompliance with trading standards. The evidence is extensive and provides a compelling argument for meaningful change and raising standards. Why, then, does the sector continue to rank as one of the most problematic in terms of labour exploitation and other forms of criminality? The answer to this question lies in the fact that there is little fear of oversight or sanction. Our research at the Responsible Car Wash Scheme (RCWS), conducted with Nottingham Trent University’s Work, Informalisation and Place research centre with input from local police, councils and the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), confirms this. Operating in plain sight, the rule-breaking has been ignored, tolerated and embedded, and has now become commonplace. Concerns over worker welfare take precedence when it comes to site visits by enforcement agencies such as the police and the GLAA, and rightly so. New and irregular migrants in the UK are attracted to hand carwashes as they can often start work immediately with no employment checks. This makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation. The current economic downturn will probably intensify this risk as more people may be willing to accept exploitative practices to secure work. Enforcement visits will not necessarily take into account wider elements of the business operation, missing the opportunity to look at other aspects of non-compliance. Noncompliance for other issues such as non-payment of business rates or lack of planning permission are implicitly tolerated, with a lack of available resources and other higher priorities frequently quoted as the reasons why agencies do not routinely visit sites. Sanctions against identified noncompliance can also require extensive intelligence gathering over a protracted period. The RCWS has trialled many different interventions to encourage hand carwashes to engage with the scheme, but with limited success. The RCWS voluntary scheme will close at the end of the month after five years, with only a handful of hand carwashes having achieved accreditation. The body of evidence compiled by ourselves and other parties on poor business practices is a damning indictment of the sector. With no government support for licensing it is hard to see how standards will improve in the future. The government should implement mandatory licensing of hand carwashes. A licensing scheme means that hand carwashes will need to provide evidence that they have planning permission, that they hold insurance, they have a trade effluent permit, pay business rates, that they comply with health, safety and environmental regulations and that they uphold statutory employment rights. With the burden of proof transferred to the operator, if they can’t provide the evidence they can’t open for business. Too much to ask for? I don’t think so. It’s what all businesses are required to do. Teresa Sayers is managing director of the Responsible Car Wash Scheme Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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UK labour market can’t hold out much longer against impact of stagflation

Britain’s economy is suffering from a textbook case of stagflation, and the symptoms are clear from the latest labour market trends. It looks like a complex picture. The number of people looking for work rose while the number of job vacancies fell. Hours worked in the economy were down while days lost through strikes in 2022 were the highest annually since 1989. In fact, the diagnosis is straightforward. There was zero growth in the final three months of 2022 while the annual inflation stood at above 10%. Attempts by the Bank of England to reduce inflationary pressure through higher interest rates are feeding into lower levels of activity – but only slowly. There has been no sudden collapse of the sort seen during the global financial crisis of 2008. There are a few complications, as shown by the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. The legacy of the pandemic has affected the supply of labour, largely because workers in the older age groups have given up work, either through choice or due to long-term sickness. Although the number of vacancies has fallen since last summer, it is still well above pre-pandemic levels. Businesses and employees are responding to these trends in predictable ways. Firms are looking past the current economic slowdown and wondering whether they will be able to replace workers in the future if they make them redundant now. Mostly, they are hoarding staff, taking on part-time rather than full-time employees, and paying their workers more. Annual growth in regular pay – excluding bonuses – stood at 6.7% in the three months to December. In the private sector, earnings growth was 7.3%. Labour shortages have made it easier for some groups of workers to secure higher pay deals. Even so, private sector pay is not keeping pace with price rises, and the resulting squeeze on real incomes is a big factor behind the sluggish state of the economy. Public sector workers are facing a bigger hit than those in the private sector, leading to widespread industrial action . There are, though, signs that people who were formerly inactive – neither working nor actively looking for a job – are starting to return to the jobs market. Again, this is only what might be expected in light of the problems many people are having to make ends meet. Inactivity fell by 113,000 towards the end of last year as long-term sickness dropped and early retirees made themselves available for work. The government can tackle stagflation with one of two cures. First, it can try to ease the pressure for higher wages by taking steps to increase the supply of labour. It could, for example, change the pension rules to encourage more early retirees back to work. It could make childcare less expensive. It could take the advice of the British Chambers of Commerce and reform the shortage occupation list to make it easier for firms to fill job vacancies from outside the UK when they cannot recruit locally. Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, is looking at whether tougher benefit rules are needed to move people from welfare into work. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion The alternative is for the Bank of England to carry on pushing up interest rates until higher interest rates lead to higher unemployment and less upward pressure on wages. In all likelihood, there will be a combination of both approaches. So far, the labour market has proved to be remarkably resilient but that won’t last. There are already signs from the latest data for inactivity and pay that the labour market is on the turn. The fact that unemployment has started to rise suggests one thing: this is going to hurt.

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Simon Schama on the broken relationship between humans and nature: ‘The joke’s on us. Things are amiss’

