Klain is expected to depart in the coming weeks. He finalized his decision to leave to coincide with the administration’s two-year anniversary, which he and other staffers marked Friday with a hearty celebration of their accomplishments.
It comes as the administration enters a new phase of Biden’s presidency, pivoting from legislating to fending off investigations by the new House GOP majority and preparing for the president’s likely reelection campaign.
News of Klain’s impending departure was first reported by the New York Times.
A prolific tweeter and emailer known for working 16-hour days, Klain largely succeeded in making the West Wing a cohesive workplace — although detractors both inside and outside the building criticized his tendency to micromanage and at times questioned his political instincts. Despite Biden’s low approval numbers and persistent inflation, Democrats did far better than expected in November’s midterm election, validating Biden’s tenure and Klain’s approach.
Biden, who relied heavily on Klain and a small group of senior aides who’ve been with him for years, had urged him to remain in the job. But many White House staffers acknowledged the physical grind of the high-pressure position and wondered how long he could keep up his pace.
Some of those senior aides, including presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti and senior adviser Anita Dunn, are among the most discussed names of Klain’s potential successor. Jeff Zients, who served as Biden’s first coronavirus coordinator and who Klain tasked with managing the expected staff and Cabinet turnover following the midterms, is also mentioned frequently as a potential next chief of staff.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The head of a Kurdish people-smuggling ring has been arrested after going on the run before his sentencing, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.
Tarik Namik, 45, from Oldham, failed to show up at Manchester crown court and was given an eight-year jail term in his absence on 9 December.
Police had issued a warrant for his arrest after his no-show at Manchester crown court last month, when he was convicted of heading a “sophisticated, lucrative criminal enterprise” smuggling Kurdish migrants.
Four other members of his gang were sentenced alongside him, according to the NCA.
The four other men – based in Manchester, Stoke-on-Trent and Nottingham – received sentences ranging from 16 months to nearly five years for their role in the criminal scheme.
All five had admitted the charges against them at previous hearings. Namik previously pleaded guilty to a count of conspiring to help asylum seekers enter the UK, while the others pleaded guilty to helping asylum seekers to enter the country.
The agency said the court had previously heard how Namik became the subject of an NCA investigation in 2017, and headed an organised crime group involved in transporting migrants from Iraq and Iran to the UK hidden in the back of lorries.
A warrant was issued for Namik’s arrest after he failed to attend court and he was detained as he arrived at Manchester airport on a flight from Istanbul on Friday.
The NCA said he was due to appear at Manchester magistrates court on Saturday and is likely to return to the crown court on Monday to be formally sentenced.
The NCA’s branch commander, Richard Harrison, said: “Namik was a prolific people smuggler whose crime group put vulnerable migrants at great risk while he reaped the profits.
“I’m delighted that he will now face justice for the offences he committed.
“Fugitives never come off our radar, and I’d like to thank our colleagues at Greater Manchester police for their assistance in ensuring he was detained quickly the moment he set foot back in the UK.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Frank Lampard vowed to “dig in” after a damaging defeat by West Ham in a crucial clash at the bottom of the table left Everton’s manager clinging to his job.
In a potentially significant development Everton’s majority shareholder, Farhad Moshiri, was at the London Stadium to watch Lampard’s side slip deeper into relegation trouble. Moshiri had not attended an Everton game since October 2021 and he could decide that it is time for a change of manager.
Asked about Lampard’s future after the game, Moshiri said that it is not his decision to make. It was later clarified that any move would be agreed with the rest of Everton’s board. Having stayed away from Goodison Park before last weekend’s defeat by Southampton, the rest of Everton’s directors joined Moshiri at the London Stadium.
They would have seen Everton’s fans hold up banners decrying “a board full of liars” and the team deliver another poor display. West Ham climbed out of the bottom three after two goals from Jarrod Bowen, potentially saving David Moyes from being fired, and left Everton in 19th place after a run of 11 defeats in 14 games in all competitions. It would come as little surprise if Lampard is fired.
Lampard, who hopes to improve his squad before the transfer window shuts, vowed to fight on after being asked about his future. “Those things are not my choice, it is my job to work, focus and keep my head down,” he said. “I know there’s things going on at the club but it’s never been a consequence for me whether a chairman or board member is at the game.
“I was at Chelsea for 18 months and the owner didn’t come to one competitive game. It’s not for me to guess what he thought about the game. We stayed up by the skin of our teeth last year and were five points shy of safety with not many games to go.
“I’ve said that we might stay where we are, and was questioned whether that is competitive enough talk. But if you are in a club where the club has moved downwards with serious investment, the conditions now are that we don’t have that investment and we are trying to rebuild. That doesn’t mean straight away you start climbing stairs. It means you have to dig in as a club and I’m prepared to dig in.”
Kenwright refused to discuss whether Lampard is at risk of being sacked. “It’s been a bad run of results for us all, and for Frank, but I would never say that to you,” he said. “We’ve just got to start winning, haven’t we?”
