Shoeless, shivering, passing out: Afghan refugees arrive in the UK. They arrived shoeless and shivering, with some toddlers wearing the same nappies they wore when fleeing their homes days earlier.
Volunteers have described the extraordinary dignity and stoicism of the Afghan refugees, including about 2,200 children, who were airlifted to the UK out of the clutches of the Taliban. Some of the new arrivals were passing out from exhaustion in airport terminals, said Dara Leonard, a team leader for the British Red Cross. Others, including pregnant women and “the sick and incredibly frail” were rushed straight to hospital.
“These were people on the far side of exhausted,” said Leonard, who was among the first to meet the Afghan families arriving at Heathrow airport last week. “My word, they are so stoical, so dignified but they were literally putting one foot in front of the other. We all play the status game, but who are the real winners? Life is a game.
To understand this is to understand why the human world can be so maddening, angry and irrational. The behaviour of racists, transphobes, conspiracy theorists, cult members, religious fundamentalists and online mobbers becomes much more explicable when you realise that humans are programmed by evolution to be obsessively interested in status, and that this obsession is powerful enough to overcome the will to achieve equality, truth or the sense of generous compassion for our rivals. We play games for status incessantly and automatically. We do so because it’s a solution our species has come upon to secure our own survival and reproduction.
As a tribal animal, our survival has always depended on our being accepted into a supportive community. Single-use plastic plates and cutlery to be banned in England. Single-use plastic plates and cutlery, and polystyrene cups will be banned in England under government plans, as it seeks to reduce the plastic polluting the environment.
A public consultation will launch in the autumn and the ban could be in place in a couple of years. The move was welcomed by campaigners, but they said overall progress on cutting plastic waste was “snail-paced”, with the EU having banned these items and others in July. The average person uses 18 throwaway plastic plates and 37 single-use knives, forks and spoons each year, according to ministers, while the durability of plastic litter means it kills more than a million birds and 100,000 sea mammals and turtles every year around the world. The government will also impose a plastic packaging tax from April 2022. This will charge £200 per tonne for plastic that has less than 30% recycled content, to encourage greater use of recycled material. Toyota pauses Paralympics self-driving buses after one hits visually impaired athlete. Toyota has apologised for the “overconfidence” of a self-driving bus after it ran over a Paralympic judoka in the athletes’ village and said it would temporarily suspend the service.
The Japanese athlete, Aramitsu Kitazono, will be unable to compete in his 81kg category this weekend after being left with cuts and bruises following the impact with the “e-Palette” vehicle. His injuries prompted a personal intervention from the president of Toyota, Akio Toyoda. Brexit is a failure: but, to remainers’ frustration, it’s not a spectacular one.
Britain was not expelled from the European Union, although some of the dismay at the consequences of Brexit would make more sense in that scenario.
Customs checks at the border are likened to a blockade. Rules that apply to all non-EU countries are described as punishment beatings. The expectation that Boris Johnson uphold the treaty he signed is cast as unreasonable spite. Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts. Dr Anna Lembke, a world-leading expert on addiction, is concerned about my “phone problem”.
During our interview I confess, in passing, to having an unhealthy attachment to my iPhone, checking it every few minutes like a compulsive tic (sound familiar?) Lembke is having none of it. She wants me to abstain from using it for at least 24 hours by locking it in a drawer and going out. The first 12 hours will be filled with anxiety and Fomo, but as time unfolds, I’ll experience a sense of “real freedom”, will gain insight into my relationship with my digital companion and will “resolve to get back to using it a little differently”, she says, speaking with a soothing yet firm tone. I’d do well to heed her advice. The planet is in peril. We’re building Congress’s strongest-ever climate bill.
The latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is clear and foreboding.
If the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions, the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. The world that we will be leaving our children and future generations will be increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable. But we didn’t really need the IPCC to tell us that. Just take a look at what’s happening right now: A huge fire in Siberia is casting smoke for 3,000 miles. The plight of women helped justify war in Afghanistan. Now they have been abandoned. It was one of the worst phone calls I’ve ever received: a friend in Kabul calling on Sunday afternoon to say that armed men had just visited her house.
Her voice was shaking to the extent that she sounded as if she was gasping for air. The men had intimidated her and left, and she had fled to a friend’s house to hide with her children. She didn’t know when they’d return, if they would find her, or when it would be possible to relocate again to somewhere farther away.
I have never heard someone sound so scared. She begged for help to escape the country; I promised I would keep trying. On the day Kabul fell I refused to leave – I am not ready to give up on Afghanistan yet. It is mind-boggling how fast some world-defining moments happen to us.
From entering a meeting to exiting it, my world had changed. There were people running in panic and the traffic was jammed. You could see armoured vehicles with their security protocols cutting through traffic. The city had fallen before the Taliban had entered it. There was no police, no armed forces and all government employees were asked to leave their offices. From A-levels to pensions, algorithms make easy targets – but they aren’t to blame. A year ago, when the prime minister blamed a “mutant algorithm” for A-level students receiving lower than their predicted grades, a new phrase entered political discourse.