I n March 2021, the 13th month of the Covid confinement, the peepers , in their vast multitudes, sang out again. Down in the swampy wetlands below our house in Hudson Valley, New York, millions of Pseudacris crucifer (“cross-bearing false locusts” but actually minute frogs) puffed up their air sacs and warbled for a mate. That’s spring for you. The peepers are so tiny – an inch or so long – that you’ll never see one, no matter how carefully you creep up on them. Their blown-out song bags are nearly as big as the rest of them; it’s all they are: innocently inflated peeps of expectation. They are not alone. In recent years, the soprano peepers have been accompanied by a bass rhythm section – wood frogs, Lithobates sylvaticus , a tattoo of deep quacking, punctuated by raspy burps. They and the peepers survive bitter winters by means of antifreeze cryoprotectants stored within their bodies. When ice crystals begin to form on their skins, their livers flood the bloodstream with glucose, sending vital organs like the heart, its beating paused, into a dormant but protected state. Seventy per cent of the frogs’ body water can then freeze without compromising the organs that will magically reawaken in the spring. To help matters, wood frogs can recycle urea through their urine. So if you were to come across a wood frog in deep winter, or expose a tiny peeper beneath the leaf litter, their sparkling, gelid rigidity would lead you to assume they were dead. A twist from your fingers could snap a leg. So don’t do that, for as the Hudson Valley light goes pearly and the afternoons stretch out, the superficial body ice of the frogs melts away and, along with that decrystallising resurrection, wild singing begins: at first a mere teatime tuning up by scattered vocalists, but by sunset building into a massive chorus, an entire Albert Hall-ful of peepers. There is always mating business to be getting on with and only a month or so to get it done. Quick, quack, peep. The teeming amphibians ecstatically multiplied, even as much of humanity sank into another engulfing wave of infection. I t’s a commonplace (but no less true for being so) that the empty desolation of cities, the grim, still, silence of locked-down streets and squares, was offset by the irrepressible burgeoning of nature. We saw it – the budding and blossoming, the buzzing and butterfly-fluttering on our walks in parks and on heaths, in our gardens and on windowsills. While we hunkered and cowered, and ordered home delivery, flora rioted; fauna trespassed. Parliaments of legislators were reduced to socially distanced barking from the hollow shell of their chambers, while parliaments of birds flocked and chattered. We tweeted with our fingers; they tweeted with their lungs. Those with the sweetest song showed off, none more liquidly around here, in Hudson Valley, than the Carolina wren nesting under our barbecue. The more we retreated into digitally numbed companionship, the more brazenly the company of animals advanced towards us. Morning roadkill was evidence of nocturnal roaming and rambling by hitherto seldom-seen critters. On the path leading to a local arts centre, weasels and milk snakes lay side by side, cartoonishly flattened, as if mutually KO’d in a small-hours brawl. At the entrance to our local woodland trail, a sign advised walkers not to make nice with the black bears. Everything, except us, seemed to be emboldened. Reporting on record fox sightings in her London neighbourhood, a friend chuckled, “It’s laughing at us, nature is.” So it was: the low chuckle of gallows humour. But the joke’s on us. Things are amiss. Species are out of place, or incautiously testing human presumptions about where their place actually lies, and what its boundaries might be. Lockdowns or not, migrants, two-legged and four, are on the move to wherever subsistence beckons. In north Wales, mountain goats from the Great Orme munching potted petunias off Llandudno windowsills supplied much-needed online entertainment. But the crashing of barriers between wild and domestic spaces has an ominous side. Displacement is a symptom of ecosystems under stress. The capybara roaming through the upscale gardens of houses in Nordelta on the outskirts of Buenos Aires would not be there had not the suburb been built by draining extensive areas of the Luján River delta, robbing the metre-long rodents of their natural habitat. The relentless growth of Mumbai – a million new residents a year – has pushed its eastern and western suburbs into areas normally reserved for leopards, specifically the 100 sq km of the Sanjay Gandhi wildlife sanctuary. Deprived of prey, the big cats have strayed beyond the preserve. At least 50 of them have taken up residence within the city, sustaining themselves from the enormous population of feral dogs, occasionally sampling an amuse-bouche of a dachshund or a Siamese cat. The causes and consequences of this ecological disruption are complicated. On the one hand, it’s not good for the leopards to become Mumbai street creatures; on the other, they are doing the bloated metropolis a favour by culling the feral dog packs, which often include rabid animals. But then again, there would not be so many of those wild dogs were it not for the introduction, a decade ago, of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug commonly used for livestock in the 1990s, which ended up driving the third player in this urban drama – white-rumped vultures – to near extinction as a result of scavenging drugged cattle. A south Asian vulture population of 40 million in the 1980s now numbers around 19,000 40 years later . This is more than a catastrophic species loss, bad enough though that is. The dramatic depletion of vultures has unpicked the ecological threads that have tied human and animal culture together in India for centuries. The reverent freedom given to sacred cows by Hinduism, so that they might wander the streets until their bodies lie down in peaceful death, depended on the working assumption that carcasses would be cleaned by scavenging vulture flocks. Without the vultures, decomposing cattle have attracted rats and feral dogs, whose numbers have increased exponentially as the birds have disappeared. A collateral result is the steeply rising incidence of rabid attacks on humans, many of them fatal. Mutuality between humans and animals has been dangerously disrupted. Temple monkeys, long conditioned to exist symbiotically with humans, and largely dependent on pilgrims and tourists for their food, turned combative as a result of the abrupt withdrawal of their customary diet. The Thai temple city of Lopburi has seen gangs of macaques, in their thousands, engage in violent street battles over scraps of discarded food, while residents barricaded themselves in their houses against the rampaging primates. There is good reason for their fear. Macaques are reservoir carriers of herpes B – McHV1 – often lethal for humans. Disruption-born contagions are happening in domestic as well as exotic places. A serious malady generated by ecological displacement arrived almost 50 years ago and parked itself on the vegetation of the American dream: the suburban lawn. During my first year in New York state in 1994, it found me, and was no fun at all: three months of piercing headaches, spells of dizziness, and sharp, arthritic muscle pain, before an antibiotic got the better of it. The infecting agent of Lyme disease (named after Old Lyme, Connecticut, where it was first diagnosed and analysed) is a corkscrew-shaped spirochaete found in white-footed mice and sometimes in other small mammals like chipmunks. Not only do those mice survive the excavation and shredding of the woodland habitat for house construction, they positively thrive on the alteration, overwintering in the suburban estates that have displaced their native habitat. The rodents function as reservoirs for the dormant but immanent spirochaete. Enter black-legged ticks, needing blood meals at each change in their life cycle, from larva to nymph to adult. A feed on the mice absorbs the spirochaete, which is then transferred to white-tailed deer, upon which the ticks lodge in huge numbers, especially on the ears and around the nose. The deer have themselves multiplied abundantly on the borderland between old forests and the herbicide-saturated, brilliantly lurid carpet lawns of “colonial” McMansions. Suburbanites are accustomed to watching white-tailed deer emerge from their woodland cover to graze their shrubs or settle on lawn pasture. During the pandemic, fear of urban contagiousness led to departures from cities by those who could afford to do so. But clearcutting for suburban construction to meet the quickened demand has brought new residents ever closer to those ubiquitous reservoirs of disease – white-footed mice. Even as house-dwellers awaited their next delivery of online-ordered groceries, black-legged ticks hung on the blades of those hyperfertilised lawns, primed for their next blood meal. T his shrinking of distance between wild and human habitats has also encouraged the long-distance traffic in wild animals. In 2005, it was estimated that each year of the previous decade had seen the live trafficking of 40,000 primates, 640,000 reptiles, 4 million birds and 350 million fish , numbers that have almost certainly increased in the years since. In 2017, China’s National Key Research and Development Programme estimated the value of wildlife trades for medical sales and food consumption at 520bn yuan (£60bn). Pangolins – scaly anteaters found in both sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia – are, since the enforcement of restrictions against ivory, the most commonly trafficked mammals of all. Malayan pangolins are served in high-end restaurants in south-east Asia, especially in Vietnam, where they are both the most popular wild delicacy on the menu and, at £120 for 450g, the most expensive. Assuming you have remembered to order your pangolin three hours in advance, the manager of the Thiên Vuong Tuu (Alcohol of the Gods) restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City will personally bring the live animal to your table and slit its throat to assure you of the unimpeachable freshness of the upcoming dish. Unlike sources of ivory, pangolins are pathetically easy to catch. Their scaly covering may pose a challenge for animal predators, but when they are shaken from a tree or a bushy hideaway, the perfectly curled-up ball into which they form themselves is a pangolin harvester’s perfect convenience. Into the bag go the scaly balls and into the truck goes the bagful. Tens of thousands of these animals are caught this way every year, most of them merely for the scales, which, when ground finely, are advertised as promoting lactation, helping to heal sores and rashes, banishing headaches and curing anorexia, infertility and pretty much anything else that might ail you. The fact that the scales are entirely keratin, and thus ingesting them is no more medical help than eating chewed fingernails, has no effect on the size and success of the pangolin market, which asks £2,400 for a kilogram of scales plucked from the roasted animals. An ironic consequence of the rise in demand for animal-sourced remedies is that they have ended up contributing to the ailments they are thought to cure. In the spring of 2020, a group of Chinese scientists published analyses of coronavirus-infected pangolins confiscated from smugglers in 2017 and 2018 by customs officials at Guangdong. The receptor-binding domain of the virus was 97% identical with that of Sars-CoV-2. Though this is not enough to clinch the case for pangolins being the intermediary host for the virus between a reservoir mammal like a bat and the end destination in humans, it adds to the growing evidence that the waves of terrifying diseases coming at the world faster and faster are almost always zoonotic. They are the direct result of what we have done to our planetary habitat. Climate change has added to the witches’ brew, since the flooding that comes with extreme weather events has created more breeding pools for disease-carrying mosquitoes, which, thanks to global warming, now also have an extended season in which to multiply. The massively extended disease ranges of West Nile virus and Zika virus are the result. In a disconcertingly gothic footnote that Mary Shelley would have appreciated, the melting of glaciers on the Tibet-Qinghai border into a vast saline lake has revealed viruses dated to 15,000 years ago and said to be unlike any yet known to contemporary science. The years since 1980 have seen outbreaks of new infections at a rate of one every eight months in hot zones from Brazil to central Africa to south-east Asia, most of them viral. They include the catastrophes of HIV and Ebola , as well as Sars and H5N1 bird flu . The routinisation of long-distance trade in animals has speeded up the pace of these contagions. H5N1 originated in two mountain eagles illegally transported to Belgium from Thailand; chytridiomycosis, the fungal disease that made 90 species of amphibians extinct , was spread by the international traffic in African clawed frogs. Sickness in animals has, inevitably, made its way into the human population transporting, marketing and consuming them. Mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), first identified in 1958 in macaques, has reservoirs in striped mice, giant pouched rats, African rope squirrels and brush-tailed porcupines. A first American outbreak in 2003 has been traced to some of those exotic animals being housed with prairie dogs for the wild pet trade. The jump of the disease from animal to human populations in Africa is itself a cascade of all the disruptions – demographic, social and environmental – that have stirred new contagions from dormancy. For 40 years, no human cases of Mpox were recorded. But between 1970 and 2018 the population of Nigeria almost quadrupled from nearly 56 million to 195 million. The demographic explosion drove the conversion of rainforest to farmland and conurbations, along with the migration of reservoir species of animals into cities. A series of floods generated by climate change accelerated this migration, and, ironically, the termination of smallpox vaccination programmes due to the announced declaration of the extinction of the disease in 1980 weakened immunity to the closely related Mpox virus. From two African zones – west Africa and the chronically war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo – the international trade in wildlife exported the disease to the US and beyond. The Sars epidemic of 2003-04, only barely contained, has been traced back to the meat of masked palm civets, shredded and combined with chrysanthemum petals and minced snake to make the high-priced delicacy “dragon-tiger-phoenix soup”, served in upmarket restaurants in south China. The virus jumped, not to civet-eaters, but to others in the supply chain leading to the dish: breeders of captive civets held in filthy cages in Guangdong, transporters, slaughterers and cooks. It gets worse (or better) for an opportunistic virus. In Thailand, captive populations of masked palm civets are fed exclusively on coffee bean “cherries” which, as they travel through the gastro-intestinal tract, have the acidity extracted from them by the action of digestion-aiding enzymes. The neat piles of coffee cherries packed in civet excreta will then end up as your speciality java of the day, expensively priced on the market. Imagine how many opportunities there might be for a virus to make the jump from an infected animal to a civet-shit gatherer slaving on minimum wage. Venti latte, anyone? Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Although a letter to Nature Medicine in March 2020 from Kristian Andersen and four microbiologist colleagues argued, on the basis of genomic analysis, that “it is improbable that Sars-CoV-2 emerged from the laboratory manipulation of a related Sars-CoV-like coronavirus” and that it was more likely to have come from an animal reservoir – like Rhinolophus affinis , the intermediate horseshoe bat – there is, at the time of writing, no definitive verdict on the virus’s aetiology. Live mammals known to be susceptible to Sars, such as hog badgers, foxes and (especially) raccoon dogs sold for both fur and meat, were stored and sold in quantities at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, and the first known infected person was a vendor there. In March 2023, raw genetic data taken from swabs around the stacked cages of raccoon dogs showed that an animal did indeed carry the Sars-CoV-2 virus, although whether it contracted the infection independently in the wild or was infected by a human remains as yet unproven. In January 2023, 155 microbiologists joined a commentary by the editor of the Journal of Virology, Felicia Goodrum, asking, optimistically, for a less politicised “ rational discourse ” on the subject, stating that “at this time and based on the available data, there is no compelling evidence” supporting either “an accident” or “nefarious actors” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That still remains the case, since data supporting the US Department of Energy’s “low confidence” opinion, made public in February 2023 , that a lab leak was the likely origin of the virus, remains classified. Unfortunately, there may never be a definitive explanation of the origin of Sars-CoV-2, but there is no doubt that the closeness between human and wild animal populations has enabled “reverse zoonosis”: viral leaps from humans to non-humans, and then back again. It is thought by some epidemiologists that this is the route that the Omicron variant of Covid-19 took, mutation taking place in infected rats which then transmitted an adapted virus back to humans. On 23 February 2023, Cambodian health authorities reported the death of an 11-year-old girl in Prey Veng province from H5N1, the virus responsible for the current pandemic of influenza in wild and domestic bird populations. The virus had already made the jump from avians to mammals including Peruvian seals and Spanish mink. At the time of writing, although the Cambodian girl’s father also tested positive for H5N1 infection, there is as yet no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. But the likely epidemiological implication of this news from Cambodia has already made the World Health Organization (the WHO) state that the report is “worrying”. Wildlife, intensively fed and bred livestock, and humans to all intents and purposes, now constitute a common planetary reservoir of perpetually evolving and mutating micro-organisms, some of them baleful. The Global Virome Project , established, as its name suggests, to coordinate worldwide research, estimates that there are 1.6m potential zoonotic viruses in the world with just 1% of them currently identified and analysed. All this is happening at ever briefer intervals. Demography remakes geography, transforming – right now, and not for the better – the future of life on Earth. B y the end of 2021, up to 18 million people had died , worldwide, from Covid-19 infection, according to some estimates. You would suppose that in the face of a pandemic – an outbreak that by definition is global – together with a recognition of shared vulnerability, governments and politicians might have set aside the usual mutual suspicions and, under the aegis of the WHO, agreed on common approaches to containment, vaccination and control. Needless to say, nothing remotely like that has happened. If anything, the reverse has been the case: responses to the pandemic sharply diverged, even within entities like the European Union, ostensibly committed to common policies. Decisions taken by individual US states on vaccination requirements and mask mandates thwarted federal guidelines, deepening the already bitter cultural divisions between “red” and “blue” America. Ron DeSantis , the Republican governor of Florida, cast himself as the voice of Regular Folks’ mistrust of expert opinion handed down from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: the people’s anti-Fauci. To some extent, the raising of walls, psychological and institutional, is understandable. The instinctive reaction to contagion breaking out somewhere distant is to erect barriers against its importation. For a while, geographically isolated countries like New Zealand benefited from the possibility of self-sealing. But two years’ experience of the pandemic, in particular the unpredictable incidence of recurring outbreaks and viral mutations, has made the locking off of discrete zones of exclusion all but impossible. The need for an alternative, transnational approach to containment, mitigation and protection, coordinated by the WHO, has never been more urgent. The geographically uneven and glaringly unequal supply and delivery of vaccines and therapeutic drugs has only underlined this need. Because mutations arise most easily in thinly vaccinated populations, the comment of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, that “until everyone is vaccinated no one will be safe” ought to have been an epidemiological truism. This was not, however, the attitude of the then US president. At the end of May 2020, during the most desperate early days of the pandemic, Donald Trump announced that the US would be withdrawing from the WHO . His major justification was to complain that the organisation had become a pawn of the Chinese government and had, in effect, been an accomplice of Beijing’s efforts to disguise the origin of the Covid outbreak. In Trump’s view, this meant that China and the WHO, working as collaborators, had knowingly unleashed the contagion on the world with the unpardonable consequence (if not actual intention) of damaging his re-election prospects. They had had the audacity to launch the embarrassment virus with millions of fatalities as collateral damage. Whether or not Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is undeniable that China did initially play down the magnitude of the outbreak in Wuhan. The WIV was not at all transparent in making documentation of its experiments with genetically manipulated viruses available, yet the WHO was prepared to take on trust Chinese statements, such as they were, about the origin and spread of the disease. It was, however, far from alone in this incuriousness. In the early stages of the outbreak, there was no more ardent cheerleader for Xi Jinping and his government’s Covid measures than Trump himself. “China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus,” he said in January 2020, and a month later, “ I think China’s handled it [Covid] really well .” Once, however, Trump concluded that China had weaponised its own epidemiological dishonesty and incompetence expressly to make him look bad, his mentions of the virus invariably came with a tag of culpability, as in “ the China virus ” or more facetiously “ the kung flu ”. There is a history to attaching misleading nicknames to pandemics, the better to characterise them as an alien plague falling upon a vulnerable homeland. Although the first documented cases of the horrific influenza outbreak of 1918 occurred in a military establishment in Kansas, the pandemic became known as “ the Spanish flu ”, principally as a result of that country’s willingness (unlike belligerents in Europe) to report candidly on the severity and extent of the contagion. In no time at all, discussion about the origin and transmission routes of Covid had likewise collapsed into the usual mire of military metaphors, so that its progress became an “invasion” against which “defences” had to be manned, battles fought, conquests pursued, to a decisive “victory”. Politically, it was all too easy for populist leaders, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, infuriated by their impotence in the face of a microbial “enemy”, to emerge from an initial state of denial into a nationalist blame game; somehow, some other force, some other nation, was responsible for their country’s predicament. Before long, any possibility of a clear and honest understanding of the common worldwide conditions that allowed such disasters to happen, not least the biological consequences of environmental degradation, became swallowed up by this default vocabulary of competitive nationalism. Astonishingly, Boris Johnson’s UK government was so intent on applying its new norms of Brexit isolation that it withdrew from the common European pandemic early warning information pool. Later, it made the claim that Brexit had allowed it to have the earliest and most successful vaccination programme, passing over the inconvenient fact that, as of July 2022, Britain nonetheless had the highest case and mortality rate of any state in western Europe. Mercifully, it has not all been a zero-sum game. In late March 2021, 25 world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, Johnson, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Cyril Ramaphosa, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the head of the European Council, Charles Michel, as well as the prime ministers of South Korea, Fiji, Thailand, Chile, Senegal and Tunisia – but, depressingly, missing the leaders of the US, Japan, Russia and China – issued a statement explicitly acknowledging the chain linking human and non-human lives and destinies. Invoking the multilateralist idealism of the years following the second world war that sought a reconnected world through the United Nations and agencies like the WHO, they proposed a legally binding international treaty to deal with future pandemics. Such a treaty would embody “an approach that connects the health of humans, animals and our planet”. On 1 September 2021, Merkel and Ghebreyesus opened the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin. In a gesture more appropriate for a country fair or the launch of an ocean liner, they cut a ribbon in two places. The ribbon was striped red and white as if simultaneously alerting visitors to peril and bidding them enter anyway. The hub’s mission brief says that it is meant to provide global data linkage and the sharing of advanced analytical tools and predictive models, the better to be armed against future outbreaks. “No single institution or nation can do this alone,” Ghebreyesus declared. “That’s why we have coined the term ‘collaborative intelligence’.” But there is already data-gathering at the WHO Academy in Lyon and preparations for the storage of infectious material at a secure bio-bank in – where else? – Switzerland. None of this, however, overcomes the immense disparity of resources, for both research and clinical trials, between richer countries and the regions of the world from which new infectious diseases often arise. This moment in world history is no less fraught for being so depressingly familiar: the immemorial conflict between “is” and “ought”; between short-term power plays and long-term security; between the habits of immediate gratification and the prospering of future generations; between the cult of individualism and the urgencies of common interest; between the drum beat of national tribalism and the bugle call of global peril; between native instinct and hard-earned knowledge. If it is a happy answer you want to the question as to which will prevail, it is probably best not to ask a historian. For history’s findings are more often than not tragic, and its boneyard littered with the remains of high-minded internationalist projects. The appeals of idealists fill whole-page declarations in earnest broadsheets and win funds from far-sighted philanthropic foundations. But the plans and the planners are demonised by the tribunes of gut instinct as suspiciously alien, hatched by cosmopolitan elites: the work of foreign bodies. This is an edited extact from Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama (Simon & Schuster, £30). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply. Hear more from Simon Schama as he discusses Foreign Bodies in a livestreamed Guardian Live event at 8pm BST on 24 July. Tickets available here .