West Ham’s first league win since 24 October was a huge boost for Moyes, who has been backed by his board. “I think it’s a relief to the club itself,” West Ham’s manager said. “I really hope Everton stick with Frank. He is a top bloke but I have to think about my position because winning one game doesn’t mean everything is fine.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Nadhim Zahawi was battling to save his political career on Saturday night after he finally admitted reaching a tax settlement with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) following an “error” over a controversial multimillion-pound shareholding in the polling company YouGov.
In a carefully worded statement, Zahawi appeared to confirm that HMRC had carried out an investigation into his financial affairs while he was serving as chancellor last summer. Zahawi, now the Tory party chairman, said that the tax authority had concluded that he had made a “careless but not deliberate” error.
“So that I could focus on my life as a public servant, I chose to settle the matter and pay what they said was due, which was the right thing to do,” he stated. Tax experts said the statement was a tacit acknowledgment that Zahawi had paid a penalty.
The admission raises questions for Rishi Sunak over what he knew about the settlement and when. It comes with the prime minister already under pressure after being fined for not wearing a seatbelt, with MPs also unhappy over his rejection of tax cuts and the government’s allocation of levelling up funds. In an attempt to protect Sunak, Zahawi added: “When I was appointed by the prime minister, all my tax affairs were up to date.”
Zahawi’s tax affairs were thrown into the spotlight last summer when he was appointed chancellor by Boris Johnson, the day before Johnson was forced to resign. The Observer reported that civil servants in the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team had alerted Johnson to an HMRC “flag” over Zahawi before his appointment, but it had been ignored.
Zahawi faced scrutiny on a tranche of shares in YouGov, the polling company he co-founded, which were held by a Gibraltar company, Balshore Investments, and sold for about £27m between 2006 and 2018. It was estimated by the thinktank Tax Policy Associates he may have avoided £3.7m capital gains tax on the sale of these shares.
Saturday’s statement immediately set off new demands for Britain’s most senior civil servant and parliament’s standards commissioner to launch separate investigations into the affair, after questions over whether Zahawi has made the correct declarations to officials and parliament concerning his financial interests.
Zahawi has still not disclosed the size of the HMRC settlement or confirmed he paid a penalty. It follows a Guardian report that he paid about £5m in relation to the sale of shares in YouGov.
Unlike his YouGov co-founder, Stephan Shakespeare, Zahawi took no shares in YouGov. However, a 42.5% shareholding was held by Balshore Investments, an offshore trust controlled by Zahawi’s parents. As YouGov grew in value, Balshore sold all the shares by 2018.
Zahawi said his father took shares “in exchange for some capital and his invaluable guidance”. He added that while HMRC agreed that his father was entitled to shares, it “disagreed about the exact allocation. They concluded that this was a ‘careless and not deliberate’ error.”
Zahawi said HMRC had agreed he had never set up an offshore structure, including Balshore Investments, and that “I am not the beneficiary of Balshore Investments”. When asked on Saturday night, his team would not comment on whether he had ever benefited from Balshore Investments in the past.
Dan Neidle, a tax lawyer and founder of Tax Policy Associates, said: “When I first reported this, he denied it, threatened to sue me and said throughout his tax affairs were in order. It is a disgrace.”
Opposition parties are now demanding the publication of all of Zahawi’s correspondence with HMRC. They are also calling for independent investigations into whether Zahawi made the necessary declarations to officials and parliament.
Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, is facing calls to oversee an investigation into whether Zahawi should have declared any links relating to YouGov or Balshore under the ministerial code. The Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, has written to Case, calling for his intervention.
Cooper said: “Zahawi and his Conservative cabinet colleagues are arrogantly trying to brush this under the carpet. There are facts that still need to be established so there must be an independent investigation to get to the bottom of this. The British public has lost all faith in Conservative ministers to tell the truth after years of scandal.”
Meanwhile, Labour has also written to Daniel Greenberg, the new parliamentary commissioner for standards, asking whether Zahawi should have declared Balshore Investments in the public register of members’ interests.
Anneliese Dodds, the Labour chair, said Zahawi’s new remarks raised more questions. “This carefully worded statement blows a hole in Nadhim Zahawi’s previous accounts of this murky affair,” she said. “He must now publish all correspondence with HMRC so we can get the full picture. In the middle of the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, the public will rightly be astonished that anyone could claim that failing to pay millions of pounds worth of tax is a simple matter of ‘carelessness’.”
She added: “Nadhim Zahawi still needs to explain when he became aware of the investigation, and if he was chancellor and in charge of our tax system at the time.”
Several senior ministers have defended Zahawi, including the prime minister. At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Sunak said Zahawi had “already addressed this matter in full and there’s nothing more that I can add”.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Cathy Rice had been in all-consuming pain for 18 months when she decided to fly to Lithuania. “I was going up the stairs on my hands and knees. I couldn’t get to the shop. I had no quality of life,” she says.
Rice, 68, who has four grandchildren, had been told she needed a knee replacement for an injury caused by osteoarthritis but – like millions of NHS patients – faced a gruelling wait.
At a clinic in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, the operation was arranged within weeks and cost €6,800 (£5,967) – around half the cost in the UK. The price included a pre-travel consultation, return flights, airport transfers, two nights in an en suite hospital room, pre-surgery check-ups and post operative physio.
“I thought, ‘Just look at your choices. You can stay here and be in this kind of pain for another couple of years or you can take a decision’,” Rice says.