Since then, the government’s proposed housing algorithm has been labelled “mutant” by the Conservative MP Philip Hollobone; recently even the pensions triple lock was referred to as a “mutant formula” by the GB News journalist Tom Harwood. It’s worth thinking about why this wording has spread. The implication of calling an algorithm “mutant” is that technology has got out of hand and that a useful mathematical system has produced perverse outcomes when applied in the real world.
Here’s what the right gets wrong about culture: it’s not a monument, but a living thing. The culture war, much like the war on drugs or the war on terror, is a metaphorical state that seems fated to go on for ever. The left blames the right for instigating a cynical distraction from its economic and public health failures; the right insists it is merely acting in self-defence after years of clandestine advances by the left. The indefinite nature of this battle stems from a general failure to define what is being fought over, or to determine what is meant by culture, where it comes from or why it matters. One of the people who thought hardest about the idea of “culture” that so preoccupies today’s culture warriors was Stuart Hall, the sociologist and founding figure of British cultural studies. Hall arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951 to find a rigidly hierarchical society that was undergoing profound social changes in the aftermath of the second world war.
‘Can we ever return?’ Tears and heartbreak as Hongkongers leave for a new life in the UK. It was a heartbreaking scene. A family get-together on a Sunday morning, not for a leisurely lunch at a traditional Chinese restaurant, but for a tearful farewell at the airport. Amid the Covid pandemic, Hong Kong airport is quiet except for twice a day, when long queues form at airlines desks for London-bound flights. Friends and families turn out in droves to see them off – grandparents hand out “lucky money” in red envelopes to grandchildren, aunts and uncles joke with children to lighten the otherwise melancholic mood. With tearful eyes, many stop for a final hug and pose for one last photo with their loved ones before passing through the departure gates. The waving continues long after they have disappeared from view. Analysis: Biden forges ahead where Trump and Obama failed on infrastructure and Afghanistan.
His huge gamble on more than $4.5 trillion in infrastructure spending and an exit from America's longest war, which threatens to trigger a foreign policy disaster, are both unfolding in a dramatic August that could define his presidency. Alongside these twin historic pushes, the story of Biden's administration is also being shaped by a resurgence of the pandemic that he thought he had beaten and is deepening the national political estrangement he vowed to heal.
The Senate passage of a bipartisan $1.2 trillion traditional infrastructure package was a huge win for Biden on Tuesday and validated his promise to try to heal bitter divides and mistrust in a nation that is politically at war with itself. A companion $3.5 trillion budget resolution focused on "human" infrastructure muscled through the Senate with only Democratic votes early Wednesday morning and could reshape the economy and American society by funding home health care, community college and climate initiatives. Canada: pressure on Catholic church to compensate victims of residential schools abuses. The Catholic church in Canada has come under growing pressure to compensate victims of the country’s residential school system after the scale of its assets were revealed in a string of media investigations. As part of a 2007 agreement, the church agreed to pay C$29m in compensation to survivors, but distributed only a fraction of that figure, citing poor fundraising efforts.
Now, reports by CBC News and Globe and Mail have revealed that the church not only controls more than C$4bn in assets, but also pulls in hundreds of millions in charitable donations and that it constructed gilded cathedrals while claiming it lacks the funds to make good on its promises to pay compensation. The Irish language can give us all a sense of home – if we save it from sectarianism. The hard men of Ulster loyalism are adept at spotting Trojan horses. Belfast’s first Irish-language preschool, planned to open in September, wouldn’t get past them without a fight. This weekend, as the school announced it would look for another location, they celebrated victory over Irish republican insurgents disguised as tiny two- and three-year-old children. After the incursion was abandoned, one of the leaders of the rout addressed “the loyal residents” of the area via a social media post: “STAY STRONG AND PROUD … THE DAYS OF LOYALISTS QUIETLY ROLLING OVER, FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE AT ANY PRICE … ARE OVER.”
Hybrid work: How 'proximity bias' can lead to favouritism - BBC Worklife. Hong Kong Leader Says City Set to Adopt China’s Anti-Sanctions Law. ‘Code red for humanity’: what the papers say about the IPCC report on the climate crisis. A Black realtor was showing a home to a Black father and son. They were handcuffed by Michigan police. Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country.
Dead zones spread along Oregon coast and Gulf of Mexico, study shows. Latin to be introduced at 40 state secondaries in England. Dear Gavin Williamson, if Latin in schools is about levelling up, I have other ideas. Chinese uproar as state TV host calls gold-medal winner a ‘manly woman’ Japan shrugs at name-and-shame policy amid Covid fatigue and changing norms. Six EU states overtake UK Covid vaccination rates as Britain’s rollout slows. A top U.S. official was moved by reports about Canada’s residential schools. She’s taking action at home. During the pandemic, a new variant of capitalism has emerged.
We’re slowly discovering the murky side of elite sport – thanks to women speaking out.