The state pension is set to rise by 8.5% in April, in line with average earnings, on top of a 10% increase earlier this year. Under the increasingly controversial “triple lock”, the payouts rise by whichever is highest out of inflation, earnings or 2.5%. At least 3,000 people are feared dead in Libya, and 10,000 missing, after a powerful storm unleashed devastating floods in the eastern city of Derna. Intense rainfall led to the collapse of two ageing dams, says The Guardian, releasing a fast-moving river that “simply washed away at least one neighbourhood”. Deadly red fire ants could be on their way to Britain, bug boffins have warned, after the invasive species was spotted in Europe for the first time. Solenopsis invicta, which has a sting so powerful it can cause anaphylaxis, was found in Syracuse, Sicily, having likely arrived from China or the US.
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Martha Mills: a tragic death. Merope Mills |
It’s time we faced the truth about the NHS |
Like any parent who has heard Merope Mills talk about the negligent doctors responsible for her daughter Martha’s death, says Janice Turner in The Times, “I’ve wondered what I’d have done in her place”. If my 13-year-old had sepsis, and the blood was “seeping” out of her stomach tubes, would I furiously confront the imperious consultants refusing to move her to ICU? Scream at the junior doctor who failed to perform any overnight checks? Probably not. Like Mills, I’d say please, thank you, sorry for causing bother. That’s what I did during “a decade of NHS adventures with elderly parents”. I didn’t ask why no one had given my mother water for five hours after I found her “deranged with dehydration”, or criticise the “slovenly and unkind” nurses in a rehab unit. “These were low-paid workers; I am not, so I said nothing.”
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The “unquestioning goodwill” so many of us have for the NHS is largely justified. But medics are not all “life-saving heroes”: as in any profession, some are “substandard, callow and heartless”. Incredibly, the NHS in England pays out £8.2bn a year in clinical negligence compensation for maternity care – “more than double the total £3.2bn maternity and neonatal budget”. Nottingham University Hospitals Trust is being investigated over the deaths or injuries of 1,700 babies, “a whole secondary school of children”. The system has to change – Mills wants a “Martha’s Rule”, which would give patients the right to a second opinion. But for now, her advice to worried parents is simple: “If things seem to be going wrong, shout the ward down.”
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Star Island: pricey premiums. Typhoonski/iStock/Getty |
It’s not just ordinary Americans who are seeing their insurance premiums balloon because of extreme weather, says Bloomberg. A homeowner on Miami’s Star Island – an ultra-rich enclave with some of the highest house prices in America – was recently quoted $622,000 for annual house insurance, triple the previous year. A growing number of well-heeled residents are choosing to forgo hurricane insurance altogether, “risks be damned”. |
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In his new memoir, Rory Stewart provides “memorable pen portraits” of all the leading players he encountered in Westminster, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. David Cameron came across like the “host of a pheasant shoot, rented only for the day”. George Osborne was an 18th-century French cardinal – “wryly observant of colleagues and capable of breath-taking cynicism”. And Boris Johnson? At first sight, he seemed like a Regency Squire “fond of long nights at the piquet table at White’s”, says Stewart. But his “air of roguish solidity” was undermined by “the furtive cunning of his eyes, which made it seem as though an alien creature had possessed his reassuring body and was squinting out of the sockets”.
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Nice work if you can get it
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Working from home appears to be driving a boom in mid-week golf, says Tim Harford in the FT. Stanford University boffins have found that the number of people playing on Wednesdays rose nearly 150% between 2019 and 2022, while numbers on Saturdays declined. Particularly popular is the Wednesday 4pm tee-off – that’s up more than 275%. |
Xi has turned his back on the world order |
When the world’s most powerful leaders gathered in Delhi for the G20 summit over the weekend, says Michael Shuman in The Atlantic, China’s Xi Jinping “deemed it not worth his time”. Ditching the year’s “premier diplomatic event” marks a dramatic turn for Beijing’s foreign policy. For many years, Xi tried to make China an “alternative to the West”. Now, it seems, he is positioning his country as a “full-on opponent”. The message of his absence from Delhi couldn’t be clearer: “China is done with the established world order.”
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This shift has been “a long time coming”. Whereas his predecessors sought to integrate China into the US-led global order, Xi has developed his own institutions that he can lead and control. He formed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to rival Washington’s World Bank. He has promoted competing international forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes Russia and Iran, and the fast-growing “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). By skipping the US-dominated G20, Xi is trying to discredit it – and in so doing give greater weight to his rival groups. But it’s a bad move. By vacating the stage in Delhi, Xi merely turned it over to Joe Biden. And his absence was a huge insult to the conference’s host, Indian PM Narendra Modi, a crucial player in the power struggles to come. “If Xi wants to win the great geopolitical game, he has to be in it. Instead, he’s opted out.”
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London’s bus drivers have an “underappreciated role in the history of medical science”, says The Economist. In the late 1940s, no one could work out why so many people in Britain and elsewhere were suffering from heart disease. A young doctor called Jerry Morris began studying the medical records of London transport workers and made a “breathtaking” discovery: bus conductors, who were constantly walking up and down the vehicle’s stairs, had 30% less incidence of heart disease than drivers, who were sedentary. His revolutionary finding – that “exercise was keeping people alive” – utterly transformed “epidemiology, medicine and the way we live now”.
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It’s Millie Laws, a yoga instructor in Lincolnshire whose class was recently mistaken for a ritual mass killing. At the end of an hour-long session, says The Daily Telegraph, seven yogis lay on their backs in “corpse pose” while Laws, 22, walked around in candlelight banging a shamanic drum. A couple walking their dog past the window mistook them for actual corpses and phoned the police, who duly turned up, sirens blazing – by which time all the “victims” had packed up and gone home. Laws says she feels “absolutely awful” for the couple, “because they’ve had the fright of their life and we’re just really chill”.
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“Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.” Queen Elizabeth II |
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That’s it. You’re done. |
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