The former health sector worker, from Glasgow, is one of a growing number of Britons going abroad for routine medical care. She had never gone private before and never had a desire to. But last week, a year after the first surgery, she returned to Lithuania to have the same procedure on her other knee. This time, she says the wait she faced on the NHS was three years.
She explains tearfully that to cover the costs of the surgeries in Lithuania, she sold her house. “People think that if you’re doing this you’ve got a wonderful pension or you’re very well off. But the driver here is that people are in pain,” she says. “This is not medical tourism; it’s medical desperation.”
In the basement gym of the same hospital in Kaunas – a gleaming white clinic overlooked by Soviet-era apartment buildings – another patient, William Grover, 79, is stepping on and off an aerobic block.
William Grover paid just over £6,000 to have a hip replacement abroad. He was quoted £15,000 by a private hospital in the UK. Photograph: Oleg Nikishin/The Observer
The grandfather of eight, from Portsmouth, is two days post-surgery following a right hip replacement that cost €7,000 (£6,146). The former construction worker decided to fly the two and a half hours from Luton to Lithuania to have the procedure at the Nordorthopaedics clinic after facing an uncertain wait on the NHS. He had been quoted £15,000 by a private hospital in the UK.
“I always used the NHS. I never thought I would need to go private. But my hip was getting worse and worse and I got to the stage where I was just thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’” he says.
Battered by the pandemic, workforce shortages and a chronic lack of social care capacity, the UK’s health systems are under acute strain. The latest NHS figures show that 7.19 million people were waiting for treatment in England alone in November, with 406,575 waiting over a year. There were more than 600,000 patients waiting in Scotland for planned procedures at the end of last September and there were more than 750,000 waiting to start treatment in Wales in October.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said it was “working tirelessly” to ensure people get the care they need and that the NHS had “virtually eliminated waits of more than two years for treatment”.
The Welsh government said it had “ambitious targets” to tackle delays for planned care while the Scottish government said it was opening four national treatment centres that could provide capacity for over “12,250 additional procedures, dependent on workforce”.
But a growing number of people are resorting to going private. Google trends data shows UK searches for “private healthcare” are at a record high while figures from the Private Healthcare Information Network show the number self-paying for private acute care has increased by more than a third compared with before the pandemic, with a 193% rise in those paying for hip replacements.
For those who cannot afford private care in Britain, travelling abroad can be appealing. In some countries in Europe, operations can be as little as half the price of the equivalent treatment in the UK, even after factoring in extras like post-operative rehabilitation.
Nordclinic clinic in Lithuania. The country has a good reputation for healthcare and is relatively inexpensive and easy to reach. Photograph: Oleg Nikishin/The Observer
There is no reliable source of data on outbound UK medical tourism, but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has estimated that about 248,000 UK residents went abroad for medical treatment in 2019, compared with 120,000 in 2015.
For years, the medical tourism market has been dominated by people crossing borders for tummy tucks, dental work and other cosmetic treatments. But Keith Pollard, editor in chief of International Medical Travel Journal, says there is evidence of an increased demand for core medical care, with NHS waiting lists “driving business”.
Clinics in Lithuania, Hungary and Spain are all reporting a rise in demand for elective procedures like hip operations, he says. “There are rising numbers of people who are opting out of the NHS to self-pay and can afford private treatment in the UK. There is another group of patients who might not be able to afford that, but may pay £3,000 or £4,000 for a procedure overseas.”
Lithuania, whose total population is a third of the size of London’s, has become increasingly popular because it is easy to reach, relatively inexpensive, and has developed a good reputation among international patients.
This year 500 patients are expected to visit Nordclinic in Kaunas for orthopaedic surgeries alone, including hip and knee replacements, achilles tendon repair and foot and ankle surgery, up from 392 last year and compared with 150 before Covid. The clinic also has a branch offering general surgery, including hernia repairs and gallbladder surgery. In January so far, five Britons have had their gallbladders removed.
Before they travel, patients have a remote consultation, fill in a health questionnaire and supply relevant scans and blood test results. When they return, they are expected to have an x-ray after three months which is sent back to the clinic. If something were to go wrong, patients would be entitled to further free treatment to address the issues. Other clinics, like the nearby Gijos Klinikos, a sprawling hospital with wards like hotel rooms, make the same promise.
Orthopaedic surgeon Sarunas Tarasevicius says nearly all his international patients are English. Photograph: Oleg Nikishin/The Observer
Prof Sarunas Tarasevicius, an orthopaedic surgeon at Nord, says that when he began working there a decade ago, virtually none of the international patients he treated were from the UK. Now nearly all of them are, mostly from England. “Often they are elderly and they should be going to hospitals near their home. But still, somehow they make the decision,” he says. “Some people are borrowing money from their kids.”
Tarasevicius says that before Brexit, patients could get the costs for surgery like hip replacements abroad reimbursed if the NHS could not provide them in a “reasonable” timeframe – usually around six months. Funding for pre-planned care has now become more difficult to access, but still the patients come. “We were expecting a drop-off after Brexit, but it didn’t happen,” he says.