GOOD

Stay-at-home North Shropshire Tories call time on succession of self-inflicted train wrecks

We all congratulate Lib Dem Helen Morgan on her victory at Thursday’s North Shropshire by-election. At the same time, let us recognize that with a proud record of public service in the military and NHS, the very antithesis of a career politician, Neil Shastri-Hurst was an excellent Conservative candidate. Just as I did after failing to win the Chesham and Amersham by-election in June, Neil will now delve deeply into a study of self-reflection to determine what more he could personally have done. He should not dwell in that space for too long as this thumping defeat for the Conservatives was clearly not his fault. The total collapse of the Labour vote in North Shropshire has gone largely unreported. All the excited talk of swings and shares of votes ignores the reality of differential turnout. Surely those who previously wanted Comrade Corbyn to be our Prime Minister remain highly motivated to “land one on Boris” when given the chance! So I suggest that the nine thousand lost Labour votes went directly to the Lib Dem corner without passing go (accounting for three quarters of the increase in their vote!). So the heady Lib Dem claim that it was the successful recruitment of Brexit-voting Tory voters into the open arms of EU-fanatic Ed Davey “wot won it” is somewhat wide of the mark. As in Chesham and Amersham, stay-at-home Tories were again the real story of the night. Conservative voters who want to register their displeasure with a Conservative government do so very effectively at a by-election by simply staying at home; for lifelong Tory voters, this is a big step! Given an 80-seat majority, with zero chance of a change in government, they can express this anger without risk. In Chesham and Amersham, stay-at-home Tories were expressing their deep resentment of HS2, opposition to feared planning reforms and anger at the state of local roads; all of which was heard loud and clear. In North Shropshire, stay-at-home Tories are surely calling time on the endless succession of self-inflicted train wrecks and for an urgent resumption of sound government. Contrary to the giddy rhetoric of some, the government’s legislative fuel tank is still running on full. The £36 billion package to reform the NHS and social care tackles issues that successive governments have ducked for decades. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill gives the eleven thousand extra police officers already recruited the powers and tools they need to keep us all safe. The Nationality and Borders Bill should seriously curtail the dangerous small boat crossings of the Channel. The Chancellor’s well thought through reduction to the Universal Credit taper rate and increase to work allowances gives the lowest paid workers a tax cut worth £2.2 billion just in time for Christmas. And just this last week the government announced a formal consultation on a UK Bill of Rights to re-assert the primacy of UK law, signed an historic deal with Australia unlocking over £10 billion of free trade and enshrined the Armed Forces Covenant into law. All of this at the same time as taking the immensely difficult decisions to steer our country through a global pandemic whilst maintaining record levels of employment, delivering a world-leading vaccine rollout and now the fastest booster programme in Europe. But very few voters in North Shropshire heard any of this above the deafening noise of crashing carriages and tangled train tracks. The Prime Minister knows what he needs to do. To be the best leader that we know he can be, he must surround himself with the very best talent; step forward Jeremy Hunt and Tom Tugendhat to join the top table. He has to restore discipline in the ranks; start by firing anyone who publicly criticizes outstanding public servants like Chris Whitty. And just like any effective CEO, he should set and publish timebound “must-do” delivery objectives for every member of his Cabinet; the results of which must align to enable the Chancellor to get back to the best levelling-up device known to man: cutting taxes for hardworking families as soon as possible and certainly before the next General Election. During my thirty years in business all around the world, the best trading turnarounds I have seen have been executed by strong and charismatic CEOs who find their backs against the wall with hostile inbound issues, shareholders, and competitors on all fronts. These are the testing conditions that bring out the very best in leaders. Now is the time for our Prime Minister to rediscover his very best.

BAD

Finally, women are calling out toxic online dates. Now to target the apps themselves

It had to happen. And now it has. Women are finally rising up against the pitfalls of dating app culture, and fighting back. Since March 2022, Are We Dating the Same Guy? Facebook groups have sprung up in almost every major American city, from New York to Little Rock, as a way for women to call out bad digital dating experiences. What started as small-scale communities are now spreading internationally and have grown to include hundreds of thousands of members. “Boys, frickin’ buckle up,” one TikTok user said in July. “If you mistreat a girl, or are doing some sketchy stuff, the time is over, ‘cause you’re getting caught.” Since joining some of these groups earlier this year, what I’ve seen, above all, is women trying to protect each other, including from sexual assault. In one east coast US city, a woman posted about a date with a man during which he pinned her down and choked her without consent. Other users gently walked her through her responsibility to report him to the dating app in order to protect other women. She did, and then posted a screenshot saying that he had been banned (a welcome decision, but one that doesn’t prevent him just joining another dating app and doing it again). Are We Dating the Same Guy? appears to have been started by three women, none of whom have sought the limelight (and none have immediately responded to requests for comment). Their identifying details on social media are scant, lending an air of mystery to the open-secret quality of this enterprise. One must be approved to join, and agree to a lengthy list of ground rules, which includes not sharing any recognisable information about users or their posts in public. Cautious to protect members’ privacy, I hesitated about writing about the groups at all, until I saw a male standup comedian on TikTok making fun of them, characterising women’s complaints as frivolous. “‘Saw him in the park, weird posture’,” he joked, mocking users’ comments. “‘Yellowing teeth.’ He’d probably say you were a bitch.” Are We Dating the Same Guy? groups are full of pushback against misogynistic attitudes, as well as practical advice from women about how to navigate today’s broken dating culture. They offer support for heartbreak after being ghosted, warnings about catfishers and men who have scammed them for money. Members give their takes on some of the plagues of modern dating, such as “situationships”, those relationships that exist in a limbo of non-commitment. “My advice is never settle for a situationship again,” one wrote. “Your heart will get hurt and it never ends well.” The women are often very funny, sharing stories of bad dates and relationships gone wrong. Or they are sad, many of them, at how difficult it has become to find true intimacy. “Why is it so hard to meet a gentleman who truly loves you?” one asked. “Two words,” another responded. “Swipe culture.” The ostensible reason for the group, as suggested by its title – calling out men for cheating or dating multiple women at the same time – is only part of what goes on. But it is a big part. Women who have matched with men will post their pictures to get the inside scoop on what they are really like, beyond their profiles. Members will also post a picture of someone they’ve been dating for a while to find out if he’s seeing others. In one of the most dramatic threads I’ve seen, a married man with four children was exposed for dating women on the apps, after women who apparently knew his wife saw the thread and said they were going to alert her. Often, the women express their gratitude to each other for the information. “This group is a godsend,” someone said. “I’m so glad we have a community to help prevent us from being preyed on by opportunistic men.” Are there downsides to all of this? A key issue is privacy – the men’s privacy – which the administrators of these groups seem to be battling to protect as best they can, frequently issuing reminders that users must be “extra extra strict” in enforcing rules about not saying anything “accusatory” that could lead to “possible defamation”. The groups are also accused of operating within an increasingly lawless, internet sleuthing culture, where social media users on TikTok and other platforms publicly shame men for alleged transgressions, acting as judge and jury, sometimes with real life consequences . The groups also have a decidedly heteronormative focus, with the majority of users being women mainly discussing cisgendered men (despite no indication that the groups exclude discussion of LGBTQ+ people or relationships). But they are also an example of women taking problematic systems into their own hands, to protect themselves from toxic behaviours that for decades have disproportionately impacted women. #MeToo’s promised reckoning has been subject to a predictable backlash. Moira Donegan, the journalist responsible for compiling what was dubbed the Shitty Media Men list in 2017, a viral Google spreadsheet listing alleged sexual harassers in the US media industry, is currently facing a libel lawsuit . Are We Dating the Same Guy? groups are the whisper network in step with the digital age. In one study of women who had used a dating platform in the past 15 years, more than a third said they have been sexually assaulted by someone they met on an app. In an ideal world, Are We Dating the Same Guy? wouldn’t have to exist, because dating apps would protect their users more . They would vet their users, provide background checks and age checks and proof about whether or not someone is married. These Facebook groups have emerged and caught fire in reaction to the widespread, unchecked abuses rife in dating app culture – from cheating to rape. My only regret is that their members don’t turn the same passion they have for outing male misconduct on the dating app industry itself. Women have more power in this than perhaps they realise: they can refuse to use dating apps at all. Nancy Jo Sales is a writer at Vanity Fair and the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

