We’re a week into the New Year and already things are quite terrible. Here are a few lowlights:
- Israel killed 70 Palestinian children in 5 days. The silence of the international community is deafening.
- More than a dozen hospitals in the UK declared a critical incident as they were overwhelmed by patients sick with the flu. This was entirely predictable. Every winter for the past 10+ years has been a crisis for the NHS. This year flu is particularly bad, and vaccination rates are low. There is also a lot of RSV circulating. We need to stop pretending it will be fine next year, and plan for the realities of winter viruses hitting a health service which operates at 100% capacity on a quiet day.
- LA is on fire, the first manifestation of climate breakdown of 2025. But not the last.
- People are paying attention to the random outbursts of Elon Musk instead of addressing real issues, like a failure to tackle child sexual explotation, the majority of which is perpetrated by male family members. Research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders, or so called grooming gangs, are most commonly white
- AfD in Germany, emboldened by other far Right groups, is spreading hate. Co-leader Alice Weidel stated that Hitler had “been wrongly framed as a fascist”.
drlj 