About 100km away in the capital, Vilnius, the Medical Diagnostic and Treatment Centre is also in demand among Britons. The four-floor hospital treats around 150,000 patients a year, about 5,000 of whom are from the UK. Most want health check-ups – diagnostic tests like MRIs and scans. Others come for orthopaedic surgery.
Deividas Praspaliauskas, the chief executive, says UK requests have remained at a similar level to before the pandemic but demand from Lithuanian patients has spiked in the same period. “People are planning visits from the UK and we don’t have enough capacity to treat them all,” he says.
The Gijos Klinikos clinic in Kaunas. Photograph: Oleg Nikishin/The Observer
Maja Swinder, patient co-ordinator at EuroTreatMed, a medical travel agency, has observed a similar trend in Poland, with patients from the UK travelling for orthopaedic surgery. “Those patients were considered non-urgent cases under the NHS, and some of them had their surgeries postponed several times,” she says. “People were waiting in pain [and] some became wheelchair-bound.”
One private hospital, KCM clinic in Jelenia Góra in south-western Poland, says orthopaedic operations for UK patients were 20% to 30% higher in 2022 versus 2019.
In France, Carine Briat-Hilaire, chief executive and co-founder of France Surgery, a medical travel facilitator in Toulouse, said her company was seeing high demand from UK patients seeking cardiology care as well as orthopaedic surgery. “Before Brexit, English people came to France for healthcare purposes because they were reimbursed by the NHS. Now, they come to France because of the skyrocketing waiting lists in the UK,” she says.
Spotting a market, some clinics are ramping up their sales efforts. Acibadem, a leading healthcare group in Turkey, held an event at the Royal College of Surgeons in London last week to mark the opening of its UK office, which promotes its medical services. Online, clinics in Europe pay for ads that pop up when people google terms like “hip replacement” while brokerages sell treatment packages offering to send patients to Thailand and India for cut-price care.
The UK government advises patients to ensure any hospital or clinic they visit is properly regulated and that they have insurance that covers pre-planned medical care abroad. Patients should also consider potential language barriers and any aftercare they will need on returning to the UK, the NHS says.
Samantha Barker resorted to crowdfunding to pay for treatment.
Patients who travelled abroad said they considered the risks and decided they were worth taking.
“At the end of the day it’s benefiting my quality of life,” says Stuart Yeandle, 70, from Ceredigion, western Wales, who had a total hip replacement in Lithuania last week after facing a “three or four year wait” at home. He says that while he will have an appointment with an NHS nurse to remove the staples, the net benefit to the health service outweighs any perceived negatives. “It’s helping the NHS in reducing numbers and allowing people who can’t afford it to get it done sooner,” he says.
For many others who are waiting, paying for quicker access is an option that remains out of reach. The number of Britons using crowdfunding for private medical expenses has surged in the last five years. But while hundreds of campaigns are live – for treatments ranging from hip operations to ACL repair and brain aneurysm surgery – many never reach their target.
Last year, Samantha Barker, 25, launched a GoFundMe appeal to pay for surgery at a specialist hospital in Romania after learning that the wait in Malvern, Worcestershire, would be at least 65 weeks.
The gym instructor says she was in agony due to endometriosis, a condition where tissue grows on the outside of the womb or uterus which can cause severe pain and infertility. “I’d be screaming in the bathroom at 2am on the floor, in so much pain I couldn’t speak. They’d call an ambulance and say you need to go to A&E, then give me morphine and tell me to go back home,” she says. “There was just no hope.”
In the end, she did not come close to her £3,000 goal, so could not afford to go. Instead she had a less preferred, temporary treatment at a UK private clinic which gave her the option of repaying the £4,022 over 24 months.
It has improved her quality of life, but she has heard from others that for less money, the standard of care in Romania would have been “so much more than the UK”. “If I have to have surgery again I’d definitely try and have it abroad,” she says.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
My mother had four different first names, depending on which language she was speaking at the time. She was Anka in German, Hanka in Polish, Chanka in Yiddish, and after arriving in Australia on a refugee passport in 1949, she adopted the anglicised version of herself, Hannah. Her surname was Altman, although after she married my father, that vestige of her former life disappeared too. The only remnants of her years in Europe were captured in a few black-and-white photographs kept in an old shoebox, hidden away in the hallway cupboard, together with a leather suitcase and tailored winter coat she never wore. As a young girl, I would secretly rummage through these photos, searching for my mother’s story in the anonymous faces I knew no longer walked this earth.
When the ghosts of her past became too much for her to bear, my mother took her own life. I was 21 years old at the time, left to deal with my own ghosts. More than 30 years later, on one otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon, I tried to resurrect my mother’s past.
I wanted to explain the burnt branches of our family tree to my children, the eldest of whom was turning 21. I had spent my youth running away from my mother’s story. Now, as a mother of the grandchildren she would never know, I felt an urgency to piece together her life. Typing one of the versions of her name into Google – Hanka Altman – up came a link to a photo of her seated in the middle of a group of young men in uniform. She was the secretary for the Jewish Civil Police at Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons camp in 1946. At 21, she was alone in the world, a survivor of the horrors of the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen in turn. She was smiling.