BAD

The Partygate investigation has left more questions than answers

To his critics’ evident disappointment, the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into lockdown rule-breaking in Downing Street concluded without the Prime Minister receiving multiple fines . Boris Johnson was given only one fixed penalty notice, for attending a birthday gathering. In total, 126 fines were awarded for events on eight different dates. A team of 12 detectives had worked on the investigation, examining 345 documents, 510 photographs and CCTV images, and 204 questionnaires. But the results of their work leave rather more questions than answers. It is unfortunate, for one thing, that the Met is not naming the recipients of the penalties. While Mr Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, opted to inform the public when they received a fine, others were under no obligation to do the same. The result is that it is not clear whether junior officials bore the brunt of the penalties, fairly or not. It is also impossible to know whether the police conducted their investigation properly. In particular, it has left some observers wondering why it is that some events resulted in the Met taking action, while others did not. In part, that may be due to the absurdity of the lockdown rules themselves. They changed so often, and in such obscure ways, that an event that might have been found in breach one month could have been perfectly legal the next, even if the effect of each set of rules was intended to be the same. In any case, the country should never have been in a situation in which a birthday party could be considered illegal. Or indeed, a drink and a curry with colleagues. Sir Keir Starmer, who relished the opportunity presented by “partygate” to moralise on the Government’s sins, is himself facing an investigation by police in Durham over an event involving exactly that. Mr Johnson is not out of the woods yet. Now that the Met’s investigation has finished, a report by the senior civil servant Sue Gray is due to be published within days . He also faces a separate inquiry by a Commons committee into whether he misled Parliament, so this saga may have months more to run. The Government is rightly keen to move on to more pressing issues such as the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine, but the public is still entitled to an explanation as to why we ended up enduring such ridiculous lockdown rules in the first place. Will we ever get it?

BAD

Oliver Dowden named deputy PM and Alex Chalk justice secretary after Raab quits

Rishi Sunak has appointed his long-term ally Oliver Dowden as his deputy after the resignation of Dominic Raab, while making Alex Chalk the new justice secretary. Downing Street announced on Friday that the prime minister had promoted Dowden, a minister in the Cabinet Office, after Raab’s decision to stand down over a report on allegations of bullying behaviour. Sunak also decided to promote Chalk, a trained lawyer, from his role at the Ministry of Defence, defying speculation that Raab’s successor would be a woman. The appointments came hours after Raab’s resignation, which was triggered by the lengthy report by Adam Tolley KC into multiple bullying accusations made against him by senior civil servants. Sunak’s appointment of Dowden as deputy prime minister cements his reputation in government as the prime minister’s right-hand man, after a stint in the Cabinet Office where he was responsible for co-ordinating the government’s response to winter strikes. Dowden was culture, media and sport secretary for 18 months in Boris Johnson’s government, during which time he provided emergency funding for the arts during the pandemic and also banned Huawei from UK 5G networks . His promotion came only an hour after sources had briefed that Sunak would not formally appoint a new deputy to replace Raab, suggesting the prime minister had made a last-minute change of plan. His new role will enable him to continue working across government, and will also see him deputise should the prime minister be unable to attend prime minister’s questions. Dowden and Sunak have been close for years. Together with Robert Jenrick, who is now the immigration minister, they wrote a piece in the Times in 2019 backing Boris Johnson as the next Tory leader and prime minister – a piece that was seen at the time as crucial in bolstering Johnson’s campaign. Last summer, Dowden resigned as the chair of the Conservative party after a pair of disastrous byelection defeats, saying he was taking responsibility for the results. In his resignation letter, he said: “We cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility.” His comments were taken at the time to be a veiled criticism of the prime minister , and Dowden was accused of being part of a plan to make Sunak prime minister . When Sunak did run in the eventual leadership campaign, Dowden was an early backer . And when Sunak became prime minister following Liz Truss’s resignation last autumn, he appointed Dowden to the Cabinet Office in a roving role that allowed him to tackle problems across different departments, such as the winter’s industrial action. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Chalk, meanwhile, is a former lawyer who has prosecuted and defended clients in a range of cases, from terrorism charges to fraud. His appointment satisfies the demand of some Conservative backbenchers that the justice secretary should be a lawyer, but disappoints others who had hoped it would be a woman. Downing Street also announced on Friday returns to government for Chloe Smith and John Whittingdale. Smith, who was work and pensions secretary under Truss, will take over as secretary of state for science, innovation and technology to cover the maternity leave of Michelle Donelan. Whittingdale, a former culture, media and sport secretary, will return to the department in a junior ministerial role to cover the maternity leave of Julia Lopez. Whittingdale came to public prominence in 2011 when he was chair of the culture, media and sport select committee during the phone-hacking scandal . He successfully pushed Rupert Murdoch to testify in front of his committee, but was seen by some campaigners as too close to News International.

GOOD

Vueling cancelled our flight to Florence, then ignored a refund request

Last year I used the British Airways website to book a June 2022 flight from Gatwick to Florence for me and my husband. The flights cost £770, and when the confirmation email came through, it turned out they were with BA’s sister firm, the Spanish airline Vueling. However, two hours before we were due to take off, Vueling cancelled the flight, “due to meteorological reasons” in Florence. Phone calls made by various other passengers to family in Florence soon established the weather there was sunny and calm, so we assume the flight was cancelled for another reason. We made our way by train from Gatwick to our home near Southampton and managed to book a flight with another carrier to Florence two days later. We lost two days of our holiday, plus hotel costs. Since then, we have been trying to get a refund of the outward-bound leg of the flight and compensation for cancelling as per the EU rules. Vueling initially just ignored our requests. Eventually, after involving the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), it responded in September, reiterating the flight had been cancelled as a result of “extraordinary circumstances”. It refused compensation, and no refund was paid. In March, it accepted our request for a refund but only for the £20 paid for the extra train journey from the airport back home, not for the cancelled flight. After further correspondence, it said I had to contact BA to get the refund. BA has, in turn, refused to accept responsibility and told me to take my claim to Vueling. Almost a year on, I have received £20 and am at a loss as to know what to do next. AB, Hants This letter arrived within days of another from a reader who was similarly complaining that Vueling had ignored his demand for compensation after it had cancelled his flight. He had been trying to send pre-action papers but found that none of its listed UK addresses would accept them. I asked Vueling, BA and the CAA about both cases but have mostly come up against a wall of silence. Like you, BA tells me to talk to Vueling but the airline has – you guessed it – ignored me, too. Coby Benson, Bott and Co’s airline compensation expert, says the law is clear in this reader’s case, and Vueling should have provided a full refund within seven days of the cancellation, or provided a free replacement flight. “AB therefore has the choice of a full refund or reimbursement of the replacement flight if it was more expensive. “I think there’s a strong argument that compensation of £220 a passenger is due because Vueling failed to take reasonable measures to minimise the disruption they experienced.” Of the company’s failure to engage with customers seeking compensation for cancelled flights, he claims this type of behaviour is now entirely typical. “Its actions frustrate the process of passengers enforcing their consumer rights. Ordinarily, I would advise passengers to issue court proceedings. However, Vueling does not have an address in England on which to serve court proceedings. “Prior to Brexit, we were able to issue court proceedings against it with relative ease using the European small claims procedure. However, that is no longer an option.” For this reason, he says, Bott and Co has stopped taking cases from Vueling passengers. There is one happy outcome to this. After my intervention, Vueling did finally make contact with AB, and it appears it is refunding her the £380 for the cancelled outward leg she was due 11 months ago. If AB and the other letter writer wish to pursue their compensation claims, they could try sending them to International Airlines Group Waterside, PO Box 365, Harmondsworth, UB7 0GB. It might work. Failing that, Benson says you should both look for a no-win, no-fee lawyer in Spain (Vueling’s home country) where proceedings could be issued with relative ease. In the meantime, I’d urge Guardian readers to avoid this airline, unless they enjoy fighting legal battles. Big firms that operate transparently, and within the law, are usually happy to talk to the press and allow claims to be heard in court, so why isn’t Vueling? The CAA, which is supposed to enforce UK airline passenger rights, also declined to comment. Maybe it’s quietly decided to give up on this one. We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions

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Woman died on floor after waiting over five hours for ambulance in Wales

A 58-year-old woman died alone curled up in a blanket on the floor of her bedroom as she waited more than five hours for an ambulance. Relatives of Rachel Rose Gibson believe she had a heart attack at her home in Wrexham, north Wales , only a short drive away from a hospital, but died before an ambulance reached her. The Welsh ambulance service said that on the day Gibson died, its crews spent more than 700 hours waiting outside hospitals for patients to be admitted, which meant they could not respond quickly to people needing help. Family members said Gibson, a grandmother of seven, called an ambulance at 4pm on 5 April as she was coughing up blood and in chronic pain. By the time an ambulance arrived at 9.30pm, she had died. Her daughter, Nikita, 29, said: “She was lying on the floor curled up in a blanket. It haunts me to know she died alone in so much pain. “I feel like I can’t fully grieve because I’m so angry. She only lives five minutes away from the hospital, but must have been in too much pain to get into a taxi.” Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion The family is waiting for test results to confirm her cause of death, but Nikita Gibson said she had been told it may have been a heart attack. She added: “It’s disgusting that we are using ambulances as waiting rooms. My mum was in need. She should have been a priority.” Liam Williams, the executive director of quality and nursing at the Welsh ambulance service, said an investigation would be carried out. He said: “On April 5, our ambulance crews spent over 700 hours outside hospitals across Wales waiting to hand patients over to our hospital colleagues, which in turn meant that our ambulances couldn’t respond to those waiting in the community. I would like to reinforce our sincere apologies and regret to anyone who has had a poor experience from us.” In April the ambulance service in Wales lost more than 23,000 hours at hospitals across Wales – the equivalent of 2,000 shifts. Michelle Greene, of Betsi Cadwaladr university health board, said: “We continue to face challenges to discharge patients from hospital to suitable accommodation or care services. “This does impact flow through the entire hospital system, and on our ability to bring patients into and through the emergency department in a timely manner and we continue to work with our health and social care partners to improve this.”

