Ara Darzi released his report on the English National Health Service last month. To no one’s surprise, he finds that the service is ‘in serious trouble’, with crumbling buildings, demoralised staff and slipping standards in key areas such as maternity care. More than 7.6 million people are on waiting lists. Only a third of dentists are accepting new NHS patients, and DIY dentistry kits are for sale in pound shops. Yet Darzi also insists that the ‘vital signs’ of the NHS ‘remain strong’ and his report outlines strategies for the new Labour government to adopt.
You can tell a lot about the state of the contemporary university by looking at something peripheral: the parking. You might think there is only so much that can be said about parking. You would be wrong. Parking at my university is an issue of surprising intricacy and strong passions. Presumably this was not always the case. There may have been a time, not so long ago, when you could simply drive to work, park and work. But those days are gone.
A judge in Georgia recently struck down the six-week abortion ban. But total or near-total bans are still in place in sixteen other states. Florida, where I grew up, enacted a six-week ban in May. ‘We don’t want to be an abortion tourism destination,’ Governor Ron DeSantis said.
A building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Choueifat, south-east of Beirut, on Saturday, 28 September 2024. Photograph © AP Photo / Hussein Malla / Alamy
On Friday, 27 September, we felt the whole of Beirut shake. A huge plume of smoke was visible across the city. Israeli jets had dropped more than eighty bombs, flattening six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik without warning. Their target was one man. The rest of the still uncounted dead – many hundreds incinerated – were collateral damage.
When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’
Incapacitants. Photo © Yoshitaka Shirakura
The Tokyo-based duo Incapacitants deploy feedback, vocals and ‘various electronics’ to generate noise for the sake of noise.
Labour members have long used the party conference to push for a more humanitarian approach to immigration and asylum. In Liverpool this week, however, at the redeveloped docks from which more than five million Europeans travelled to America at the end of the 19th century, the only progressive motion on immigration was arbitrarily ruled out of order. On Tuesday afternoon, delegates were instead invited to debate a motion that would have committed the party to ‘establish a new Border Security Command’, ‘negotiate additional returns arrangements to speed up returns’, ‘increase the number of safe countries to which failed asylum seekers can swiftly be returned’ and ‘deliver new counter-terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime’. It pledged to ‘act upstream’ to stop ‘the humanitarian crises’ that fuelled immigration.