There was the reason why. Nandi. Top row, fourth from the left. Handsome and tall, I recognised him immediately from the only black-and-white photo my mother would show me from that hidden shoebox.
“He was the love of my life,” she used to tell me.
Hanka Altman (second row, third from left), secretary of the Jewish Civil Police at Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons camp, and Ned ‘Nandi’ Aron (back row, fourth from left)
And as a young girl, hearing stories of how Nandi made her feel alive again after she had lost her entire world, I kind of fell for him too. She reminisced about how they would go for drives into the countryside on weekends, hiking in the forest, picnicking beside lakes. Licking the wounds of their recent traumas, they spoke headily of a future together, once they could find a country that agreed to take them in as refugees.
The youngest of six siblings, and the sole survivor of her entire family who had all been murdered during the war, my mother had nowhere to go. Nandi had an uncle in America and promised her they would travel there together one day to start a new life. But she told me the love of her life ended up breaking her heart and left Europe without her.
In the photo, she sat looking forward, not knowing how the rest of her life might unfold. She had met Nandi and fallen in love. Although she told me a little about her time in Germany after the war with Nandi, that hopeful moment captured by the camera can never be retrieved. Which leads me back to why I googled her name almost 70 years after the photo was taken. I ached to find out more about their relationship. Who was this man to whom I felt so strangely drawn to?
****
I decided to stalk him online. The same photo that was in my mother’s shoebox appeared on the screen. Five people’s names were identified in the caption underneath, one of whom was Ned, an abbreviation for Ferdinand, Nandi’s real name. He had donated his own copy of the photo to the Holocaust museum in Washington. My heart raced as I ran to tell my children that I had found my mother’s old boyfriend. They had grown up with my curious fascination around Nandi. We quickly looked him up in the phone book and found a number in the US.
“Call him!” my son urged.
We rehearsed how I might introduce myself and explain that I am trying to find out more information about my mother. I would tell Nandi she had spoken so warmly of him. With trepidation, I finally dialled the number. A woman with a heavy eastern European accent answered.
“Hullo?”
“Oh, hello,” I said, my voice shaky. “May I please speak to Ned.”
There was a short pause before she sobbed into the receiver, her anguish reaching right across the Pacific Ocean: “He’s dead.”
I had missed Nandi by two years.
When she calmed down a little, I told her who my mother was and why I was calling.
Herszek Altman, Hanka Altman’s brother, who was murdered at Dachau in 1944. These are his work papers from the Łódź ghetto, where he, along with Hanka and their family, were interned from 1941-42
“I remember Hanka Altman,” she said. I thought I heard a tinge of jealousy rising in her voice, even though decades had passed since they would have met. The two of them used to go away together for weekends, she said.
As we kept talking, I learned the reason Nandi and my mother never ended up together. Something she had never told me. He had left her for Anna, who he ended up marrying in Belsen in late 1946. The same woman I was speaking to on the phone.
There was a pause, before Nandi’s widow added: “He was the love of my life.”
****
In her seminal work On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself – a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.” My children’s formative years are heavily documented – each birthday, vacation, trip to the beach. Recording these ordinary events, I have labelled them all, carefully placing them in albums which we hardly ever look at nowadays. It seems that in taking so many photos I was somehow trying to compensate for my mother’s undocumented life.
In my mother’s old shoebox, among the pile of photos, are snaps taken on her voyage aboard the SS Sagittaire from Marseilles, via New Caledonia, arriving in Sydney on 27 July 1949. In one of the black-and-white photographs my mother is wearing a swimsuit as she paddles in the shallows on a tropical beach with four other women. She is holding a half-eaten banana in her left hand. Another snap captures her at the wheel of a convertible, dressed in elegant European style as she stares at the camera. In yet another she is standing on a bridge in some European city I feel I should recognise, wearing a tailored frock and clutching a chic handbag. There are no photos of her family in the shoebox. I don’t know which is worse – to have old photos with images of nameless people you knew were once dear to those you loved, or to have no photos at all. Throughout my life I have tried to imagine what my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins might have looked like.
Hanka Altman (standing, right) in New Caledonia in 1949, en route to Australia
Recently, my husband surprised me with a gift. As I unwrapped it, a photo of a man who looked very familiar stared out at me from the past. I couldn’t place him, but he bore a strange resemblance to my son.
“Who is this?” I asked.
My husband smiled. He had also been stalking the dead. He passed me an official document only recently released from a Polish archive. It was an inmate’s ID card from the Łódź ghetto, dated 11 May 1941. Printed at the top was the name Herszek Altman, born 1911, 43 years of age. My mother’s older brother.
I held the photo of my uncle and gasped for air, feeling like I was drowning in a sea of whispering voices calling out to me from the past. I wondered if it might have saved my mother’s life to have such a tangible link to a loved one.
The people in these photos are now long gone. Yet finally being able to match their names to their faces, I feel like they get to live on just a little longer. “The shortest prayer is a name,” writes Canadian poet Anne Michaels. My mother gazes out from that photo from the displaced persons camp and I wonder what she might ask of me. The faultline between the living and the dead means I can never really know. Perhaps it is simply to ensure that her name, her four names, will not to be lost to history. I do not believe in God, but I am drawn once a year to attend a part of the Yom Kippur service, called Yizkor. Remembrance. The names of those who have died are called out loud by congregants, their presence recreated among the living, if only for a moment. I speak my mother’s name quietly, offering her memory up to strangers. The echoes haunt the synagogue like an incantation, returning her to me in some small way. I could not bear to lose her twice.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Is there any platform that creates as much collective angst as TikTok?