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Daily Mail announces redundancy plans as print readership declines

The Daily Mail has announced plans to make some of its journalists’ jobs redundant, as the newspaper struggles with declining print readership and the increased cost of paper. The newspaper’s editor, Ted Verity, said his plan would lead to staff working across the print Daily Mail, its sister title the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline . Until very recently the three outlets have had distinct identities with different teams and little sharing of resources. In many cases journalists from the different outlets would be competing against each other for stories, despite all working for the same parent company. Staff at the Mail on Sunday are expecting to bear most of the job losses. Verity said the weekend newspaper would retain its “distinct characters, columnists and senior staff” but hinted that more junior roles are at risk. He told staff: “We need to be nimble, open to new ideas and we need to make sure our newsroom is structured in a way that allows us the greatest possible collaboration across titles and platforms. “So the next phase of this process will involve bringing the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday much closer together. “This kind of collaboration – with everyone working together for the same goal of getting our stories read by as many people worldwide as possible, in whatever form they choose – is the key to the future. “This is critical because there’s no question that the opportunities for future growth now are digital.” The Daily Mail still lays claim to be the biggest selling print newspaper in the UK, selling an average of 797,704 copies a day in the latest official figures – although this is down 12% on the same time last year. Verity said the increased cost of newsprint is causing difficulties for the entire newspaper industry, which has been hit by substantial increases in the cost of the paper that newspapers are printed on. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion The impact is much more financially damaging for outlets that retain substantial print readerships, such as the Daily Mail. As a result in recent years the outlet has been trying to push readers towards its Mail+ subscription product. The newspapers’ parent company, Daily Mail & General Trust, was taken private by its controlling shareholder, Lord Rothermere, in 2022 and is now entirely owned by an off-shore family trust. The newspaper group is also facing the costs of legal cases from notable individuals including Prince Harry, Elton John and Doreen Lawrence over allegations of illegal reporting tactics . Lawyers acting for the Mail’s parent company have so far managed to avoid the claims being reported in open court, although a hearing on the cases is due at the end of March.

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Maya Forstater was discriminated against over gender-critical beliefs, tribunal rules

A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex has won her claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs. Maya Forstater suffered direct discrimination when the Centre for Global Development (CGD), where she was a visiting fellow, did not renew her contract or fellowship, an employment tribunal found on Wednesday . The tribunal also ruled that Forstater, the executive director of Sex Matters, suffered victimisation with respect to the removal of her profile from CGD’s website. Its decision comes after Forstater successfully brought a test case to establish that gender-critical views are a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act . She initially lost that case at an employment tribunal in 2019 but won a landmark decision on appeal last year , with the judge stressing that while gender-critical views might be “profoundly offensive and even distressing to many others … they are beliefs that are and must be tolerated in a pluralist society”. The case was then sent back to the tribunal to decide whether Forstater’s claim had been proved on the facts. It upheld two complaints of direct discrimination and one of victimisation. Two other complaints of direct discrimination and one of victimisation were unsuccessful. The judgment stated: “Absent an explanation from the respondents, the facts are such that the tribunal could properly conclude that the tweets were a substantial part of the reason why Ms Forstater was not offered employment; and the respondent’s evidence, far from proving the contrary, supports the finding that they were … “We reminded ourselves that it would be an error to treat a mere statement of Ms Forstater’s protected belief as inherently unreasonable or inappropriate.” The tribunal examined a number of tweets by Forstater, including tweets in which she drew an analogy between self-identifying trans women and Rachel Dolezal , a white American woman who misrepresented herself as black, and another in which she said: “A man’s internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality.” It concluded that the tweets asserted her gender-critical beliefs. It said the same of one that described self-identification as a woman as “a feeling in their head”, rejecting the suggestion that it equated self-identification with mental illness. The tribunal also considered tweets in which Forstater said she was surprised people could say they believed that males could be women, and that they are “tying themselves in knots”. It said they were “fairly mild examples” of mockery, adding: “Mocking or satirising the opposing view is part of the common currency of debate.” The three-member panel, led by the employment judge Andrew Glennie, said a description of a Credit Suisse executive, Pips Bunce, who identified as a woman for part of the week, as a “part-time cross dresser” could have been put in “more moderate terms”. But two of the three panel members said it “did not amount to an objectionable or inappropriate manifestation of Ms Forstater’s belief, given the context of a debate on a matter of public interest; the fact that Pips Bunce had put themself forward in public as a person who is gender fluid and who dresses sometimes as a woman and sometimes as a man”. Responding to the decision, Forstater said: “My case matters for everyone who believes in the importance of truth and free speech. We are all free to believe whatever we wish. What we are not free to do is compel others to believe the same thing, to silence those who disagree with us or to force others to deny reality.” She also thanked JK Rowling for standing by her. The Harry Potter author tweeted: “Every woman who’s been harassed, silenced, bullied or lost employment because of her gender critical beliefs is freer and safer today, thanks to the warrior that is @MForstater.” Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ campaign group, said: “Today’s judgment … does not change the reality of trans people’s workplace protection. No one has the right to discriminate against, or harass, trans people simply because they disagree with their existence and participation in society.” Amanda Glassman, chief executive of CGD, said: “We are reviewing today’s judgment, which found in favour of Ms Forstater on some claims, and dismissed others. CGD’s primary aim has always been to uphold our values and maintain a workplace and an environment that is welcoming, safe, and inclusive to all, including trans people.” Remedies will be determined at a later date.

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Australia’s welfare system puts disadvantaged at risk, inquiry told

Australia’s mutual obligation system for welfare risks “subjecting disadvantaged participants to unreasonably onerous and punitive conditions”, the commonwealth ombudsman has warned. The ombudsman made the submission to a Senate inquiry, which has already recommended a major overhaul of the controversial ParentsNext program , and revealed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants were fined at almost double their rate of participation. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Indigenous participants “incurred a higher rate (33%) of payment suspensions than their proportion of the ParentsNext caseload (18%)”, according to the employment department’s submission. ParentsNext is a $110m a year pre-employment program which requires some people on parenting payments with children as young as nine months to attend compulsory activities such as career guidance, vocational education, playgroups or storytime, or risk payment suspension. The Senate select committee inquiry is examining ParentsNext as well as the entire Workforce Australia employment services model , which imposes obligations on welfare recipients who risk payment suspension for non-compliance. After the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, the employment services minister, Tony Burke, said it was too late to unwind Coalition-era contracts for Workforce Australia but promised to make the points-based mutual obligation system more “logical”. In its submission, the commonwealth ombudsman warned it was “concerned the incentive structure for providers and their discretion concerning participants’ job plans may not always produce fair outcomes for participants”. “For example, participants may be subject to significant penalties such as payment suspensions for relatively minor instances of non-compliance.” The submission to the Senate inquiry comes after revelations in the robodebt royal commission from senior members of the agency that the commonwealth ombudsman did not do enough to shut down the program, despite doubts about its legality . The employment department’s submission noted in 2021-22 that 25,920 people, or 22% of the participants of ParentsNext, had their payment suspended. But it said due to the median duration of just three business days for a suspension “the significant majority of suspensions (97.4%) resulted in no payment delay … [that is] they received their payment on the same day as they would have” without the suspension. “Since 2018, out of more than 220,000 parents who have participated in the program, 17 individuals have incurred a financial penalty. Six of these were in 2021-22.” The department said that younger men were more likely to fail to meet requirements without a valid reason, but “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants are more likely to face compliance action even controlling for these factors”. The department is reviewing “whether bias is a factor in decision making”, it said. Sign up to Guardian Australia's Afternoon Update Our Australian afternoon update email breaks down the key national and international stories of the day and why they matter after newsletter promotion The department defended the penalty regime by noting it accepted a “range of valid reasons for non-attendance” and the system allowed a review “before financial penalties are applied”. Earlier iterations of the program “had more flexible compliance arrangements, relied on income support suspension and did not apply penalties, and were not subject to the same level of criticism”, it said. In separate submissions the Australian Council of Social Services and Jobs Australia, the largest network of not-for-profit job services providers, called for mutual obligation to be overhauled to ensure activities are beneficial, and the “punitive dynamic is removed from the employment service relationship”. In February the Senate select committee’s interim report recommended that the ParentsNext welfare program be abolished and replaced by a new service that dials down mutual obligations and offers cash incentives for parents. Earlier in March the minister for women, Katy Gallagher, acknowledged that “a lot of stakeholders in the women’s sector [are] concerned about it” particularly due to the “punitive side of that program where young parents, single parents lose entitlements for not … attending a certain parenting class”. “I think we want to make sure that we’re not penalising women unfairly, but also that we are providing the right support for them when they’re parenting young children,” Gallagher told Radio National. The inquiry continues, with a final reporting date of no later than 29 September.

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Even if you’re ‘on the apps’, it feels pretty hard to meet people these days

To date or not to date is no longer the question. Instead, it is to date or not date online. I am old enough to remember eHarmony ads on TV, but young enough to know more people on dating apps than not. I know some operate on a “monthly swipe” regime, carefully limiting their time on the apps so it does not become all-consuming. Others are caught in a vicious cycle of download, delete, re-download, repeat. And then there are those who tried it once, or not at all, and are determined to steer clear altogether. That’s me. This is not a love story or a tale of the moment I knew . Because even with connection at our fingertips more than ever, it feels pretty hard to meet people today. So much so that when asked if I have a partner, I find I almost justify my response – no – with “Well, I’m not on the apps”, as though you must be a hermit if you have no dating profile and it is the only way a relationship could happen. It is not. Our relationship with dating apps has become complicated. Last year we marked 10 years of Tinder , but a growing number of people are still rejecting the apps in favour of meeting people in real life – in the office, through friends, in pubs and at the age-old meeting place, weddings. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning For all the horror stories out there, there are success stories online too. They are no less romantic, long-lasting or less valued. I know of several. But for those who have abandoned all hope of an online romance, our use of technology sometimes feels like it prevents old-school encounters and curtails opportunities to strike up conversation. That’s not to say we can expect it to happen like in the movies. We may hope to spill a drink on our soulmate and live happily ever after but it won’t be like when Harry meets Sally , or when Hugh Grant spills orange juice on Julia Roberts on the streets of Notting Hill. But it does feel as though these kind of meet-cutes have become rare, even if dating apps like Happn claim to be able to engineer a brush with the One. So why does doing it online feel so different? Surely swiping left or right would involve the same degree of chance as bumping into someone? I see the same five people at the bus stop each day (no candidates), but at a bus stop across the city there could be a spark. The apps can take me to that bus stop in a way my commute never can. But I still don’t want to be mindlessly swiped or mulled over. Dating in the digital age is fraught enough. Apps aside, we’re labelled as a generation obsessed with our phones and the dopamine hits from social media notifications that fuel addictive behaviour. With partners, flings or friends, young people can be eaten up by cryptic text messages or lack thereof. The number of “how to tell if my messages have been read” articles online prove it. And just like knowing which emojis mean what , you also have to be up with the dating lingo. Sadly most people know what ghosting and gaslighting are, as both manipulative behaviours have increased with the rise of online dating . But do you know what “cookie jarring” or “orbiting” is? “Cuffing season”? Those still at uni tell me “rizz” is “a big one” on TikTok at the moment. You can turn to the New York Times guide to modern dating to decode them for yourself. The apps are also increasingly becoming fraught with fears for online safety and high rates of sexual violence that make the phrase “share your location with me” commonplace among young people as they wish their friends well on date night. The news that even the Chinese government is getting involved , collecting data on singles to match them with others on a state-sponsored app, not to mention the invention of a long-distance kissing machine , prove that technology and dating aren’t divorcing anytime soon. Friends say we app sceptics will download them at a certain age out of desperation. But for now, follow the sound advice of mums and mentors: there’s no rush, relationships don’t define you and you must keep your standards high. Just not Prince Charming high. Carrie Bradshaw will tell you that’s nothing but a fairytale . So while technology means we may not have to worry about losing the slip of paper someone’s phone number was written on, or wait by the landline for someone to call, apps are still a choice. Anyone who tells you otherwise has spent too long scrolling. Maddie Thomas is an editorial assistant at Guardian Australia

