Number of lung cancer patients not treated within two-month standard rises by 40% with some waiting more than a year Winter Fuel Payments: Govt needs to complete world's slowest u-turn Cole-Hamilton reveals constituencies with most sewage spills and those with no monitoring Greene urges government to keep a record of online sextortion offences Number of lung cancer patients not treated within two-month standard rises by 40% with some waiting more than a year The number of lung cancer patients not treated within the 62-day standard from a referral has risen by 40% since 2019 to 3,750 last year One patient ...
I like to think of myself as a vaguely cultured soul. My fondness for sixteenth and seventeenth century music - I've recently discovered the works of Byrd, Dowland and Tallis, for example - brings me gentle pleasure. But I'm not entirely an active seeker of culture in the widest sense. As a Londoner, potentially exposed to some of the best art, music and theatre, I didn't really take advantage of it - there was always a sense that it was always there and that actually turning up wasn't urgent. And then, living in a small village, it became rather more ...
"The idea of progression in prison is seductive but unachievable. Too many prisons are struggling to get men out of their cells for even an hour a day, there is little or no opportunity for education or work, the food is stodgy and there's too little of it, contact with family is intermittent, and violence prevalent. How such a prison could possibly encourage people to go to non-existent work to earn early release is just pie in the sky."Frances Crook finds that David Gauke's sentencing review tackles prison overcrowding but fails to challenge the system's core flaws or offer a ...
Stillbirth surveillance is the next chapter of our dystopian and dangerous abortion laws. Our parliaments must legislate to decriminalise. We were chilled to read about the new stillbirth surveillance guidance from the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC). This NPCC guidance on "child death investigations" includes the seizure of mobile phones and accessing data from menstrual tracking apps in order to understand people's "intentions" with the pregnancy. You would think this was a news story in Trump's America, not right on our doorstep. This development is part of a wider picture: one of an incremental and dystopian attack on women's rights, ...
The latest edition of my weekly political polling round-up, The Week in Polls, is out. As it says: Although I have plenty of views on how the self-regulation of British political polling by the British Polling Council (BPC) could, and should, be improved, there are two things the current setup certainly does impressively well. First is the basic transparency that sees full details of polls published within a few days of a poll becoming public. Second are the events the BPC puts on at which pollsters reflect frankly on their hits and misses. Particularly given how little really well informed ...
Photo: Maritime and Coastguard AgencyAs the first one has proved surprisingly popular, here's a second post about a cargo vessel being grounded in the River Nene. Back in 2000, reports Lincolnshire Live, a ship named the Lagik, carrying a cargo of 2250 tonnes of steel products, attempted to berth at Sutton Bridge, a few miles downstream of Wisbech, with severe consequences: The 92 metre-long German-owned cargo ship entered the swinging basin at the port to be swung before it could berth, but within seconds it began to ground following "inappropriate manoeuvring." It's bow ... grounded at a distance from the ...
It's summer in the late Sixties and you're out for the day on a coach or in a car with plastic seats that children have to peel themselves off carefully at journey's end. This is playing on the radio and it tells you you're going to have a good time. For this was an era when optimism was still the default register - Jonathan Meades once wrote that the future happened briefly in 1969. As I discovered long ago, Soul Coaxing is an orchestral arrangement of the song Âme Câline by Michel Polnareff. Lefèvre's skill here is to make you ...
Romania, Poland, Portugal On the surface, this week's elections in Poland, Romania and Portugal were a victory for Europe's political centre. But look an inch or two below and a different, darker story emerges. Let's start with Romania. A few week ago the country was looking into a political abyss after the first-round of presidential elections was won by Calin Georgescu. The far-right, ultra-nationalist, pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, anti-NATO, agronomist was a political unknown before the December vote. Yet he managed to top the first round of a two-part elections. A quick investigation revealed Russia skulduggery. The election was annulled and Georgescu ...
With thanks to SJ Bogue and Dundee Memories, a great photo of the Sinderins area from 1978 :
The Guardian reports that slot machine companies are targeting Britain's poorest neighbourhoods and channelling the proceeds to billionaire-owned overseas corporations and a Wall Street fund that uses an offshore lending structure. The paper says that the number of slot machine shops has risen by 7% since 2022, as companies -friendly planning and licensing laws to flood Britain's high streets with new "adult gaming centres" (AGCs), most of which are open 24 hours a day: Venues are disproportionately concentrated in Britain's most-deprived areas, according to analysis by the Guardian, prompting concern from a leading addiction expert and calls from politicians - ...