For some, TikTok is just a silly video app. For others, it’s a symbol of our most potent social and political fears. What are young people engaging with? Isn’t it collecting a huge amount of data? Are they being dragged down dangerous rabbit holes? And is China spying on them?
Concerns about data privacy, hyper-personalisation and exposure to content that could be harmful are all reasonable. But sensationalist headlines, reactionary calls for stricter content moderation – or banning the app entirely – risk missing the forest for the trees.
TikTok is not some strange aberration; it’s the logical next-step on the pathway of platform capitalism that was laid down by those that came before it. It’s a product of a privatised internet that best serves applications ultimately designed not for people, but for profit.
I confess: I really like TikTok. For me, it’s become a place of joy and absurdity among the rage, horrors, and tedium of its competitors. As a digital rights and privacy advocate, admitting this feels like a dirty little secret.
The thing is, it’s possible to simultaneously hate a platform but love the people on it and the things they create.
But my experience of TikTok is likely to be completely different to yours; that’s by design. TikTok’s commitment to algorithmically curated content is one of the reasons it stands out from the rest. The “For You’” page is responsible for its popularity and profitability – but also its harm.
As with all social media, there are myriad horrendous marks against TikTok. From TraumaTok and content encouraging disordered eating and self-harm to influencer propaganda attempting to recruit Gen Z to the military, there is no shortage of reasons to worry.
Australia weekend
There are also plenty of examples of TikTok being used for social good. Labourers have used it to gain visibility and criticise their working conditions; it’s the home of a growing Indigenous creator community; and many young people use it to organise and amplify their voices on critical political issues.
What are we really worrying about when we worry about TikTok? Most concerns seem to be misdirected anxieties about the broader status quo of the platform ecosystem. Almost all widely used digital platforms threaten the privacy and security of users. They share information with various governments, have the capacity for cultural and ideological influence, and exploit user data for profit.
TikTok has shifted emphasis away from mass virality and toward maximum niche-ification. Once it has determined what keeps someone on the app, it takes them deep into the obscure content trenches. Perhaps they lingered on a couple of sad heartbreak videos and now they’re being bombarded with depression content, or re-watching a controversial political video led them to conspiracy theories. Wherever they end up, once there, it can be incredibly hard to get out.
This is partially why online anonymity is so important – it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn’t make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence.
TikTok isn’t alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there’s very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads.
Because of its monumental success, other apps are attempting to follow in TikTok’s footsteps, giving us a glimpse into the current trajectory of social media. Instagram recently faced backlash when it started prioritising recommended short-form videos, and just last week, Twitter made the algorithmic feed the default. With a business model this lucrative, it’s not enough to fight TikTok alone.
Let’s go down our own rabbit hole: if you’re worried about algorithms showing people problematic content, you should be worried about targeted advertising. The logic of personalised engagement is the same. And if you’re worried about targeted advertising, you should be worried about the way data is collected for profit under surveillance capitalism. That’s what enables it.
And if you’re worried about surveillance capitalism, you should be worried about regular old capitalism. Profit is what drives companies toward invasive data collection and developing algorithms that keep people on their apps for longer.
But online spaces run for profit aren’t preordained. This is a choice, and we could make a different one. What might social networking look like if the incentive to make money was removed? What might be built if it was in the hands of the people, with the motive being connection, creativity, or community, rather than market competition?
This is not a call to apathy, but rather, to think bigger. It’s an invitation to take those concerns about TikTok and reorient them. It’s time to broaden our collective political imagination of the kind of online experiences that could be possible if we break the profit-motive stranglehold and make room for publicly owned and collectively controlled social technology.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Dozens of asylum-seeking children have been kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton hotel run by the Home Office in a pattern apparently being repeated across the south coast, an Observer investigation can reveal.
A whistleblower, who works for Home Office contractor Mitie, and child protection sources describe children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars.
“Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They’re being taken from the street by traffickers,” said the source.
It has also emerged that the Home Office was warned repeatedly by police that the vulnerable occupants of the hotel – asylum-seeking children who had recently arrived in the UK without parents or carers – would be targeted by criminal networks.
About 600 unaccompanied children have passed through the Sussex hotel in the past 18 months, with 136 reported missing. More than half of these – 79 – remain unaccounted for.
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, described the revelation as “truly appalling and scandalous” and called on the government to reveal how many children had disappeared and what was being done to find them.
She added: “Suella Braverman [the home secretary] has failed to act on the repeated warnings she has been given about totally inadequate safeguards for children in their care.
“It is a total dereliction of duty for the Home Office to so badly fail to protect child safety or crack down on the dangerous gangs putting them in terrible risk. Ministers must urgently put new protection arrangements in place.”
The Mitie whistleblower also described witnessing children being in effect trafficked from a similar hotel run by the Home Office in Hythe, Kent, estimating that 10% of its youngsters disappeared each week.