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Sudan is descending into hell while our citizens remain trapped – the clock is ticking

NO ONE is pretending that evacuating thousands of British passport-holders from Sudan is an easy exercise. But there are deeply uncomfortable reminders of the chaotic, bloody withdrawal from Afghanistan. Once again, there has been a failure of intelligence and planning with key figures absent at the wrong time, and our ambassador on holiday. Claims that Foreign Office staff prioritised data protection rules above preparing proper evacuee lists are shameful. Notwithstanding the perceived threats, it is also troubling to see British Embassy staff flee the scene . The once-noble idea that the captain should stay with the ship appears gone. Khartoum is descending into hell while our citizens remain trapped and other countries get their people out . The clock is ticking. DIANE Abbott’s political career appears finished. It’s about time. Being the first black female MP to reach the top of the Labour Party was an admirable achievement. That a woman who campaigned so hard against racism should be brought down by her own hateful words about Jewish people is a bitter irony. But don’t imagine this was some thoughtless mistake on her part. It stemmed from a long-standing belief on the Left that it is impossible for Jewish people to suffer racial discrimination. This is not only appallingly ignorant of the horrors of the past. Even today, the Government has to spend £15million to protect Jewish communities and schools from attacks. Sir Keir Starmer has rightly branded Abbott’s comments anti-Semitic. There should be no comeback from that. LAST year more than 10,000 Albanians arrived in Britain on small boats. But in the first three months of this year, just 29 made the trip . Why such a dramatic difference? Because Rishi Sunak struck a deal with the Albanian government to repatriate any that entered the UK illegally. Such a slashing of the numbers shows that a coherent, sensible policy — such as the Rwanda scheme — will put migrants off if it’s not mired in legal attacks. Deterrence works. FROM Dartford ducker and diver to Los Angeles via the nation’s favourite dance show, what a life Len Goodman had. The Strictly head judge loved to gleefully award celebrity dancers a booming “SEVEN!” And we like to think he’ll still be watching on from seventh heaven.

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Inflation calculator: find out how much UK household price rises affect you

Inflation has been soaring in the UK, with people being hit by higher prices for everyday essentials. The latest inflation rate for the 12 months to April 2023 means that goods and services cost more than 8.7% more than they did a year ago – in most cases, surpassing any pay rises workers can expect to receive. However, you could have a different, personal inflation rate depending on what you typically buy each month. This is because some items have gone up by more in price than others. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has built a personal inflation calculator, allowing you to see what inflation looks like for your household. Use it below to see how prices are changing in your budget, and which items are contributing most to your rising cost of living. This calculator does not store any information you enter. Note: the ONS calculator uses the CPIH measure of inflation, which includes housing costs for those who own their home. It is based on the current inflation rate and does not include the latest energy price cap rise, which comes into effect in October.

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Next UN climate summit to consider health issues in depth for first time

The next UN climate summit will be the first to consider health issues in depth, with a meeting of global health ministers to highlight the consequences of the climate crisis for wellbeing. Sultan Al Jaber, the president of Cop28 , which will take place in Dubai this November, said on Tuesday: “We will be the first Cop to dedicate a day to health and the first to host a health and climate ministerial. And we need to broaden our definition of adaptation to enable global climate resilience, transform food systems and enhance forestry land use and water management.” The climate crisis is likely to place further burdens on already overstretched global health systems . As well as dealing with the consequences of climate disaster such as heatwaves, floods and droughts, doctors will be faced with the increased stress on patients from rising temperatures, and higher temperatures will allow for the increased spread of disease vectors such as mosquitoes. Ministers from around the world are gathered in Berlin this week for the Petersberg Climate Dialogue , an annual meeting on climate held by the German government. Al Jaber, addressing the conference, vowed to use Cop28 to fulfil the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement . At Cop28, countries will for the first time formally assess progress since Paris, a process known as the global stocktake. This is likely to show that most countries are falling well short of the cuts in greenhouse gases needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, the more stringent of the two goals in the Paris agreement, in line with scientific advice. Al Jaber told ministers at the Petersberg dialogue: “The most recent IPCC report has already made it crystal clear that we are way off track. This is a moment of clarity that we must face with total honesty. We are already seeing the impacts, from rising sea levels to failed harvests, to food, water and energy insecurity. Everyone is affected and the most vulnerable communities, across the global south, who have done the least to cause climate change, are the most affected.” Al Jaber has faced strong criticism since taking on the Cop28 role earlier this year. He is chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc, as well as founder of the Masdar renewable energy company, and minister of advanced technology for the UAE. Adnoc is one of the world’s biggest national oil companies, and the Guardian revealed last month its plans for a massive expansion of fossil fuel production . Many climate campaigners have criticised Al Jaber’s dual role, and the UAE’s plans to continue drilling. Alex Scott, the climate diplomacy and geopolitics programme leader at the E3G thinktank, said Al Jaber must respond to his critics at the Petersberg dialogue. “These talks are a chance for the UAE to address the criticism they have faced, and start setting out a really ambitious agenda for what countries should be preparing to bring to Cop28,” he said. “The global stocktake is the chance to get new decisions taken by ministers on global targets, renewable energy acceleration, and the transition out of fossil fuels.” Al Jaber also said rich countries must come to Cop28 having proven that they are delivering the $100bn a year of climate finance to poor countries that was promised more than a decade ago. He said their continued failure to do so was “holding up progress”. The key issue of climate justice – focusing on the poor and vulnerable countries that are most at risk from the climate crisis while having done least to cause it – must be at the heart of Cop28 and preceding talks, campaigners say. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network, said: “Unless equity and justice are put at the heart of a deal on a fossil fuel phase-out, we will not see any traction because we know who caused the problem. We know who has the biggest responsibility, and this is where rich countries have to play their role, and a just transition cannot be a conversation on the margins of climate action.” Since the final chapter of the landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in March, there has been heated discussion of whether and how to use technologies that could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere . Petter Lyden, the international climate policy lead at the campaigning organisation Germanwatch, warned against relying on technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide as a substitute for reducing emissions. “We cannot prolong the use of fossil fuels with the use of CCS and CCU [carbon capture and storage/utilisation] and we need to make that clear. There might be a need for them in some sectors where emissions are very difficult to avoid, but I think there are some not-so-helpful initiatives floating around ahead of the Petersberg Climate Dialogue,” he said.

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‘We have no time to lose’: Ban Ki-moon criticises climate finance delays

The former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has warned that the world’s largest fund to help developing nations weather the climate crisis remains an “empty shell”, despite decades of promises by rich nations. “We need to see a massive acceleration in mobilising trillions of dollars needed to keep the world from climate collapse,” he said. International climate finance from rich to poor countries is between five and 10 times short of what is needed, according to the UN. In 2020, money set aside to help poorer countries adapt to climate breakdown amounted to $29bn – far below the $340bn a year that could be needed by 2030. The largest such fund, the Green Climate Fund, stands at $11.4bn . Rich countries have also been accused by NGOs of misleading accounting and issuing loans instead of grants. Ban, a South Korean diplomat, served from 2007 to 2016 as eighth UN secretary general; his first major initiative was to urge action on climate at the Bali summit in 2007 . Two years later, at Cop15 in Copenhagen, rich countries promised to provide $100bn of climate finance a year every year for developing countries by 2020. However, Ban said: “After 14 years, nothing has been happening.” The war in Ukraine, as well as conflicts in Tigray, Ethiopia, Yemen and Afghanistan, have taken the focus away from the climate crisis, he added. “The most critical crisis is climate change, which is happening so much faster than one might think. We have no time to lose.” Ban did not agree with critics who saw Cop27, held in Egypt last year, as a failure. “We were able, after decades, to agree on loss and damage. That was a great success,” he said. But it was now the “moral responsibility” of states to put talk into action, he added, to help poorer countries adapt to global heating, and to mitigate the loss and damage they have already suffered from the climate crisis. “I have been urging political leaders: raise your political ambition levels and then find a way to provide the financial support. It is their moral responsibility. “As we move towards Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates, our efforts in climate mitigation and adaptation must accelerate.” Known for his quiet diplomacy during his time as secretary general, Ban went on to co-found the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens in 2017, to empower women and young people to achieve climate and development goals. Stepping down from his UN role, he said, meant he could now talk more forcefully about the climate emergency – for instance, when in 2020 he described Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement as “morally irresponsible” . “Many people regard me as a gentle and soft person,” Ban said. “But when it comes to climate I become much more passionate and sometimes angry. I refrained from expressing my anger as secretary general. But now I am a retired person. I was really angry at Trump, when he was president, withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement.” Trump’s withdrawal was politically shortsighted, scientifically wrong and morally irresponsible, he said. Ban, 78, also chairs the Global Center on Adaptation and is an advocate for smallholder farmers, who in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia produce 80% of the food but receive only 1.7% of climate finance. “This is irrational,” he said. “What an injustice. If we want a world free of hunger while adapting to climate change, we need to put smallholder farmers at its centre.”

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US Covid emergency status ends as officials plan ‘new phase of managing’ virus

Thursday marked the end of Covid-19’s public health emergency status in the US, concluding more than three years of free access to testing, vaccines, virtual accommodations and treatment for the majority of Americans. The end of the emergency designation comes just weeks after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency. But the nation’s leading health officials also wanted to be sure Americans don’t confuse this marker for the end of Covid-19 concerns. “This does not mean it’s over. This is just a new phase of managing it,” Dr Becky Smith, infectious disease specialist and director of Duke Health News, said. “The ability to make the transition out of the public health emergency phase signals a lot of successes in vaccine development, immunity and effective therapeutics. “All of those successes have paid off and now because we’re seeing less severe disease we can sort of fold it into how we think about other respiratory infections.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates more than 1,000 people are still dying of Covid-19 in the United States every week and many suffer from long Covid symptoms months or years after being affected. Meanwhile, at the height of the pandemic, there were sometimes upwards of 20,000 people dying in the country in just one week. According to the CDC, both vaccines and medication, like Pfizer’s Paxlovid, will remain available for free “while supplies last”. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted access to these supplies under the Covid-19 emergency use authorization declaration and insured Americans can continue to get vaccinated at no cost. However, most Americans will be left to foot the bill for testing. Without public health emergency designation, insurance providers aren’t required to waive costs for testing. The federal government will continue to distribute tests online via their website through the end of May. For those who have Medicaid benefits, a program which largely insures low-income families, at-home and in-office testing will remain free until 24 September, when federal funding expires. At this point, those who are uninsured will no longer have access to free testing, though community health organizations and local clinics are still likely to offer these supplies. There are other ways that the emergency designation changed the US healthcare system that could extend beyond Thursday. Telehealth and telemedicine, for which many restrictions were lifted to expand access and stop viral spread, will remain largely intact for now. The Consolidated Appropriations Act passed last December and included provisions that extend access to telehealth through December 2024 for Americans with Medicare. In addition, clinics in rural areas can continue to see patients remotely. Sign up to First Thing Start the day with the top stories from the US, plus the day’s must-reads from across the Guardian after newsletter promotion Through November 2024, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced, providers can still prescribe controlled substances via telehealth after the emergency is lifted. But for Medicaid recipients and children enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, telehealth flexibilities are up to the states. After years of updating maps and statistics, the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response team will disband after Thursday and Americans will lose access to data collected and shared by the CDC. Federal tracking of Covid-19 infections will be largely left to individual states. The Department of Health and Human Services will also no longer require labs to report Covid-19 test results, meaning data regarding test positivity at the county level will no longer be available. The CDC will end weekly updates of case and death counts and officials urge states to sign agreements to enable the sharing of vaccine administration data.

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Prisoner is suicide risk after more than two years in solitary, high court hears

A prisoner’s detention in solitary confinement in England for more than two years has been “wholly unnecessary” and has made him suicidal, the high court has heard. Kevan Thakrar , 36, who is serving a life sentence for murder and attempted murder after being convicted on a joint enterprise basis in October 2008 , is challenging his solitary confinement, claiming it is unlawful. He has spent 749 consecutive days – and five of the last eight years – in a designated cell, totally isolated from other prisoners, within a high-security close supervision centre (CSC), a judge was told on Tuesday. Opening Thakrar’s judicial review in London against Alex Chalk, the new justice secretary, Nick Armstrong KC said in written submissions: “He remains locked up on his own for more than 22 hours a day; he cannot associate with any other prisoner; he has no access to corporate [non-solitary] worship; he cannot work and he cannot attend education classes; he can exercise alone in a cage, he has no access to a gym. “C [the claimant] feels that his transfer to segregation was an ‘unofficial punishment’ which felt as though it was designed to ‘break him’ – it caused him to have suicidal thoughts. Being held in these conditions is causing C to experience helplessness and despair on an ongoing basis.” Thakrar, who watched proceedings via video link from HMP Belmarsh, was originally placed in a CSC after he used force against prison officers at HMP Frankland in March 2010. Armstrong said this continued to be cited as a justification for the conditions in which his client was held, despite the fact that Thakrar was acquitted at trial by a jury who accepted that his use of force against officers was reasonable and lawful because he anticipated an assault on him. He said prison staff “reacted furiously to the acquittal”, and added: “The concern is that this has become an enduring source of serious resentment which has coloured the Prison Service’s attitude towards C ever since.” Armstrong told the court there had been a failure to comply with the requirement to regularly review Thakrar’s segregation, and the reasons given for his solitary confinement were confused, inconsistent and arbitrary. These included alleged “non-engagement”, particularly with psychologists, which Armstrong claimed “can never be a proper basis for prolonged solitary confinement, and the policy which permits that is unlawful”. The barrister said it was also alleged that Thakrar was disruptive when on a main CSC unit – not in solitary – despite the fact that his client had been attacked by other prisoners and not responded with violence. Armstrong cited a November judgment against the Ministry of Justice, which led to it paying damages to Thakrar, a practising Muslim, for failing to protect him from racial and religiously motivated abuse and assaults by other CSC prisoners between 2012 and 2019, and failing to investigate such incidents. The court heard that another reason used to justify Thakrar’s solitary confinement was an indirect comment he is said to have made about a prison offender manager in April 2021. Armstrong said Thakrar denied the allegation, which was never formally proved and was “obviously incapable of justifying two years and counting of solitary confinement”. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Thakrar, whom psychologists have assessed as suffering from PTSD – although the defendant disputes this – is asking the judge to rule that his human rights have been breached and order that he be transferred out of solitary confinement. In oral submissions, Armstrong told Mrs Justice McGowan: “This is one of the dark places where the spotlight is not shone very often … That’s what we are asking you to do.” The defence will make its submissions on Wednesday.

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Rebekah Vardy says she was sexually abused in Jehovah’s Witness childhood

Rebekah Vardy has said she was sexually abused while growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, an ordeal her former community failed to protect her from. Vardy, 41, opened up about her upbringing in a Channel 4 documentary titled Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah’s Witnesses and Me, which will air on 16 May. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Christian denomination with about 8.5 million active members. A primary tenet of the religion is that the world’s destruction is imminent. In the documentary, Vardy returns to her home town of Norwich , where several practising family members still reside. She left the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the age of 15, after she was “shamed” for being sexually abused and seeing her family shunned for her parents’ divorce. “I was brought up in a strict and controlling religious organisation,” Vardy said. “What happened to me during my childhood still affects me every single day.” Vardy said a person in the community had sexually abused her between the ages of 11 and 15, something that she said was covered up by “elders”, senior male religious leaders. “From the age of around 12 years old I was being abused and instead of being supported I was blamed, manipulated into believing it wasn’t the best thing to take it to the police,” she said. “I told my mum about the abuse that I was experiencing. She cried, but didn’t believe me,” she said. “I told numerous members of my family, Jehovah’s Witness community, and they called a meeting. I think I was about 15. It was suggested that I had misinterpreted the abuse for a form of affection.” She added: “I knew that I hadn’t. I was well aware of what was right and what was wrong, and it was explained that I could bring shame on my family, and I was basically manipulated into believing it wasn’t the best thing to do to take it any further and take it to the police. “It’s hard to see how I survived that.” Vardy, who is married to the Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy , said her childhood was spent believing she would die during Armageddon if she was not “perfect”, recalling “upsetting” images depicting the end of the world that were shown to her. She said they still caused her nightmares as an adult. When she was 11, her family was ostracised by the community after her parents’ divorce, with relatives and friends forbidden from associating with them. The documentary also records Vardy meeting former Jehovah’s Witnesses, including a child-abuse survivor and the mother of a man who took his own life after the organisation expelled him. Vardy said she had initially “closed Pandora’s box” on her experience, and until the documentary she “didn’t want to revisit that”. Asked whether the documentary had given her closure on her childhood experiences, Vardy said: “Definitely. I think this chapter has closed. “It already really was, but I really wanted to do this when Channel 4 approached me, because I was fascinated by it,” she said. “Knowing that I had a voice, knowing that my voice could help, and hopefully there will be more people who come forward to share their experiences.”

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Ramadan TV dramas signal shift in Arab-Israeli relations

Nightfall during Ramadan in the Middle East is drama time, when Arab soap operas accompany evening feasts with fare of feuds, historical heroes and villains and forbidden love. This year though, programmers have broached new ground using the popular shows to highlight a normalisation with Israel. Two series broadcast across the region in the first three days of the Muslim holy month have stirred both surprise and contention – one by daring to explore the Jewish history of the Gulf, the other by suggesting that Israel may not be an enemy and that Palestinians have been ungrateful for Saudi Arabia’s support. The unusually pointed messages have both aired on the Saudi-controlled satellite channel MBC, offering little doubt that they had been sanctioned by the country’s leaders. The broadcasts have left some viewers reeling at the spectre of Ramadan becoming a forum to showcase political shifts and others claiming they belatedly addressed issues that had been airbrushed from Saudi culture. When satellite TV took hold across the Middle East from the early 1990s, the appeal of Ramadan TV drama shows as a forum to project soft power soon became apparent. Leaders recognised their potential to shape debate as the popularity of the soaps surged. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, has included the dramas in his clampdown on free expression , putting pressure on filmmakers to emphasise approved themes such as the glory of the military and perfidy of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. A 2016 series lauded as the first “political drama” produced in the United Arab Emirates also focused on the “evils” of the Brotherhood. Judaism has received warmer treatment in recent years, even as Israel was still portrayed with hostility. A 2015 drama sympathetically depicted Egypt’s Jewish community while emphasising them as staunchly opposed to Israel’s creation. If the first days of this year’s Ramadan are any guide, 2020 breaks new ground. The characters in both series, Exit 7 and Umm Haroun, are depicted debating not whether Israel should exist but whether doing business with Israelis should override concerns. The stances taken in both shows are aligned with Saudi government positions, which have drawn the two countries closer than at any time since the state of Israel was formed in 1948. Mutual security concerns about Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood have been instrumental in the shift, which have also led to ties with Saudis Gulf allies thawing to the point that Israelis can now enter the UAE, and previously undisclosed trade ties are public. The Israeli prime minister’s approach has been to promote relations with the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, while at the same time marginalising the Palestinians. “What is happening with Arab states has never happened in our history, even when we signed peace agreements,” Benjamin Netanyahu has said on more than one occasion. “Cooperation in different ways and at different levels isn’t necessarily visible above the surface, but what is below the surface is far greater than at any other period.” Israeli media reported in January that Riyadh was formally allowing Israeli citizens to visit the kingdom for the first time, provided they were Muslims performing pilgrimages to Mecca or invited by the government and looking to do business. That month, the US president, Donald Trump, unveiled his peace plan for the region in Washington in front of diplomats from Oman, Bahrain and the UAE. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a friend of the heir to the Saudi throne, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was instrumental in drafting the plan, which offered a markedly reduced deal to the Palestinians than any earlier package and has since gone nowhere. Riyadh was officially non-committal, though some former Saudi officials sharply criticised the plan’s outline. This article was amended on 29 April 2020. A reference to “Riyadh and Tel Aviv” was amended to “the two countries”, meaning Saudi Arabia and Israel.