The child protection source said some of the children missing from the Brighton hotel may have been trafficked as far away as Manchester and Scotland. One case is under investigation by the Metropolitan police in London.
Data revealed in October showed 222 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were missing from hotels run by the Home Office. Ministers admitted that they had no idea of their whereabouts.
Meanwhile, it has also emerged that no new guidance for police has been issued for tracking down missing asylum-seeking children, with sources saying it remains in “development”.
New data released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that newly arrived unaccompanied children spend an average of 16.5 days in Home Office hotels before being transferred into council care around the country.
When asked to comment, Brighton and Hove city council, which traditionally cares for child asylum seekers when they arrive in the UK without parents or guardians, referred queries on criminals targeting children to the police. Sussex police said queries on criminals targeting the children should be addressed to the Home Office.
The Home Office said: “Local authorities have a statutory duty to protect all children, regardless of where they go missing from. In the concerning occasion when a child goes missing, they work closely with other local agencies, including the police, to urgently establish their whereabouts and ensure they are safe.
“We have robust safeguarding procedures in place to ensure all children in our care are as safe and supported as possible as we seek urgent placements with a local authority.”
Brighton and Hove city council added: “We have been actively involved when any child is reported missing and have worked with the police and other agencies to try to trace them.”
Catherine Hankinson, National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for missing persons, said regular multi-agency meetings by police reviewed the response to every missing migrant child who had not been located.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Civil society groups need to be mobilised to stop drug trafficking at the local level. Parents should monitor the activities of their children and protect them from getting addicted to drugs and falling into the clutches of drug addicts.
Drug addiction is a hot topic in Jammu and Kashmir because there is an alarming increase in drug addiction cases. The recent extremely upsetting report by the Government Medical College’s Psychiatry department has revealed that Kashmir has surpassed Punjab in drug abuse cases and is currently at the number two position among the top drug abuser states in the country. With the Northeast topping the drug abuse list, Kashmir is not far behind. Jammu and Kashmir is on the powder keg of drug addiction.
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterised by a persistent and intense urge to engage in certain behaviours, one of which is the usage of a drug, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences. Drug addiction, also called substance use disorder, is a disease that affects a person’s brain and behaviour and leads to an inability to control the use of a legal or illegal drug or medicine. Substances such as alcohol, marijuana and nicotine are considered drugs. When you are addicted, you may continue using the drug despite the harm it causes.
Drug addiction can start with the experimental use of a recreational drug in social situations, and, for some people, drug use becomes more frequent. For others, particularly with opioids, drug addiction begins when they take prescribed medicines or receive them from others who have prescriptions.
Globally, some 35 million people are estimated to suffer from drug use disorders who require medical treatment, according to the latest World Drug Report, released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The most widely used drug globally continues to be cannabis, with an estimated 188 million people having used the drug in 2017.
As per the study conducted by Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences Kashmir (IMHANS-K) titled Prevalence and Pattern of Substance Use in 10 districts of Kashmir:A 2022 survey, Jammu and Kashmir has surpassed the number of drug abuse cases in Punjab.
Thousands of youth in Kashmir are slipping into the dark alleys of drug addiction as the valley has been flooded with a huge quantity of heroin usage. The Jammu and Kashmir administration had said as per a consumption survey there are at least six lakh residents affected by drug related issues in the region.
Over 33 thousand syringes are used to inject heroin by drug abusers in the Kashmir on a daily basis. Heroin is among the most common drugs used by these abusers. The study shows 90 percent of drug abusers are using heroin while the rest are using cocaine, brown sugar, and marijuana. The survey has also revealed that most of the drug abusers are in the age group of 17-33 years. Unemployed youth are the main consumers of these drugs. And the number of drug abusers in the valley has crossed 67000, while 33000 are injected heroin using syringes. Drug use has become an easy escape from the fluctuating situations of life.
Among the most potential causes attributed to the skyrocketing drug abuse in Kashmir are, an unusual increase in psychiatric disorders, the uncertainty of the conflict, unemployment among the youth and non-availability of recreational activities.
The youth see it as an escape from the uncertainty and trauma of living in a conflict region. But it has unnecessarily taken a heavy toll on youth who are the future of the society.
Kashmir is in the grip of an epidemic and the biggest victims of this epidemic are youth. Over the last few years, there has been an extraordinary increase in crimes in Kashmir. It is said that the main reason for these crimes is the increasing use of drugs among the youth. Drug use has become a scourge, which is giving rise to many social evils. The growing trend of drugs in the Valley should be of concern to the society.
Couple held for drug peddling in Hazratbal on September 30, 2022 by Jammu and Kashmir Police.
Diagnosing drug addiction (substance use disorder) requires a thorough evaluation and often includes an assessment by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a licensed alcohol and drug counsellor. Although there’s no cure for drug addiction, treatment options can help you overcome an addiction and stay drug-free.
The eradication of drug addiction needs a multi-pronged approach. There is an urgent need for legal, social and religious measures to prevent drug addiction. Although the government has taken strict measures to eradicate the scourge of drugs, several serious measures are needed to eradicate this epidemic. The laws that are in force for the prevention of drug abuse should be implemented in a better way and these laws should be enforced and made stricter. The cultivation, sale and misuse of cannabis and opium should be completely banned. It is necessary to have cooperation between the administration and the people. Only then can our society get rid of this evil.
Bilal Gani
There is an urgent need for measures not only by the government but also by society to end this scourge. Civil society groups need to be mobilised to stop drug trafficking at the local level. Parents should monitor the activities of their children and protect them from getting addicted to drugs and falling into the clutches of drug addicts. Although there has been a lot of awareness among people about the harmful effects of drugs, this awareness needs to be spread to those areas and people who are unaware of it.
Another aspect of drug abuse prevention is the rehabilitation of victims of this scourge. But recovery must be consistent and victim-focused. The rehabilitation centres should take proper care of the psychological and emotional needs of the victims so that they can fully recover and move towards a prosperous future. These rehabilitation measures include preventive education and awareness building, capacity building, skill development, vocational training and livelihood support for ex-drug addicts, among other relevant measures to stop this epidemic before it is too late.
(The author is pursuing his PhD from the Central University Kashmir in politics and international relations.The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Kashmir Life.)
Some claim that the first day in the third week of January is the most depressing one in the calendar. This year, Blue Monday arrived with added cruelty – for those of us who happen to be single, at least. A financial services firm chose just that miserable moment to reveal how much more expensive it is to live on your own than in a couple.
If you’re currently alone, and the post-holiday slump already has you feeling down about it, you may want to look away now. According to the brokers Hargreaves Lansdown, the cost of living premium for being single comes in at an average £860 a month, factoring in typical expenses from rent and energy bills to groceries, wifi and TV subscriptions.
That’s a whopping figure in isolation – an additional £10,000 a year in outgoings – and it wounds even deeper when you compare it with what your partnered friends are paying. The average couple spend £991 per person, so if you’re living alone you’re spending nearly twice the amount they are on the exact same goods and services. For those who didn’t choose their solo state, it’s adding impecuniousness to injury.
As a long-term single, I’ve become inured to the injustice of the single supplement – the one that demands I pay extra for eating less breakfast and soiling fewer towels. I scoff at the misleadingly titled “discount” I receive from the council, which taxes me 75% of the married rate for using only 50% of the services (and arguably less, because I’m childless).
Still, I’ve rarely wasted much time wondering how life without a partner affects my finances. That’s not because I’m comfortably cushioned by personal wealth (which would be nice) but because I have always assumed these things even out overall.Since I don’t share my worldly goods with another person, I have never watched my bank account being depleted by someone making purchases I neither want nor need. Nor have I copped the eye-watering expense of raising children or had to stump up the galling legal fees and potentially lifelong financial commitments of a divorce.
There is another reason I’ve resisted contemplating the economic disadvantages of living alone. Women are already conditioned to perceive the unpartnered life as one of lack or absence, if not downright misery. Challenging that Bridget Jones default can be hard work and a poor-me mindset doesn’t help. As someone who always pictured herself married, I have learned the hard way not to fixate on the negatives of singlehood.
Today’s climate of uncertainty, inequality and inflation is making the issue impossible to ignore. Much as I’ve loved Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters, I can’t watch Sharon Horgan’s Eva living alone in an enormous family home without wondering how she affords to heat it. Seeing last week’s figures in stone cold print has finally shaken me out of my state of denial. An extra 10 grand a year? The comparative financial benefits of singledom and coupledom aren’t swings and roundabouts at all, they’re snakes and ladders.
More noteworthy than the vast disparity itself, one that the majority of single people have long intuited, is how we respond to it. Whatever sympathy the news may elicit for ourselves or our single friends is soon followed by a sense of impotence or even outright ambivalence. This isn’t the kind of inequality we feel compelled to challenge or change. Maybe it’s because we see singleness as a temporary status. Or maybe because we can’t shift the suspicion that a solo life is a self-indulgent one.
In the 18th century, social commentators in Britain argued for a tax on bachelors and spinsters, who were considered to contribute nothing concrete to the productivity of the nation. Frances Brooke, writing a series of articles as “Mary Singleton”, proposed that unmarried men over the age of 30 pay a shilling in the pound and unmarried women sixpence. “The very circumstance of having no burden upon their fortunes, but what merely concerns themselves, makes them of all others, the fittest to be assessed extraordinarily,” she wrote, adding that she would herself pay such a due “with the greatest pleasure”.
Living alone is a privilege, but it can also be a burden. In her brilliant book about spinsterhood, She I Dare Not Name, Donna Ward argues that “the crucial conversation to have is about the reality of this life – the social, psychological and financial implications of it and the way legislators, friends, family and neighbours can support those living it”. Most single people are living on one income in a dual-income economy – and one whose lawmakers make the fallacious assumption that they have more disposable income than their coupled counterparts.
The American social psychologist Bella DePaulo has long campaigned for more awareness of the way that society invisibly discriminates against those without partners – expecting more of them in the workplace, for instance, then robbing them through a tax system that prioritises married and family units. Maybe it is time to make a fuss about that single supplement.
Emma John is a freelance author and writer. Her book Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life is published by Octopus
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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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