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Books by female authors studied by just 2% of GCSE pupils, finds study

Only 2% of GCSE students study a book written by a female author, according to research by campaigners who are urging exam boards to diversify their set text lists to curb the rise of misogynistic views. Research by End Sexism in Schools (ESIS) found that 67% of set texts for modern prose and drama were by male authors, while 58% of the set 19th-century novels were by men. It also found that 69% of the set texts for modern prose and drama papers had a male protagonist, rising to 71% for the 19th-century novel. Rachel Fenn, a founder of ESIS and an English teacher, said: “While these stats are shocking, they are hardly surprising. The traditional canon of English literature has always valued the white male voice over others since its creation in the early 20th century. “However, for the next generation to grow up challenging a patriarchal view of the world, both boys and girls need to be exposed to strong and empowering representations of women, not the voiceless victims and servants we see repeatedly in the perennially popular texts taught in English lessons.” The research was based on asking each awarding body to provide numbers of pupils who answered on each text in GCSE exams in 2018, 2019 and 2022, with the pandemic years excluded as these were based on teacher-assessed grades. The most common books authored by women on the approved text lists across exam boards between 2018 and 2022 were Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the campaigners found . These two novels are among the longest on set lists, at 624 and 448 pages respectively, and the campaigners said teachers were disincentivised from choosing them over shorter, more accessible books. ESIS is calling for examining bodies to ensure an equal balance of male and female authored texts and protagonists, and to provide schools with support to change the texts they teach. The campaigners also argued that there were too few books by male authors of colour, as exam boards adopt a “two birds one stone approach” by prioritising books by women of colour. ESIS calculated that out of the set texts offered by AQA, the most popular awarding body, more than 70% had a male author and a male protagonist. AQA has made some changes for 2023, replacing two male authors with females in drama, and one male writer with a female in prose. AQA declined to comment on the research. The study, which was published to coincide with World Book Day and focused on entire novels set for the modern prose, drama and 19th-century novel papers, found that An Inspector Calls and A Christmas Carol were the two most frequently taught texts, which were studied by 80% and 72% of students respectively at GCSE level. ESIS views the popularity of these texts as posing an additional problem since the female characters are either victims or servants, which “perpetuates a narrative of women as victims of a patriarchal society, reinforcing the notion of sexual inequality as an expected norm”. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, said the research reflected a “need to review the current curriculum, including English literature, to make sure it prepares young people for the world as it is now”. She said: “GCSE English literature is heavily weighted towards traditional texts which inevitably reflect societies where views of women and in general were a great deal less enlightened than they are today. “Exam boards endeavour to provide a range of options, including female writers, but they are working within a framework set out by the government, and it does feel as though this needs to be refreshed. “It should be possible to better balance knowledge of traditional works of literature with more opportunity to study a greater diversity of texts. “It is particularly important, given the current rise of misogynists such as Andrew Tate, that boys and young men are encouraged to read books which are written by women and include positive and powerful female characters.” Eduqas, one of the exam boards cited in the research, said it was “committed to continuously refining and improving the content of our qualifications and have taken positive actions to address the gender balance of authors within our GCSE English literature qualification”. From September 2023, the English literature GCSE will offer an equal split of female and male authors in modern and 19th century prose.

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World ‘population bomb’ may never go off as feared, finds study

The long-feared “population bomb” may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast. The study, commissioned by the Club of Rome , projects that on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly. The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels. The new forecasts are good news for the global environment. Once the demographic bulge is overcome, pressure on nature and the climate should start to ease, along with associated social and political tensions. But the authors caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority. Declining populations can also create new problems, such as a shrinking workforce and greater stress on healthcare associated with an ageing society, as countries like Japan and South Korea are finding. One of the authors of the report, Ben Callegari, said the findings were cause for optimism – but there was a catch. “This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.” Previous studies have painted a grimmer picture. Last year, the UN estimated the world population would hit 9.7 billion by the middle of the century and continue to rise for several decades afterwards. The new projection, released on Monday, was carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research , Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School . They were commissioned by the Club of Rome for a followup to its seminal Limits to Growth study more than 50 years ago. The report is based on a new methodology which incorporates social and economic factors that have a proven impact on birthrate, such as raising education levels, particularly for women, and improving income. It sketches out two scenarios depending on the extent to which such policies are pursued. In the business-as-usual case, it foresees existing policies being enough to limit global population growth to below 9 billion in 2046 and then decline to 7.3 billion in 2100. This, they warn, is too little too late: “Although the scenario does not result in an overt ecological or total climate collapse, the likelihood of regional societal collapses nevertheless rises throughout the decades to 2050, as a result of deepening social divisions both internal to and between societies. The risk is particularly acute in the most vulnerable, badly governed and ecologically vulnerable economies.” Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion In the second, more optimistic scenario – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – it estimates human numbers could hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by about a third to about 6 billion in 2100. Under this pathway, they foresee considerable gains by mid-century for human society and the natural environment. “By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions are about 90% lower than they were in 2020 and are still falling,” according to the report. “Remaining atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial processes are increasingly removed through carbon capture and storage. As the century progresses, more carbon is captured than stored, keeping the global temperature below 2C above pre-industrial levels. Wildlife is gradually recovering and starting to thrive once again in many places.” This article was amended on 27 March 2023. An earlier version gave a figure of 7.8 billion for current world population; that should have said 8 billion. It also referred to an estimated decrease of “more than a third” from 8.5 billion to 6 billion people; that fall would be just under a third.

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Can Joe Biden even last four years? If not, it’s awful Kamala Harris

ROLL up, roll up for the worst election race in history. No, I don’t mean our next general election, I’m referring to the US Presidential election, which also takes place in 2024. Because this week Joe Biden announced he is going to run for another term . In perhaps the least inspiring video message of all time, the 80-year-old President announced his candidacy. “The question we’re facing” he said in it, “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer”. Most Americans — especially in the crime-ridden inner cities — have a lot more questions than that. Doubtless some 80-year-olds could do the most difficult job on the planet. But not Joe Biden . He has stumbled through his first term barely answering questions from the media, fluffing his lines, forgetting his trains of thought. He makes the average goldfish look like Memory Man. All the while the President is assisted by a Vice President, Kamala Harris , who has achieved almost nothing and who is perhaps the only person in American public life able to give more embarrassing media interviews than her boss. In any ordinary season Biden and Harris would not stand a chance of re-election. All the polls show that the American public do not think he should be running again. But there is an elephant in the room. Or at least in Mar-a-Lago. For of course, last November Donald Trump also announced that he is running for the Presidency in 2024 . If Trump gets the Republican Party nomination, and Biden is not challenged in his own Democrat party , then we will see another Trump-Biden race. I don’t know anyone in America who has the mental strength to go through that again. A nastier race is hard to imagine. Trump still thinks he won last time and is consumed by bitterness and vengefulness. The version we saw of him in 2016 is light-hearted and kindly compared to the seething ball of resentment and wounded pride he is today. A far better candidate for the Republicans would be the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis . He is half Trump’s age and has shown twice his ability at actually doing things. The polls show that in a Presidential race between DeSantis and Biden, DeSantis would be most likely to win. But he may not get that chance, as Trump’s popularity rating has soared — particularly since Republicans have been watching the unfair political attempts to prosecute Trump in New York. But while Trump is popular with Republicans and unarguably has a loyal base, he is also the candidate Biden and the Democrats most want to see. He is the worst imaginable candidate for the undecided and swing voters you have to get onside to win the Presidency. Many people were willing to give Trump a chance in 2016. Still others were just sickened by the option of Hillary Clinton . This time, however, there is no one in America who doesn’t have a strong view of Trump. And aside from the die-hard loyalists, he is political poison in the US. If he runs against Biden he will lose again — and lose big. Democrats will vote for Biden in record numbers and swing voters will do the same just to keep Trump from the White House. There are reasons to do so. Trump has already suggested that he wants a second term to carry out his acts of revenge on all the people and institutions he thinks let down his Presidency last time. Which is just about everyone and everything in America. Apart from himself. It would be a disaster for the Republican party. But worse — it is a disaster for the country. Biden is plainly struggling. He fools no one with occasional faked bursts of energy. If people think he is struggling now, imagine what he will be like in five years. And the idea of Kamala Harris taking over and becoming President is too awful to contemplate. She is even worse than him. The Democrats seem to know this. In Biden’s video this week, announcing he was standing, Harris appears but does not speak. It is assumed she is on the ticket but no one has made it clear. Harris’s approval ratings are even worse than his — more than 54 per cent of Americans think of her unfavourably, according to a recent poll by Real Clear Politics. After only one year in the job even the BBC was running an article asking: “Kamala Harris . . . Where did it go wrong for her?” Her gaffes over the past three years have been excruciating, not least her admission she hadn’t visited the US/Mexico border, despite being the lead on immigration issues. So a man struggling in office will be up against a man who is unfit for office. Not least because he did not even concede the most recent election until there was a riot in Washington. Buckle up, America, this is going to be one heck of a ride. THE head of the Met Police , Sir Mark Rowley, gave a very poor performance before Parliament this week. Questioned on why eco-loons like Extinction Rebellion keep being allowed to shut down our cities, he seemed to think it was all just peaceful protest. More videos have emerged this week of frustrated motorists urging XR to move on, only to be told to go away and move on themselves by our so-called police officers. Well, I’m sorry, but the moment you take your “peaceful protest” from the side of the road to the centre of it, from the pavement to the motorway junction, you aren’t doing a peaceful protest. You are obstructing the public from going about their business. You are breaching the peace, and much more. Of course they should allow peaceful protest. But disruption like this is different. Why are the police repeatedly on the wrong side on this? WHAT exactly will it take to get our civil servants back to work? Two summers ago most of our Foreign Office seemed to be on holiday as the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal was going on. It was a disgraceful episode. And now it has happened again. After fighting broke out in Sudan, most countries have been withdrawing their nationals from the African nation. Yet despite the violence starting last week, it wasn’t until Tuesday this week that British nationals had a plane sent for them . I wonder if this had anything to do with the fact that in the weeks running up to the Sudan crisis, 60 per cent of desks at the Foreign Office were empty? It seems that more than half of the necessary officials were still working from home as the fighting started. How is this still possible? I know our civil servants like to turn up to the office in great numbers only if they are striking. But this is madness. Everyone should be at their desk. At the Foreign Office, in particular. Covid is over. It’s done. The excuse doesn’t wash any more. If you’re still pretending to be so scared of Covid that you can’t go to Whitehall then you should get another job. There are Brits in Sudan who needed help. As there were people in Afghanistan in 2021. Honestly. Sod these civil servants sunning themselves in the garden while the world goes up in flames. THERE aren’t many people who you can say actually revolutionised TV, but Jerry Springer was one of them. Love him or hate him – and I loved him – he transformed daytime talk shows for ever. Suddenly they were a cross-over between counselling and a boxing match. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but Jerry always showed that whatever the exploitation some people accused him of, his heart was in the right place. I KNOW there’s limited space in Westminster Abbey, but some of the invites seem rum to me. The fact that Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill has been invited has raised eyebrows. As has the fact she has accepted. But it has been explained as part of a process to build trust and peace in these islands. It would have sat a bit better if Lady Pamela Hicks, bridesmaid to the Queen, and daughter of Lord Mountbatten (who was murdered by the IRA in 1979), had been a guest. But what is the excuse for having Han Zheng on the list? Mr Han helped snuff out freedom and democracy in Hong Kong on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. I wouldn’t have him in the country, let alone in the Abbey. Speaking of the Coronation , is Prince Harry going to speak to anyone at the Abbey? Apart from Meghan boycotting the ceremony, the Sussexes have announced that Harry will return to California immediately after the ceremony. It’s possible Harry knows he isn’t wanted after all the ransom notes he has handed his family of late. Or perhaps there’s DIY work to do at the house in California, or another garden sprinkler system in urgent need of being set up.

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